“The Lord gave them bread from heaven.”
Today’s readings, especially the first, show us another aspect of God’s divine shepherding: how he feeds his sheep. Earlier this week we saw the shepherd lead and then protect, now God feeds his flock. God offers his people a bread that is so unlike anything they have ever seen or tasted that the people name this bread as an exclamation of mystery: “What is it? (In Hebrew, Manna). This “bread which the Lord has given you to eat” comes about in a mysterious way (like dewfall) and lasts only for a short time. It is enough for a day, nothing more and nothing less. The Divine shepherd feeds his people, not once for all, but daily, revealing each day his constant and ever-present love for the flock that he shepherds.
In the new covenant, the divine shepherd gives us bread even more mysterious, for it is the bread of his very self. We call this bread with an equally mysterious name: Eucharist, meaning thanksgiving. This bread from heaven is offered to God’s flock daily at the altar of the Mass and reveals God’s close and constant love for his sheep here and now. Both stories of bread from heaven reveal that God desires to feed you and me, he desires to feed us daily – out of his love and care for us – and that God desires to feed us because we need it, because he knows that we are hungry and need food for our journey. Our Divine Shepherd longs to feed us with his very self. Let us pray today on the ways our Lord has fed us in the past, desires to feed us now, and on what we hunger and thirst for in our own journey through the desert now?