(Please read the Scripture passage before reading the homily.)
What is the worst hunger in the world? It is not for food, but for relationship. We can receive more than enough food and still starve to death emotionally. We need relationship. Our best eating is with conversation with other people. The pandemic has removed relationships from many people. Middle school students, attending class by internet, have killed themselves because of their removal from their friends. Elderly people, who have eaten alone for long periods of time, have suffered much from loneliness. When people in silence or in broken relationships, they suffer from that isolation.
Jesus called himself the bread of life. He promised that those who would come to him would not experience hunger or thirst. He had more to give than loaves of bread. He had the word of God, relationship with God, to give those who believe in him. Scripture says that we “do not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes forth from the mouth of God.”
This bread is more than the Bread of the Eucharist. It includes the Eucharistic bread, but it surpasses it. It is relationship with God. It is that God does not want us lonely and left to ourselves. God wants to talk with us, listen to us, feed us and maintain us as members of God’s household. When God has meals with us, God engages us in conversation, nourishing us with God’s word and God’s food. God never allows us to eat alone, in silence, with unfriendly people or with virtual surroundings. God is always present when God invites us into God’s house and family.
It is the whole person of Jesus that is the bread of life. It is communion with this whole person of Jesus that is the bread of life. The whole Jesus includes our union and communion with all the members of Christ’s body, that is, with all who believe. If we restrict this bread of life only to the Bread of the Eucharist, we have not discerned correctly the body and blood of the Lord. It is our communion with Christ in his glory and in his people. It is therefore the body of Christ in heaven, the body of Christ in his people as well as the body of Christ in the Eucharist.
Christ calls us to believe in the wholeness of his presence. It is this belief in the whole Christ that nourishes us in our hunger and thirst. Just as everything the Father gives Jesus will come to Jesus, so also when God gives us Jesus, Jesus will come to us.