This morning’s Gospel reading is John 6:41–51:

The Jews murmured about Jesus because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven,” and they said, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph? Do we not know his father and mother? Then how can he say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?”

Jesus answered and said to them, “Stop murmuring among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him, and I will raise him on the last day. It is written in the prophets: They shall all be taught by God. Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died; this is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.”

Does anyone else remember this line from the 1970s: You are what you eat? The phrase goes back much further, as it turns out. The first real American national recognition of it took place in the 1930s through nutritionist Victor Lindlahr, but was repopularized in the late 1960s in the organic-diet movement of the time.

As for me, I apparently was mainly pizzas and Ding-Dongs in the 1970s and 1980s. That might explain some of my later body shapes.

Of course, this wasn’t meant literally, but as a reminder that what we consume impacts our physical and mental health. In the computer world, we’d call that GIGO: garbage in, garbage out. The consumption of unhealthy substances, or even relatively healthy substances in unhealthy amounts, will degrade our condition in one or more ways.

This applies to more than just food and drink, especially in a spiritual sense. If we consume unhealthy fare in other ways — entertainment, information, avocations, and so on — we can eventually expect that to have an influence on our spiritual (and mental) health as well. A predilection for entertainment that is singularly depressing or despairing might reflect those conditions within us already, but it will eventually contribute to and amplify them as well.

In our readings today and last week, Jesus makes this point through the Eucharist, and the prophets through other gifts from the Lord. Last week’s Old Testament reading focused on manna and its purpose for getting the Israelites through their journey to the Promised Land. Today we read about Elijah, on the run from his potential murderers Jezebel had threatened to send after him. After a day on the run, Elijah had run out of energy and hope, and prayed instead for death out of despair.

Instead, the Lord sent an angel with nourishment to continue his journey to safety. Elijah ate and drank but still felt filled with despair, leading the angel to return again and urge Elijah to consume all of the Lord’s gift to strengthen him, both physically and spiritually. “In the strength of that food,” we read in 1 Kings, Elijah walked for forty days and nights until reaching the safety of Mount Horeb.

Jesus teaches in today’s Gospel that His body will feed those who put their trust in Him forever, not just forty days. Jesus is the new manna, given to us in the transubstantiation of the Eucharist at Mass. It is the divine food, intended for men and women not because they are divine but because they seek the divine eternal life of the Trinity. “This is the bread,” Jesus tells the skeptics in the crowd, “that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die.”

You are what you eat. By the same token, we must also believe that we aren’t what we don’t eat. Paul writes to the Ephesians on this same point, emphasizing what the church and its members there must eschew from consuming in order to come closer to Christ. “All bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling must be removed from you, along with all malice,” Paul admonishes. Consuming these will eventually consume us instead, because we are what we eat.

Paul urges us to embrace charity and compassion while refusing malice, bitterness, and reviling. In fact, Paul’s list could be considered the “junk food” of human hearts — designed to deliver a sugar-rush of superiority, self-love, and revenge, all of which leaves us feeling worse in the long run and wearying both body and soul. Those “junk foods” are like the junk foods of diet; over the long run they break us down physically, mentally, and spiritually. If we put those aside, however, they quickly stop being a part of ourselves, and that brings us closer to receiving the Holy Spirit.

If we wish to come to the Lord, we therefore have to take care what we choose to consume. Jesus understands that we are what we eat, and in that sense He has laid out a perfect banquet for us in the Eucharist — if we prepare ourselves to receive it by setting aside all of those other temptations and addictions to sin.  And that will lead us to the bountiful eternal Banquet in the Trinity.

The front-page image is a detail from “The Miracle of the Loaves and Fishes” by Giambattista Pittoni, 1725. Currently on display in the National Gallery of Victoria. Via Wikimedia Commons.

“Sunday Reflection” is a regular feature, looking at the specific readings used in today’s Mass in Catholic parishes around the world. The reflection represents only my own point of view, intended to help prepare myself for the Lord’s day and perhaps spark a meaningful discussion. Previous Sunday Reflections from the main page can be found here.