Patristic Wisdom: Looking to the Twelfth Sunday after Pentecost

Daniele da Volterra. Elijah on Mount Horab

He lay down and slept there under the tree. Look, someone touched him and spoke to him, “Arise and eat!” Elijah looked and behold, by his head a loaf of barley and a flask of water. He arose and ate and drank and returned to sleep. The angel of the Lord returned for a second time and touched him and said to him, “Arise, eat, because the way is difficult for you.” He arose and ate and drank. He went in the strength of that food for forty days and forty nights until he arrived at Mount Horeb. (1 Kings 19:5–8)

Elijah was sleeping under a tree. Now an angel came to him and woke him up (sleep was weighing him down because of his fatigue, affliction and discouragement) and provided him with strength and comfort through the meal that he prepared for him.… Allegorically, the bread baked in the ashes, which [the angel] offers to Elijah, has two different meanings: on the one side, it immediately shows the toils of penitence which the ashes symbolize perfectly, since they are a figure of mourning and of a contrite heart; the unleavened bread soaked in ashes and the water are also the food of the poor and the miserable. But we can say, with greater accuracy, that they are figures of all the righteous, for whom the providence of the Creator has established a course of life in the paths of privation. Therefore he leads them through much suffering, privation of food and a severe fast in order to purify them completely from all the filth of earthly things. Then he guides them to the mountain, which is the perfection and the accomplishment of the saints.

Ephrem the Syrian, On the First Book of Kings 19.4

And Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life. He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst.… Most assuredly, I say to you, he who believes in Me has everlasting life. I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and are dead. This is the bread which comes down from heaven, that one may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread that I shall give is My flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world.” (John 6:35, 47–51)

Now wicked men hunger for bread like this, for weak souls will hunger; but the righteous alone, being prepared, shall be satisfied, saying, “But I will see Your face in righteousness. I will be satisfied with the seeing of Your glory.” For he who partakes of divine bread always hungers with desire; and he who thus hungers has a never-failing gift, as Wisdom promises, saying, “The Lord will not let a righteous soul starve.” He promises too in the Psalms, “I will abundantly bless her provision; I will satisfy her poor with bread.” We may also hear our Savior saying, “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after righteousness, for they shall be filled.” Well then do the saints and those who love the life which is in Christ raise themselves to a longing after this food. And one earnestly implores, saying, “Which way the deer yearns after the springs of waters, thus my soul yearns after You, O God. My soul thirsts for the living God. How long will I be present and appear before the face of God?” And another; “O God, my God, to You I rise early. My soul thirsts for You. How often my flesh longs for You in the desolate and inaccessible and waterless earth. Thus I appeared to You in the holy place, to see Your might and Your glory.”

Since these things are so, my brethren, let us mortify our members which are on the earth, and be nourished with living bread, by faith and love to God, knowing that without faith it is impossible to be partakers of such bread as this. For our Savior, when He called all men to him, and said, “If any man thirst, let him come to Me and drink,” immediately spoke of the faith without which a man cannot receive such food; “He that believes on Me, as the Scripture says, out of his belly shall flow rivers of living water.”

Athanasius, Festal Letter 7.6–7

Jacopo Bassano, The Feeding of the Five Thousand