Every time we pray, “Give us this day our daily bread,” we acknowledge that God is the one who feeds us. Everything we have is a gift from him. Yet we do not always think this way. In times of abundance, we tend to take for granted whatever we have. In times of want, we grumble. As we see in today’s readings, however, God remains patient, generous, kind, and merciful.
When God delivered the Israelites from Egypt, we do not know exactly what they expected. Their attitude was probably that anything would be better than slavery. With joy they marched through the Red Sea and into the desert. But soon they found themselves confronting hunger and thirst, and they began to grumble against Moses and Aaron, blaming them for their present suffering. They began to think that life back in Egypt may have been difficult, but at least they could sit by their fleshpots and eat their fill of bread.
Grumbling is indeed a grave temptation in the face of trials, especially when we have built up selfish or unrealistic expectations. We grumble because we forget the marvelous interventions God has made on our behalf, and we begin to focus on how bad things are now. Even what enslaved us in the past – the sins, vices, harmful relationships, etc. – can begin to look good to us.
“I have heard the grumbling of the Israelites….” God hears us, but he does not respond in the way we might expect. Instead of reprimanding his people for their ingratitude, he provides an abundance of food, not just once but every day: “I will now rain down bread from heaven for you. Each day the people are to go out and gather their daily portion.” When the Lord invites us to take a new path in life, he provides for us along the way. Even when we are not deserving of his help – and we never are! – he continues to care for us.
When they saw the manna, the Israelites asked, “What is this?” Moses had to explain to them, “This is the bread that the LORD has given you to eat.” It is as if Moses was telling them, “The Lord has treated your grumbling as a prayer, and this is his answer!” At times God’s answers to our prayers are not immediately recognizable. We may recognize the quail but not the manna. We ask for what we think we need; God has a better idea. He knows very well what can satisfy our hunger, and he provides. He even gives us teachers, like Moses, to help us benefit from his gifts. Without someone to clarify things for us, we might overlook or even throw away the very gift the Lord gives us.
We are no different from the people in the Gospel who misunderstood the multiplication of the loaves, the sign Jesus performed the previous day, which we read about last Sunday. Although they correctly perceived him to be “truly the Prophet, the one who is to come into the world” (Jn 6:14), they are more interested in bread than in salvation. Jesus points out to them their error: “you are looking for me not because you saw signs but because you ate the loaves and were filled.”
This is what we so often do. We look to God only for what we can get from him. He wants to give us his very self, “the food that endures for eternal life,” but we remain preoccupied with “food that perishes.” Jesus does for us what he did for the crowd in the Gospel: he uses our experience of hunger to attract us to what we are really looking for. He reveals that he himself is the “bread of God”: “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.”
We who are privileged to be Catholic can recognize in Jesus’ words a description of the Holy Eucharist. He is inviting us to see in the Eucharist, not merely “food that perishes,” but the true Bread from Heaven that gives life to the world. “To receive in faith the gift of his Eucharist is to receive the Lord himself” (CCC 1336).
To receive the Eucharist means to leave behind our grumbling and our selfish demands and to live a new way, the way of Christ. This is the lesson St. Paul teaches in today’s second reading. “You should put away the old self of your former way of life, corrupted through deceitful desires, and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new self, created in God’s way in righteousness and holiness of truth.” The putting on of a new self is not something we accomplish on our own; we receive it when we accept the Lord in faith.
“This is the work of God,” Jesus says, “that you believe in the One he sent.” We do believe in the One sent by the Father, Jesus, the Bread of Life! Our daily prayer is, “Give us this bread always” – another way of saying, “Give us this day our daily bread.” As we journey through the desert of this life to the eternal destination of the Promised Land, we are nourished and sustained by this Bread, the Lord himself.
Of God’s many gifts, which ones do I most tend to take for granted? When am I most prone to fall into grumbling and self-pity? How does the Eucharist satisfy my hunger?
Excerpt from The Anawim Way, Volume 20, no. 6. More information about The Anawim Way may be found here.