Deep within our hearts is a hunger that longs to be satisfied. We have longings and desires. We have the need to feel accepted, the need to feel wanted, the need to feel loved and to belong. All these hungers lead deeper and deeper until we reach the final hunger, the hunger for God himself. We try to find solutions to our needs, just like the people in today’s Gospel reading tried to make the Lord Jesus “King” because he multiplied the loaves of bread and fed them. When we try to satisfy our hunger in ways that give us short-term relief, do they ever really satisfy?

Our current consumer culture offers us temporary solutions that can help to distract us from our deeper hungers, but never fulfil them. We can even try to do something similar in the church when we try our best to keep busy, or follow a particular style of worship, or engage in other activities that look respectable and ‘Christian’ from the outside, but which end up distracting us from our hunger and leave us empty rather than satisfying us. We try to fill our hunger with so many things, but in the end only one thing satisfies. “Jesus the Living Bread” alone can satiate the deepest longings of our souls.

When faced with trials and temptations we can forget that God cares for us. We see this happen to the children of Israel in today’s first reading where, though having already experienced the might of God’s hand in the plagues of Egypt that culminated in their freedom. And even after walking through the Red Sea, yet now faced with this new challenge of famine in the desert they longed for the fleshpots of Egypt. They longed for the familiar pleasures that satisfied their carnal needs. But God cares, he is a great provider. He alone can feed us to satisfaction.

When we turn to Jesus, he provides what our hearts hunger for. If we are hungry for identity, Jesus gives us a new identity as children of God whom he loves and with whom he is pleased. If we are hungry to belong, Jesus makes us members of his body, as brothers and sisters in God’s family, calling us to live out our identity in Christ-centered community. If we are hungry for purpose, Jesus calls us to participate in God’s mission by being disciples who make disciples and participate in the renewing all of creation. But most of all he gives us himself as the bread of life who came down from heaven, giving himself to satisfy the deepest hunger of our human heart. The only one who can truly satisfy the human heart is the one who created it.

PRAYER: Abba Father, I thirst for you, my soul longs for you. You alone can satisfy my hungry heart. Come Lord Jesus, fill my being with your presence. Amen