Beware the bread that perishes

Today’s gospel (John 6: 22-29) is an important one for all those who consider themselves close to the Lord. Like the crowd that watched Jesus closely after his multiplication of loaves, the hearts of the devout follow Jesus, lifted with elation to see what He will do next.

At one level, this is better than the indifference of those who forgot that miraculous meal and wandered off to some other adventure, or who perhaps saw the miracle but decided it was a conjuring trick of some kind. The hearts of the devout honour Jesus’ power and they want to follow Him. At least that is what they say! But do they understand themselves? Do we understand ourselves?

Jesus at least questions the assumption that the crowd know why they are following Him.

You are not looking for me because you have seen the signs but because you had the bread you all wanted to eat.

In other words, the crowd perhaps congratulated themselves on having holy motives (because they saw the signs of the Messiah), but it was their animal appetites (for food) that really drove them on.

This is not an especially flattering account of the devotion of the crowd, and if we apply it to ourselves, things get even worse. We make some important sacrifices to follow Jesus, don’t we? After all, we give up at least 60 minutes on a Sunday to go to Mass! Some of us do a lot more – what about them?

You are not looking for me because you have seen the signs but because you had the bread you all wanted to eat.

Well, we could counterargue, Jesus, YOU gave us the bread! He did! And He does! But that is not the point. The point for the crowd (and the danger for ourselves) is that rather than following Jesus, we risk following our own sense of satisfaction. Do we take delight in His gifts? So we should. But we should not thereby lose sight of who He is and what our hearts really need.

Our hearts are made for you, O Lord, and they are restless until they rest in you.   

So wrote St Augustine. Our hearts are restless for God, but our lower passions, and not least our self-regard, persuade us not to pursue God but to pursue our own satisfaction and then – like this crowd -  to dress up this quest for satisfaction as a quest for God.  

So, the crowd (and possibly ourselves) are doubly duped. They pursue their own satisfactions rather than the words of the Messiah, and they hold themselves to be devout whereas they are just as base as the ones who didn’t follow Jesus (many of whom do not deceive themselves that they are good fellows!). How does Jesus respond to this?

Do not work for the food that cannot last but work for food that endures to eternal life, the kind of food the Son of Man is offering you.

Once we realise this, our next step should not be to hate ourselves for our baseness! Rather, it should be to be thankful to know ourselves a little bit better than when we considered ourselves really quite good at this discipleship business.

Where can I go that I will not find myself? says St Augustine elsewhere. And that is true for us all. Amidst our best efforts, our worse selves poke up their heads and subtly – with the best motives - demand attention: we believe we have earned the rights of the faithful; we believe in our own competence.

It is not that we intend to be faithless. Nor that we are irredeemably bad. But when these subtle forms of self-deception overtake us, we simply forget that we are clay vessels, prone to blemishes, prone to crack and leak. We become Peter at his most pompous, or James and John at their most righteously angry.

Pride grows on the human heart like lard on a pig, says Alexander Solzhenitsyn. The devout need to realise this applies to them, as much as to those they quietly, subtly but inexorably look down on.

Seek not the bread that perishes, says Jesus in another translation. In other words, seek not something that is finite and will wither.

Seek rather the Eternal One, the one who feeds us with the Bread of Life. 

Let us seek Him and not ourselves.