Hey, everybody. This is Father John Ricardo with Acts 29. And in the middle of all the craziness

and the uncertainty that's going on right now, it seems from our perspective as a team that it's

worth using these days to reflect in a more deliberate way on the scriptures every day, which

for many of us now is the only spiritual food that we're receiving. And so we're going to do a special podcast series simply entitled,

Be Not Afraid, God's Word in Uncertain Times.

And we'll try to post something every day, usually reflecting on the scriptures,

so that we can listen in on what God is trying to say to us in these days.

So what is manna, a really important and simple biblical principle we want to keep in mind?

And an Old Testament passage that always comes to mind for me around this time of year as we

begin to dive ever more deeply into the sixth chapter of John. So that's where we find

ourselves right now at Mass in John chapter 6, which perhaps many of us know is often referred to as

the bread of life discourse. This is the most extended teaching that Jesus offers us on the Eucharist

in the Gospels. And there's a couple interesting things worth noting before

diving in. One is, at the end of this chapter, as many of us perhaps know, is when a good number of

people who had been following Jesus, who after this teaching on the Eucharist, on him giving his

flesh to us to eat and his blood to us to drink,

they begin to walk away. They just look at him and say, this is a hard saying, who can accept it?

And they leave. Which should remind us that Jesus offers many hard teachings. In fact, I've often thought that one of the

ways that we know, one of the ways, not the only way, but one of the ways we know as a parish,

if we're truly preaching the gospel, is if we get smaller. Now that might sound counterintuitive,

but I think it comes right out of this chapter in John chapter 6.

I mean, if we really preach the gospel,

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