(Audio)
I declare and testify in the Lord
that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do,
in the futility of their minds;
Humanity apart from Christ, like the Gentiles, does not live in harmless neutrality, but rather in the futility of mind. Christ did not come merely to offer a path of optional excellence for those for whom such a path had appeal. The world to which Christ came was not OK, though, much like today, it did all it could to assure itself that it was.
The great difficulty for those who did not yet know Christ was that they lived in the futility of their minds. This meant that their minds were fundamentally unable to break out of or even recognize the cycle of futility in which they were enmeshed. The root problem was that their way of life was "corrupted through deceitful desires". But then, when they ran into the consequences of these desires, the disappoints that would inevitably result, they could not recognize that the problem was a futile way of thinking. Instead, they could only blame the circumstances. Thus the cycle continued.
Amen, amen, I say to you,
you are looking for me not because you saw signs
but because you ate the loaves and were filled.
Jesus came to teach the truth about the condition of humanity. He came to reveal the limits of seeking food that perishes, the problems of futile ways of thinking and living that kept people on a hamster wheel of effort that could never go anywhere and could not satisfy. He did not come to testify to the truth in order to condemn humanity, but because by making the truth known, humanity could be set free (see John 8:32). He could bring awareness to the vicious cycles that dominated history, and by exposing them, destroy their power over us.
Do not work for food that perishes
but for the food that endures for eternal life,
which the Son of Man will give you.
No created thing that we might chase after can really give what we desire. This was the point C.S. Lewis made when he wrote in Mere Christianity, "If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world." It was what Saint Augustine meant when he wrote in his Confessions that, "You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you." Jesus therefore called the crowds to stop seeking perishable bread and seek instead the bread giver. What the futility of their minds made them seek after in their efforts of daily provisioning could only finally be found in Christ.
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.
There is no other place where our hearts can truly rest except in Jesus. There is nothing besides him that can satisfy the deepest desires within us. Yet we grumble and express discontent because of how deeply entrenched we were in habits of futile seeking that once defined us.
“Would that we had died at the LORD’s hand in the land of Egypt,
as we sat by our fleshpots and ate our fill of bread!
But you had to lead us into this desert
to make the whole community die of famine!”
Jesus desires to renew our minds so that we can move beyond the futility which would ultimately draw us back into slavery and sin.
be renewed in the spirit of your minds,
and put on the new self,
created in God’s way in righteousness and holiness of truth.
This renewal is indeed marked by a new way of using our minds and a new way of desiring higher things. But the seed that makes this renewed mind possible comes to us as a gift, a gift of grace that we find most perfectly expressed in the true Eucharistic bread, Jesus himself.
Sir, give us this bread always.
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