18th Sunday in Ordinary Time B (4 August 2024)

1. The manna "is the bread that the Lord has given you": this is how Moses explains to the people the meaning of the manna, which has various symbols in the Bible. The choice of the account of the manna in the first reading, taken from the book of Exodus, is linked to the "Eucharistic" discourse that Jesus gave in the synagogue of Capernaum. As many as 13 times, St John evokes the figure of Moses and the manna is mentioned five times as a symbol of the "bread of life". But what is manna? One morning the wandering Jews in the desert woke up and discovered next to their camps "a fine and grainy thing, minute as the frost on the earth" that had miraculously rained down between heaven and earth; they continued to find it every morning during their exodus in the desert. They gathered it every day except the Sabbath and kneaded it to make flatbreads to be baked with the vague taste of pasta in oil. Harvesting ceased, as we read in the book of Joshua, on entering the promised land (Jas 5:11-12). Manna has various meanings in the Bible: firstly, it is 'the bread' with which God feeds his people and tests them when they complain and murmur against him in the wilderness. It is a twofold test: firstly, Israel must learn the lesson of gratitude to the One who provides everything; and secondly, being hard-hearted people never content with anything, they must learn to remain faithful to the Lord's orders and commandments, who asks them to collect only enough manna for every single day because the surplus rots. In other words, God also educates the people he has chosen as his own.  In other books of the Old Testament, especially in the Psalms, manna becomes the symbol of God's word and divine love that continues to spread over humanity and finally, especially in the Jewish tradition, manna becomes the 'food of the messianic age'.  Ultimately, the manna in the desert also becomes for us Christians the sign of God's faithfulness and of our effort to trust him and believe his promises as we advance towards Heaven, our final homeland.

2. Psalm 77/78, of which we proclaim today only a few brief passages as a responsorial psalm, takes up the theme of God's faithfulness and of man's struggle to trust him.  The Lord "rained manna on them for food and gave them bread from heaven. Man ate the bread of the strong, he gave them food in abundance' (v.v. 23-24).  Even though gratitude for such a mysterious gift emerges here, Psalm 77/78 as a whole tells the true story of Israel, which unfolds between God's faithfulness and the fickleness of the people, even though they are always aware of the importance of preserving the memory of God's works. For faith to continue to be spread, three conditions are needed: the testimony of one who can say that God has intervened in his life; the courage to share this personal experience and pass it on faithfully; finally, it takes the willingness of a community to preserve the faith handed down by the ancestors as an inalienable inheritance. Israel knows that faith is not a baggage of intellectual notions, but the living experience of God's gifts and mercy. Here is the spiritual fabric of this psalm where in no less than seventy-two verses the faith of Israel is sung, founded in the memory of the liberation from slavery and on the memory of the long troubled pilgrimage from Egypt to Sinai marked by unfaithfulness and inconstancy: despite everything, faith is handed down from generation to generation. The strongest risk to faith is idolatry as denounced by all the prophets, a current risk in every age, today easy to recognise in the signs and gestures performed and flaunted as the boast of emancipated freedom. The psalmist denounces this idolatry as the cause of humanity's misfortune. Until man discovers the true face of God, not as he imagines it but as he is in truth, he will find the road to happiness barred because all kinds of idols block our path to responsible freedom. Superstition, fetishism, witchcraft, thirst for money, hunger for power and pleasure, worship of the person and ideologies force us to live in the regime of fear preventing us from knowing the true face of the living God. In verse 8 of the psalm (77/78), which we do not find in the liturgy today, the psalmist indicates unfaithfulness with the image of the valiant archer who fails and fails in his mission: "The sons of Ephraim, valiant archers, turned their backs in the days of battle". If today's 'cancel culture' wants to make us forget that everything is a gift in life, we fall into a sadness full of ingratitude, going so far as to mutter angrily: 'God does not exist, and if he does exist, he does not love me, indeed he has never loved me'. It follows that the dark clouds of ingratitude and anger sadden life and only the liberating experience of faith dispels and disperses them because it makes us rediscover that God exists, loves and forgives: his name is Mercy!

3. In order not to give in to the temptation of idolatry, which is fashionable today, God offers us a twofold nourishment: material food and spiritual food expressed in the "sign" of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes with which Jesus feeds an immense crowd. In the synagogue of Capernaum, Jesus takes this miracle as the starting point for the long discourse on the "bread of life" that is the Eucharist. A discourse that will continue in the coming Sundays, and has a surprising incipit at first sight. To the people who ask him a simple question: "Rabbi, when did you come here?" he does not answer directly, but starts with a solemn formula: "Verily, verily I say unto you", similar to that of the prophets in the Old Testament: "The Lord's prayer".  He draws attention to something important and difficult to understand, which he is about to say, and three times the listeners interrupt him with objections. With educational and provocative skill, using metaphorical and symbolic language, Jesus also leads us, step by step, to the revelation of the central mystery of faith: the mystery of the "Word who became flesh and dwelt among us" by offering his life on the cross for the salvation of mankind. In the entire discourse on the "bread of life" we hear resound the unsurpassed meditation of the prologue of the fourth gospel: Jesus is the Word of the Father who came into the world to give, to those who accept him, the power to become children of God, "to those who believe in his name and have been begotten of God" (cf. Jn 1:12). And to be clear, he immediately says that the people did not grasp the sign of the miracle: "You sought me out not because you saw signs, but because you ate of those loaves and were satisfied".  As if to say, you are happy because of what you have eaten, but you have not grasped the essential: I did not come to satisfy your hunger for material food, but this bread is the sign of something more important. Indeed, it was not I who acted, but the heavenly Father who sent me to give you a different food that preserves you for eternal life.  In fact, the distinction between material food and spiritual food was a theme dear to the Jewish religion, as is well understood in Deuteronomy: God "fed you with manna that you did not know... to make you understand that man does not live by bread alone, but by what comes from the mouth of the Lord" (Deut 8:3) and in the book of Wisdom: "You fed your people with angel food, you offered them bread from heaven that was ready-made without effort, capable of providing every delight and satisfying every taste.  This food of yours manifested your sweetness towards your children; it was adapted to the taste of those who swallowed it and became what each one desired...not the different kinds of fruit nourish man, but your word preserves those who believe in you" (Wis.16:20-28). The listeners understand what Jesus is referring to and ask: "What must we do to do the works of God?".  Jesus then presents himself as the expected Messiah: "This is the work of God: that you believe in him whom he has sent. And why believe? Moses performed the miracle of the manna and at that time great was the expectation for the promised manna as the food of the messianic age. The third question is therefore understood: "What work do you do that we may believe?" and Jesus answers: "My Father gives you the bread from heaven, the true bread". Misunderstanding does not stop him in his self-revelation and the Gospel text today closes with the proclamation of the Eucharist: "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me shall not hunger, and whoever believes in me shall never thirst'. The secret then is to have Faith! 

Good Sunday to all + Giovanni D'Ercole

P.S. I add today, memorial of the holy curate of Ars, Jean-Marie Vianney, this thought of his on faith and the Eucharist: "What joy for a Christian who has faith, who, rising from the Holy Table, leaves with all of heaven in his heart! Ah, happy the house in which such Christians dwell!... what respect one must have for them, during the day. To have, in the home, a second tabernacle where the good God has truly dwelt in body and soul!"