“What have you done for me lately?” is a popular question for our impatient age. The Church, of course, is not immune from the impatience of the dominant culture as we search for a new sign, or desire a new experience, or jump on whatever is new and in vogue.
The setting for our Gospel text today takes place on the heels of the feeding of the five thousand. Jesus just fed five thousand with merely two fish and five loaves of bread, and they are asking for signs that they may see and believe in him! It sounds to me like they are asking, “What have you done for me lately?”
Through this discourse, Jesus doesn’t give primacy to the past, the present or the future. He consumes time, all time, past, present and future as the eternal breaks into history. Through participation in Him in the present, by relying on Him every day, we are given the assurances of God’s working out of salvation throughout history, which gives us the hope for the future.
This faith that Jesus reveals is informed by the past, lived out in the present through reception of the gift of bread from heaven, God’s sacrament of love, as we expect the hope of the promises to come.
This is our faith, received in love, as we live in expectant hope.
Why does this matter? Because we hunger for spiritual things in a world where our spiritual senses have been dulled. Jesus is the Bread of Life. This is the truth that did sustain the Church through persecution and famine. This is the truth that does sustain the Church in our current age of pandemic and myopia, This is the truth that will sustain the Church as we continue to live in this beautiful but broken world.
Keep the faith, love indiscriminately, and allow He who is the Bread of Life to fill your hunger and your thrist.
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