Getting Full

Today's Gospel finds a crowd of people looking for Jesus. It's the crowd that he fed with only five loaves and two fish just the day before on a mountainside in Galilee. They ate, and now they are hungry again.

Isn't that how life goes? At times it feels like a vicious cycle of doing and redoing the same old things. We eat only to get hungry again. We do laundry only to see dirty clothes pile up again. We diet, only to lose the same five pounds again a few months later. With our eyes and hearts focused firmly on the tasks at hand, there never seems to be enough hours in the day. Worse yet, once the to-do list is complete it only needs to be rewritten tomorrow.

This is exactly where the crowd finds themselves as they stand waiting for Jesus to come back, hopefully bringing lunch.

"Jesus answered them and said,
'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.
Do not work for food that perishes
but for the food that endures for eternal life,
which the Son of Man will give you.
For on him the Father, God, has set his seal.'"

Stop thinking with your stomachs and understand that you have a deeper hunger that needs to be satisfied.

This is the message Jesus gives the crowd. He's trying to explain that there are two kinds of hunger-- a physical one and a spiritual one. The problem with we humans is that we are always confusing the two. Food will never satisfy our spiritual hunger. Instead it only makes us more aware of the emptiness. It's possible to have everything you ever dreamed of in life, fancy cars, a great home, wealth, the best job, the greatest family, and still look in the mirror and see a starving face looking back at you.

'So they said to him,
'What can we do to accomplish the works of God?'
Jesus answered them,
'This is the work of God, that you believe in the one he sent.''

How can we get full, the kind of full that will never go away? We start looking in the right place. Things that come with price tags are not the answer. God is.

[Scripture verse: John 6:22–29]