Homily 19th Sunday OT 11th August 2024

Once again the scripture readings focus on the image of the Bread of Life, the Eucharist.

Slowly, those who heard Jesus began to get beyond the immediacy of the physical hunger for physical bread, and began to realise that what was being offered them was indeed bread from heaven, the bread of life. It is such a powerful, consistent theme in Christian revelation, God gives life.

The first reading pictures Elijah as running for his life through the desert. Elijah had been very public in his criticism of the reigning queen in Israel, Jezebel. For that he had been literally run out of town, under threat of death. So the reading pictures a broken man flat on his face in the desert sand exhausted, discouraged, begging God to let him die.

But God doesn’t try to convince Elijah of the point of life, the value of it. An Angel simply feeds Elijah.

Christ in the Gospel claims literally to be the food, the life giving nourishment for his people. In Christ’s own words, “I am the living bread which has come down from heaven. Anyone who eats this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I shall give is my flesh for the life of the world.”

It is at this point in the Gospels with statements such as this, that puzzlement and suspicion become active hostility. The word that is used here is one that in the original language does not admit of a symbolic abstract interpretation. He meant ‘eat’.

More than that, it was part of Hebrew tradition that manna, bread from heaven, would be given again, and when it was, it would be a sign of the day of the Lord, when Israel would be returned to the glory of David and Solomon.

But Christ told them that the glory of David and Solomon simply is not what it means to be alive. He told them, rather, that to be alive means to do what I do, be what I am.

The virtues, the qualities of life are those underlined in the second reading from St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians: kindness, compassion, mutual forgiveness, emptied of bitterness and anger, harsh words, malice of any kind.

So, to the extent that all of that actually is a portrait of each of us, we take the Eucharist as it is offered, as the bread of life. For us, as for Elijah, the message of the angel is the same: “Get up and eat, you have a long way to go. Take what is offered. It will be enough, if you love me, live.”

Fr Andrew