The setting for the first and third biblical readings on this eighteenth Sunday is the exodus – the time when Abraham’s family became a nation and each person became related to another in a covenant that all agreed to. To the people’s assent, God replied: “If you will obey Me faithfully and keep my covenant, you shall be my treasured possession among all the peoples. Indeed, all the earth is mine, but you shall be to me a kingdom of priests and a holy nation” (Exod 19:5-6). The Lord who bound himself to them had led them out of Egyptian slavery to his land of milk and honey, nourished them with manna so they could finish their journey and reach their land.
The manna of the Old Testament had a future meaning, a potential, because Jesus will later feed the 5000. But as was the case for both Moses and Jesus, the people resist. They didn’t want real food, food that endures. The crowd wants junk food, food that fills you up and does away with hunger pangs. The problem with the crowd in the Gospel of John is that the people did not get beyond the sign. True, the sign was the food, but it wasn’t the full story. A sign is not the reality; it only points to it.
To what does the sign in the Fourth Gospel point? The crowd in the wilderness could only see the food it craved. To them, Jesus was the Great Multiplier! But they missed what the food, the sign, actually pointed to. It pointed in two directions—to the past and to the present. Jesus’s feeding should have reminded them to look backward at their ancestors on the journey to the promised land, Israel in the wilderness. God gave them food despite their insolence and lack of trust. Nonetheless, God fed them, making it clear that the bread was given purely from God’s amazing care. It revealed God once again as openhanded and loving.
The sign also pointed to the present, their present and ours too. It reveals the true nature of the bread from heaven: “my father gives you the true bread from,” that is, the bread shows God at work in the world today, ensuring that people’s deepest hungers are satisfied if they seek with an eager heart. Even more important, it reveals Jesus himself to be the bread of life: “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and who believes in me will never thirst.” Israel of old believed that the manna symbolized God’s care and mercy, even when humans were mean and ungrateful. They learned that had the privilege of enshrining God’s presence, which is realized in Jesus as he declares that he is the bread of life. We can join those of his hearers who fully appreciated the sign. We too journey toward our homeland, we often experience aridity in the wilderness, but can now experience God’s loving action in the world, and taste the bread that is Jesus, our life.