Monday in the Third Week of Easter, April 16, 2024

John 6, 22-29

[After Jesus had fed the five thousand men, his disciples saw him walking on the sea.] The next day, the crowd that remained across the sea saw that there had been only one boat there, and that Jesus had not gone along with his disciples in the boat, but only his disciples had left. Other boats came from Tiberias near the place where they had eaten the bread when the Lord gave thanks. When the crowd saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there, they themselves got into boats and came to Capernaum looking for Jesus. And when they found him across the sea they said to him, “Rabbi, when did you get here?” Jesus answered them and said, “Amen, amen, I say to you, you are looking for me not because you saw signs but because you ate the loaves and were filled. Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For on him the Father, God, has set his seal.” So they said to him, “What can we do to accomplish the works of God?” Jesus answered and said to them, “This is the work of God, that you believe in the one he sent.”

St. Luke identifies Bethsaida as near the place where Jesus fed the 5,000.  This city lay northeast of Capernaum around the northern tip of the Sea of Galilee (which St. John calls the Sea of Tiberias), about ten and a half miles away by land.  Even by sea it would have taken a couple of hours to get from once place to the other.  The difficulty of traveling on foot by night on this wilderness would seem to preclude Jesus from making his way there after his Apostles left in the boat, and even it the Lord had tried to travel with a little lamp, the crowd would have seen him and gathered to him.  Yet, people go in search of him at Capernaum, taking their own boats.  This was a good guess, since this was his adopted town and, as far as any of the people here knew, it was his hometown.  The fact that they leave the place where the Lord had fed them indicates how thoroughly they had scoured the region in search of him.  This also reminds us how dedicated we should be to study his words and deeds in the Gospels.

“Rabbi, when did you get here?”  The people ask this question because if Jesus had gone on foot, they should have gotten to Capernaum before him as they traveled by boat.  When they find him to have arrived before them, they sense that this has been accomplished miraculously but they cannot imagine how.  We might ask why the people here followed him in this way.  The Evangelists do not tell us that the crowd of four thousand followed him like this.  But the crowd of five thousand still wants to make Jesus king: “Amen, amen, I say to you, you are looking for me not because you saw signs but because you ate the loaves and were filled.”  The Lord Jesus does not refer directly to this wish of theirs but does so indirectly, for a king feeds his subjects, providing the conditions necessary for a prosperous land through peace within and with the surrounding world.  He shows them that they are not ready for the kind of King he is by pointing out that when he multiplied the food before them, they gulped it down rather than stare in awe, wondering what it all meant.

“Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.”  The Lord insists that the crowd consider the meaning of the sign.  All they could see was an earthly king who would provide for them, but in doing this they ignore or overlook the miraculous nature of the sign.  St. John shows Jesus revealing himself as the Son of man for the first time here, with his feeding them.  He also reveals that he is not the Son of man as the Pharisees describe him, but as the One who will bestow eternal life.  The Bread that he will give far surpasses the bread an earthly king could give: “For on him the Father, God, has set his seal.”  The people want to know the difference between the work they would do for an earthly king versus the work Jesus speaks of, which the people now understand him to mean for Almighty God.  We should think about this, because what Jesus hints at and what the people suspect is that this work will go far beyond what was commanded in the Law.  To this point in Jewish history it was very clear what the people owed God in terms of obeying the moral commandments and those regarding worship.  Moses wrote it all down in the Law.  The people ask their question cautiously, and with a certain skepticism.  What are you doing to tell us to do that Moses did not?

“This is the work of God, that you believe in the one he sent.”  This could also be translated as “that you have faith in the one he sent”.  Jesus here equates himself with the Father.  As he would later say to the Apostles, “You believe in God: believe also in me” (John 14, 1).  Now, the Lord makes an extraordinary claim, but he has rendered the people to whom he speaks extraordinary proof of his claim through the miraculous feeding.  And yet, it will not be enough for them.

The seventh article in our continuing series on the Holy Mass: The Collect Prayer

Scanning the components of the Mass we have investigated so far, I see that I have neglected the most important one: the so-called collect prayer, often simply called “the collect”.  This prayer had its place in Holy Mass long before any sort of penitential rite or Kyrie or Gloria.  It is called the “collect” because it “collects” the intentions of the gathered faithful as offered by the priest.  In the earliest times the priest offered the prayer ad libitum.  By the third century, and almost certainly before then, the prayers had become standardized, at least by region.  Here is an early example, from the Mass for December 24: “O God, who wonderfully created human nature and still more wonderfully recreated it, grant us, we beseech you, that we be sharers in the divinity of him who deigned to be made a sharer in our humanity.  Through our Lord Jesus Christ your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, through all the ages.  Amen.”  This prayer has remained in the Missal in one form or another to the present day, though many of the old prayers have been replaced by modern ones.  One of the main differences between the ancient prayers of the first centuries still used at Mass and the modern ones is that the former are very coherent and concise and ring with a certain poetic sound.  The modern prayers often ramble and it is sometimes not easy to understand the object of the prayer,  a couple of the modern collect prayers are mere statements and do not actually ask for anything.  Also, the ancient prayers formed a preface to the Mass and were illustrated and fleshed out by the readings and the subsequent Offertory  and Postcommunion prayers.  This is not usually true in today’s Masses, though it is sometimes.

Next: The Offertory Prayers