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

John 6, 30-35

The crowd said to Jesus: “What sign can you do, that we may see and believe in you? What can you do? Our ancestors ate manna in the desert, as it is written: He gave them bread from heaven to eat.” So Jesus said to them, Amen, amen, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave the bread from heaven; my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” So they said to Jesus, “Sir, give us this bread always.” Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.”

The verses which form the Gospel Reading for today’s Mass are a continuation of those from that of yesterday.  To sum up: the Lord Jesus rebukes the crowd which had followed him to Capernaum after he fed them miraculously from a few loaves and fishes, for the people saw him merely as a secular king who would feed them earthly bread.  He teaches them that they should work not for food that gives earthly life but for that which gives eternal life.  This food would be given them through the Son of man if they did the work of God.  Jesus then reveals that the work of God, going beyond what was commanded in the Mosaic Law, meant believing in him as they believed in God the Father.

The people answered Jesus: “What sign can you do, that we may see and believe in you? What can you do? Our ancestors ate manna in the desert, as it is written: He gave them bread from heaven to eat.”  They ask for a second sign with great skepticism.  It is hard to imagine would would have been an acceptable sign for them, since now the sign of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes seems inadequate for them.  In bringing up how Moses fed their ancestors “bread from heaven”, they challenge the Lord, who seems to have fed them merely earthly bread.  In this way they seek to prove that he cannot be as great as Moses and so not deserving of calling himself the Son of man much less one equal to the Father through whom they would be given the bread of everlasting life.

“Amen, amen, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave the bread from heaven; my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”  Jesus will not be compared to Moses who could do nothing of himself.  God was the maker and sender of the manna, which nourished the people physically but did nothing else.  The Lord Jesus now speaks of the “true bread” of which the manna acted as the figure.  This true bread from heaven “gives life to the world”, as opposed to the earthly manna which fed only the Hebrews.  “Sir, give us this bread always.”  This answer brings to mind the words of the Samaritan woman: “Sir, give me this water, that I may not thirst, nor come here to draw it” (John 4, 15).  The Samaritan Woman, though, was asking in good faith.  The members of the crowd seem to be challenging Jesus.  “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.”  This is momentous.  Jesus claims to be the true bread that comes down to heaven, granting those who consume it eternal life.  A great silence must have followed upon these words as the people wondered if they heard right, and if they had, what did this mean?  And after the silence, shouting and accusations and denunciations, as indicated by the following statement of Jesus, which occurs in the Gospel Reading for tomorrow’s Mass: “But I said unto you that you also have seen me, and you believe not” (John 6, 36).

The eighth article in our continuing series on the Holy Mass: The Universal Prayer

I had intended to skip the Universal Prayer, otherwise called The Prayer of the Faithful, but I have changed my mind.  If we are going to study the Mass, nothing should be left out.  We will get to the Offertory Prayers tomorrow.  St. Justin (d. 165) first tells us about these.  They were set after the Gospel and before the Sign of Peace, which in the early Church preceded the Sacrificial part of the Mass.  These prayers were offered in the main for the Christian’s community and the perseverance of its members, especially for the Welty baptized.  The development of the Roman Canon (the Eucharistic Prayer) with its multiple petitions, made these prayers redundant and they fell into disuse.  They were revived in the 1970 Missal as The Prayer of the Faithful.  The General Instruction to the Missal stipulates the petitions: for the Church, for the world, “for those burdened by any kind of difficulty”, and for the local community.  The prayer should be “regulated” by the priest from his chair, but nothing is said about who composes the petitions.  Nearly always, a priest at a particular parish is assigned to draw these up.  At daily Mass they are usually given by the priest ad libitum.  In some places the customer has arisen that congregants offer aloud their own petitions, but this practice is liable to abuse.  A possible echo of the original Prayer may be found in the petitions made at the Good Friday service, which are standardized in the Missal.