18th Sunday in Ordinary Time - Year B - Manna From Heaven & “I Am the Bread of Life”

The journey of discipleship is a lifelong exodus from the slavery of sin and death to the holiness of truth on Mount Zion, the promised land of eternal life. The road can get rough and when it does, we can be tempted to complain like the Israelites in this weekend’s First Reading (Ex. 16:2-15). We have to see these times of hardship as a test of what is in our hearts, a call to trust God more and to purify the motives for our faith. As Paul reminds us in the Epistle (Eph. 4:17-24), we must leave behind our old self-deceptions and desires and live according to the likeness of God in which we are made.

 

Jesus tells the crowd in this weekend’s Gospel (Mt. 4:4) that they are following him for the wrong reasons. They seek him because he filled their bellies. The Israelites, too, were content to follow God so long as there was plenty of food. We need our daily bread to live, but we cannot live by this bread alone. We need the bread of eternal life that preserves those who believe in him. The manna in the wilderness, like the bread Jesus multiplied for the crowd, was a sign of God’s Providence—that we should trust that he will provide. These signs pointed to their fulfillment in the Eucharist, the abundant bread of angels we sing about in this week’s Psalm (Ps. 78).

 

This is the food that God longs to give us. This is the bread we should be seeking. But too often we don’t ask for this bread. Instead we seek the perishable stuff of our everyday wants and anxieties. In our weakness we think these things are what we really need. Let us trust God more and as we seek first his kingdom and his righteousness, all these things will be ours as well.

In honor of these readings, we present our latest video "I Am the Bread of Life”, a Christian hymn composed by Sr. Suzanne Toolan in 1966, based on the Bread of Life Discourse in John 6, and John 11. This version of the song has all five (5) verses of the hymn. 

Interesting fact: Sr. Toolan claims to have discarded the original copy of the song before being inspired by a student to keep it. She presented the hymn in its final form at a diocesan music educators' conference in 1966 and the popularity of the hymn coincided with the use of vernacular languages following the Second Vatican Council.

Video can be watched by clicking here or on the picture below: