NOT ALL HUNGERS

17th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Jn 6:1-15

Jesus is the Bread of Life. He satisfies our hungers. But not all our hungers, mind you.

In the Gospel today, Jesus is pleased to satisfy the hunger of the crowd by offering them the bread of the poor; he is not, however, pleased to satisfy their hunger for power by approving to become their king. Jesus is the Bread of Life. He satisfies our hungers. But not all our hungers, mind you again.

Many subscribe to the claim, “Vox populi vox Dei”. However, we have today a case where the voice of the people is certainly not the voice of God. Let us be careful in quickly believing that the voice of God is always manifested by the clamor of the people. “Vox populi vox Dei” is reduced from a proverb worth believing to a cliché worth avoiding by the fact that there are occasions when the people are already adversely affected by their hungers that their voice no longer echoes the voice of God. Beware of self-serving politicians who parrot this cliché in favor of their own hunger and greed for power.

If Jesus obliges to the people’s clamor that He be their king because He has miraculously fed them, then it would be clear that Jesus is hungrier than the people themselves are. It would appear then that as Jesus feeds the multitude, He is actually feeding Himself. It would seem that in satisfying the hungry crowd, Jesus is actually satisfying His own hunger for power.

But Jesus is in our midst not to be fed. He is with us to feed us. He Himself is the food that He gives. He comes not to be served but to serve. He serves us His life. And what an immensely generous serving He gives us.

The human hunger to lord over others is never Jesus’ hunger. Thus, He refuses to satisfy any hunger for domination. Jesus believes that the power that lords it over others is precisely the one that keeps bread from the hungry, a power that steals the community’s resources to secure its own superiority, a power that sustains itself by manipulating the hunger of the people.

Thus, Jesus offers Himself instead as the Bread of life by making Himself the servant of all. His lordship is a lordship of caring for others, of serving others, of laying down one’s life so that others may live. He who is the Lord of all is actually the servant of all. We see in His humble, loving, and truly life-giving servanthood the most distinct sign of God’s ultimate reign when all will be satisfied and no one languishes in the painful curse of any form of hunger. Jesus has nothing to do with the lordship of domination. The destructive power of domination over others and the manipulative scheme of self-serving benevolence can never be reconciled with Jesus who is the Bread for the life of the world. The same holds true for those who call themselves “Christians”.

John has a very interesting way of presenting to us the three temptations of Jesus that Matthew and Luke narrate in their Gospels. While Matthew and Luke have Jesus fighting the temptation to power in the wilderness, John has Jesus fighting the same temptation in the midst of His followers. In Matthew and Luke, it is the devil that tempts Jesus. In John, the temptation comes not from the devil but from a crowd of hungry Galileans. In all cases, however, Jesus wins the battle. He does not give in to the people’s clamor for Him to be a king, a political leader, just as He does not make stones into bread. He refuses to make benevolence a bait to catch hungry mouths that can assure Him votes come election day.

Scores of reflections have already been written and countless homilies have already been delivered regarding the Gospel today. Most of them, if not all, focus on the miraculous feeding of the multitude. But the Gospel does not end with the feeding or with the collecting of the leftovers into twelve hampers. The Gospel ends with Jesus’ refusal to be made king. To miss this point is to fail to understand the entire miracle that the Gospel recounts to us. The point is not the feeding. The point is the serving. It is not the food multiplied that fed the hungry crowd. It is the service rendered that fed them. The miracle is not when people are fed. The miracle is when people allow themselves to be bread broken for others, after the example of Him who came that we may have life and life in abundance (cf. Jn 10:10).