MANNA FROM HEAVEN

A MESSAGE FOR THE 4th SUNDAY IN LENT

The sixteenth chapter of the Book of Exodus describes how the children of Israel were fed in the wilderness with bread from heaven, which they called Manna.  You can imagine their plight—behind them were the hostile Egyptians, now no doubt even more wrathful against the Hebrews since they lost their Pharaoh and his armies at the Red Sea; and before them stretched out the great wilderness of the Sinai Peninsula, separating them from the Land of Milk and Honey promised to them by Moses.  But instead of putting their faith and trust in God, who was visibly leading them by a pillar of cloud by day and a pillar of fire by night, they murmured against Moses and Aaron, and God was sorely displeased.

In spite of their complaints, God provided them with the food they craved: meat in the form of quails at eventide, and in the morning a kind of bread-like substance that fell from heaven, and which they called Manna.  In the words of the 77^th Psalm, God “gave them bread from heaven, and man did eat the bread of angels.”

To the Hebrew people at the time, the significance of this Bread of Heaven went unrecognized.  But it was one of those events in the Old Testament that told of yet greater things to come in the New.  Today’s Gospel was another such event, this time signaling to the Jews that what the Manna symbolized was now here with them in person.  Like the children of Israel before them, they followed their master into the wilderness, where again, they found themselves in danger of starvation, of “falling by the wayside.”  And again, they were miraculously fed by God.  This time, however, the bread they ate did not fall from heaven.  It was the very hand of God, in the person of his only-begotten Son, standing there before them, that multiplied the loaves and the fishes.  And then, through the hands of his apostles, Christ fed the five thousand.

Shortly after, this same Son of God would again take bread into his sacred hands.  And he blessed the bread, and broke it, and again he gave it to his Apostles, saying, “Take ye and eat, for this is my Body.”  He went on to tell these Apostles “Do this in remembrance of me.”  Before he ascended into heaven, he solemnly admonished their leader, St. Peter, “Feed my sheep.”  And through the Apostolic Succession, passed down in the Sacrament of Holy Orders, priests have continued the work of the Apostles, first given them in the wilderness when Christ multiplied the loaves and fishes of today’s Gospel.  They continue to say “This is my Body” and feed the people with the Bread of Heaven.

At Mass today, we continue what has been passed down to us.  The faithful who come here to attend Mass are called to eat of this Bread of Angels, no longer the mere symbol that fell from the skies to the children of Israel, but the living presence of God, corporal, spiritual and divine.  In the words of our Lord: “Our fathers did eat manna in the wilderness, and are dead.  This is the bread which cometh down from heaven, that a man may eat thereof, and not die… Verily, verily, I say unto you, Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.” 

Since the time of Moses, God has impressed upon us the importance of uniting with him in Holy Communion.   Avoid this Sacrament at your peril.