‘Man does not live by bread alone.’

I tend to think of God’s word as being a physical and tangible thing, and something which touches us physically and materially and can remain a constituent part of us. If we let it, that is, and if it falls on the good soil which Jesus speaks of in the Gospels, and is not choked and driven away by our negligence and sins and lack of attentiveness to what we have received. Now I am speaking of God’s word of salvation as found in the scriptures, that which we read and hear preached. Jesus himself is God’s Word, of course, and he has a physical existence too in his glorified ascended humanity. And we are members of his Mystical Body, the Church. I am not speaking here of the inner, spiritual and supremely mysterious divine life of the Trinitarian God himself. But when we read the scriptures, or preach them ourselves or hear them preached, do we not take them in physically, with our eyes and ears? Do they not lodge themselves, even permanently, in our physical brains? How many of us cannot recall a line from scripture we have read or heard, perhaps decades ago? How else has it taken root in us, if not in our physical selves, in addition to the all the work it may have done, and is still doing, in our innermost spiritual selves? If all this is true, does not God’s word, which is holy, begin to make us holy, to heal and transform us the minute it strikes our ears, becomes visible to our eyes, takes up residence in our physical hearts and minds?

As St. Paul says to the Romans in today’s second reading: ‘The word is near you, in your mouth and in your heart (that is, the word of faith that we preach)’, and I believe that he meant that quite literally. And in the today’s Gospel reading from Luke, when Jesus is hungry and tempted by the devil to turn a stone into bread, Jesus speaks of a different kind of food which we need far more: ‘It is written: man does not live by bread alone, but on every word which comes forth from the mouth of God’. Is that word not tangible? Can it not be heard? Does it not physically strike our eardrums or appear physically before us on the page, so that the inner physical workings of our eyes can perceive it, and so that it can take root in our brains and souls?

Meanwhile, it does not become an integral part of our total being, material and spiritual, to no purpose, but so that it will lead to confession on the lips, to faith in the heart, to justification and salvation, as St. Paul says today to the Romans. Isaiah describes it in still another way: ‘For just as from the heavens the rain and snow come down, and do not return there till they have watered the earth, making it fertile and fruitful, giving seed to him who sows and bread to him who eats, so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth. It shall not return to me void, but shall do my will, achieving the end for which I sent it.’ (Isaiah 55: 10-11)

‘Why do your disciples not fast?’

Matthew 9: 14-15

One of the most striking features of Jesus’ life on earth is the fact that people were always following him around, thousands of them at a time on some occasions, desperate to be healed and taught by him, ready to endure all manner of hardships and dangers to do so. His physical presence in their midst was both transformative and essential.

After he had died, risen from the dead and ascended into heaven, this desperate longing on the part of the earliest Christians did not seem to abate at all, but rather to grow stronger. And it had some new features: Jesus, now now longer physically present in the way he had been before, was yet vividly, even tangibly present in the proclaiming of the scriptures and in the celebration of the Eucharist. And enormous numbers of his earliest followers longed for their earthly lives to be over, not because they despised the world, but because it faded away before them with the prospect of seeing their Lord in heaven in the flesh.

Anyone who has ever suffered the loss of a deeply loved friend or relative in death will understand what this means: you desperately want to go where they have gone and to take up your life with them where it left off. I believe that it is this longing on the part of 1st century Christians to rejoin their crucified and risen Lord in heaven which largely accounts for the intense eschatological nature of the very early Church. People were eager for martyrdom, just as a grieving person today could easily be eager for the end of earthly life and reunion with his departed loved ones in heaven. But there is more: I believe that the early church was intensely eschatological, or concerned with the final consummation of history, because it was already intensely experiencing the risen Lord’s presence in the scriptures and in sacramental communion, as well as its longing to find him again in heaven. In light of all this, the world around them must have seemed to drop and fade away as a kind of obstacle to the obtaining of the object of their ardent prayers.

So when the disciples of John the Baptist in yesterday’s Gospel reading asked why Jesus’ followers (before his death and resurrection) did not fast, it’s easy to see why Jesus responded as he did: ‘Can the wedding guests mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast.’