John 6.41-51
6:35 Jesus said to them, "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.
6:41 Then the Jews began to complain about him because he said, "I am the bread that came down from heaven."
6:42 They were saying, "Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How can he now say, 'I have come down from heaven'?"
6:43 Jesus answered them, "Do not complain among yourselves.
6:44 No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me; and I will raise that person up on the last day.
6:45 It is written in the prophets, 'And they shall all be taught by God.' Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to me.
6:46 Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father.
6:47 Very truly, I tell you, whoever believes has eternal life.
6:48 I am the bread of life.
6:49 Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died.
6:50 This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die.
6:51 I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh."
My great grandmother was the village midwife and children were told she delivered babies in the black bag she carried everywhere.
Homily
A store in my home town is illuminated by a neon sign of stork delivering a baby in a nappy suspended from its beak with the word ‘We supply all but the baby’.
Tomorrow, my wife and I will be celebrating our 52nd wedding anniversary and our daughter her 50th birthday. She arrived in our home to the sound of Maurice Chevalier singing ‘Thank heaven for little girls’.
Where do babies come from?
We all know the biological answer to that question but the full truth about the origin and purpose and destiny of life is much bigger than the biological facts.
The Revised Catechism tells us this bigger truth in these words:
“The Church teaches that God made me and all mankind and that in his love he sent his Son to reconcile the world to himself”.
In today’s gospel these truths are spelt out by our Lord in conversation with some Jews –
They say ‘we know his father and his mother’ and, of course, they do because like us there is a human side to the story of his birth. But he says ‘I am the living bread which has come down from heaven and anyone who eats this bread will live for ever’. We too can describe our origin has ‘come down from heaven’ but the other words make his life uniquely divine in origin and purpose. Nevertheless by baptism and eucharist our Lord wants to share even these aspects of his being with us.
As we come, this morning, to worship around the sacraments of baptism and eucharist this is the gospel truths of our lives and his that we celebrate
- we come from God
- we are to live for God
- we return to God
and between birth and death we are offered the bread of life to sustain us and to satisfy us.
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