As most of you know, I’ve had some minor surgery recently, for a hernia. Even with a few complications, a hernia is a MINOR problem, and I don’t intend to exaggerate my suffering, but, the unpleasantness of the process was grim enough to remind me of a few lessons.
I remember lying on the hospital bed and just wanting the experience to be OVER:
wanting the pain to stop,
wanting the nausea to stop,
and I won’t give you other details, but I just wanted the symptoms to stop.
It was only later, when those symptoms subsided, that I remembered what it was to feel normal and well again.
When I was sick I’d had this yearning to not be sick, but without a clear thought of what it felt like to be normal again.
I offer that to you as an image of how we yearn for God, but don’t really appreciate what it is that we are yearning for.
We yearn for something more in life, even when we don’t quite know what more we are seeking
-just as I yearned to not be sick, even while I’d lost that clear awareness of what it felt like to be well.
Or, let me put it this way:
The SAINT who has FOUND God, realises what he was looking for
even more than the SINNER who knows he is looking for something but has forgotten what the experience of finding God is like.
I can realise that I am sick in my soul, but not quite be sure what I need to be healthy.
(pause)
In our Gospel text today we heard the Lord Jesus warn the people that they were yearning for the wrong thing, “for food that cannot last”(Jn 6:27).
The people knew they were hungry, but the Lord told them that they were hungering for the wrong thing.
They were hungering for a WORLDLY fullness,
not the eternal heavenly fullness that He alone can offer.
You and I, likewise, can realise that we are hungering, can realise that we are seeking something more in life:
But are we looking for a passing, earthly, feeding?
in comfort, in pleasure, in riches, in a career?
or looking for a feeding that will satisfy us for eternity, in completion?
in a life of cheerful self-sacrifice, in holiness, in grace, in the sacraments?
To return to my analogy with my being sick:
when I was sick I didn’t know what I was seeking for in wanting to be well,
I couldn’t remember what it felt like to be well,
I couldn’t remember because I was sick
and I relied on the nurses and doctor -they got me well again.
The Lord is like the doctor.
He still knows what its like to be normal and healthy,
and He knows the food I need to eat in order to get healthy.
And what is that food?
Nothing less than Himself. HE is the “Bread of life”(Jn 6:35), He says.
If we would be satisfied with the Bread that is Him,
we must choose to NOT be satisfied with this earthly life. We must choose, as St Paul said in the second reading, “not to go on living the aimless kind of life that pagans live”(Eph 4:17),
and instead to choose to trust the words of Him who has shown in His own resurrected glory the vision of what it means to be well again, what it will look like if we feed ourselves on Him.
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