Monday, April 11, 2016
3rd Week of Easter
1st Reading: Acts 6:8-15
Gospel: John 6:22-29
The next day the people who had stayed on the other side realized that only one boat had been there and that Jesus had not entered it with his disciples; rather, the disciples had gone away alone. Bigger boats from Tiberias came near the place where all these people had eaten the bread. When they saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there, they got into the boats and went to Capernaum looking for Jesus.
When they found him on the other side of the lake, they asked him, “Master, when did you come here?”
Jesus answered, “Truly, I say to you, you look for me, not because you have seen through the signs, but because you ate bread and were satisfied. Work then, not for perishable food, but for the lasting food which gives eternal life. The Son of Man will give it to you, for he is the one the Father has marked.”
Then the Jews asked him, “What shall we do? What are the works that God wants us to do?” And Jesus answered them, “The work God wants is this: that you believe in the One whom God has sent.”
D@iGITAL-EXPERIENCE
(Daily Gospel in the Assimilated Life Experience)
We had this Mass song in high school entitled “My Lord is long a coming”. Singing without our song books we’d always mix up the first with the second stanza coming up with a line like this: “Whenever I see a loaf of bread jumping in the field, it reminds me of him….” One would suspect, and the suspicion is correct, that what comes after loaf of bread should be an oven, and what comes before jumping in the field should be a wooly lamb. But it was a happy mix up, a good illustration of Jesus coming out from the field jumping for joy because he had found his lost sheep.
Today’s Gospel introduces us to the long discourse on the Bread of life spanning from verse 22 to verse 71 of the Gospel of John. The discourse was meant to remind the people seeking to install him king merely for their experience of the multiplication of the loaves that there was the better bread to seek, the life-giving one.
As corporeal beings our search for perishable bread is legitimate because bread is a basic need. But needs easily get confused with wants and likes, and the mix up makes one forget that “man does not live on bread alone”. Dedicating a lifetime solely to the search of perishable “bread” is unfair to the author of life who has also given us a soul to nourish.
If you find funny and ridiculous the lyrics we ended up singing because we weren’t looking at our songbooks, consider how ridiculous life as a whole becomes if we mix up life’s eternal destiny with our finite existence. – Rev. Fr. Dan Domingo P. delos Angeles, Jr., DM. Email: dan.delosangeles@gmail.com.
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