18th Sunday in Ordinary Time - B 2024

I absolutely love coffee.  But I wasn’t always a coffee drinker.  In seminary I decided that I would learn to love coffee since it seemed that any priest worth his salt was a coffee addict.  There was a coffee machine in the cafeteria from which I would daily fill my mug.  The stuff was absolutely awful.  But I soldiered on and forced myself to consume at least one cup every day.  Coffee is an acquired taste and I put myself hard at work to acquire this bitter flavor.  After a while I got used to it.  Looking back, I don’t think that stuff was even real coffee.  I think it was just a kind of coffee imitation.  But then, one morning, a buddy of mine offered me a cup of coffee he had made.  I accepted his offer and was amazed at how delicious it was.  I had grown so used to the taste of awful, low-quality coffee that when I tasted a decent cup of coffee I was blown away.  My standard, my point of reference for what was real was backwards.  I had gotten used to what was merely an imitation, a cheap copy of the real stuff.

It is an interesting point about our Lord’s teaching in the Gospel of John that He always treats the things of earth, the things we can sense as unreal.  He maintains that true and real things are in Heaven.  He considers the things of earth only to be hollow and shadowy copies of a world more real.  We typically look at things the other way around.  We assume that the things of this world, our own flesh and blood, our food and drink, all the comforts in which we indulge are what are truly real.  Heaven is something far away and shadowy.  We know that we will be happy when we attain it, but we can’t imagine how because it seems so remote from our world and our experience of things.  But look at how our Lord teaches.  When He meets the Samaritan woman at the well He doesn’t say “You see the water in this well?  Well, grace is kind of like that.  It refreshes, cleanses, and gives life.”  Instead, Jesus tells her “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is that is saying to you ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him and he would have given you living water” (John 4:10).  The real, living water for Jesus is grace, the life of God.  The water of this world is the dead stuff, a mere copy of true water.  Grace doesn’t remind Him of water.  Water reminds Him of grace.

And when the crowds follow Him after He feeds them with the multiplied loaves of bread, He tells them “Do not work for food that perishes but for food that endures for eternal life” (John 6:27).  They then press Jesus and ask Him to give them a sign as proof of His power.  They tell Jesus that their ancestors are manna in the desert.  They want a sign like that.  But Jesus then responds “it was not Moses who gave them bread from heaven; my Father gives you the true bread from heaven.  For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world” (John 6:32-33).  The bread from Heaven about which Jesus speaks is the real bread.  Bread on earth is just a cheap imitation of the real stuff.  The real bread is the flesh and blood of Jesus in the Eucharist.  He says “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst” (John 6:35).  He reinforces this later when He says “my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink” (John 6:55).

The Eucharist is not meant to remind us of our earthly food.  Rather, God foresaw that He would become one of us and leave us His body and blood in the form of the Eucharist.  Bread was given to humanity as a preparation for the Eucharist, to be like the Eucharist, to remind us of the Eucharist when it would come.  Whenever we eat bread, we should be reminded of the Blessed Sacrament, the true food.  Whenever we nourish ourselves with food, we should remember that true nourishment is whatever moves us closer to Heaven and makes us more like Jesus.  This change in perspective is part of conversion, the changing and renewal of one’s mind.

We live in a world of shadows and shams.  We grow comfortable with the things of this world and hold onto them as if they were real.  But all that we cherish in this life will one day pass away.  Our toys, careers, good health, food, life itself, all will pass through our fingers like sand.  All is passing away.  And our business must be to hold onto the things that are really real, things that won’t pass away.  Our business must be to look at this world as Jesus did, a mere copy of a world more real and beautiful than anything we can sense.  Let’s not grow comfortable with this life as one might grow comfortable and used to a terrible cup of coffee from a seminary cafeteria.

If we only knew the gifts that God has given us in His Church, freely offering us His very self in the Eucharist, we would not yearn for the things of this world which promise to satisfy but ultimately leave us hungry and hollow.  May God help us begin to understand how much we miss when we neglect the Sacraments or treat them without proper care.  Remember that it is very easy for us in times like these to become all the more attached to worldly securities and material comforts, tirelessly grasping for them because they threaten to slip away so easily.  But don’t be afraid of filling your life with those things more true and more real.  Don’t get comfortable with the cheap imitation of the original.  Don’t be afraid to look away from this world of shadows and focus your eyes on what is really real and destined for those who would receive it: the gift of eternal joy in Heaven.