In 1885 Vincent Van Gogh (Dutch Impressionist Painter) visited a museum in Amsterdam to see Rembrandt’s famous painting, ‘The Jewish Bride’. Having seen it he said, ‘I would give ten years of my life if I could sit before this picture for a fortnight, with nothing but a crust of dry bread for food. My first hunger is not for food. The desire for painting is so much stronger, that when I receive some money, I start at once hunting for models until all the money is gone’. It’s not only the body that gets hungry, the heart and the spirit get hungry too. The bread of material things can never satisfy the heart of a human being. To nourish a human being is not the same as fattening cattle or sheep. We have many hungers. We hunger for a feeling of importance. Nobody wants to be a nobody. We all want to matter, if only to one person. We hunger for acceptance. If we are not accepted, it becomes almost impossible for us to relate to others. We hunger for relationships; without them we are at the mercy of the cold winds of anguish and loneliness. We hunger for motivation; without it we are like a sailboat without wind. We hunger for faith, for a set of positive beliefs to guide us. Otherwise, we are like a ship without chart or compass or port of destination. We hunger for hope – and this is something we have hungered for over this past year. To give up hope is akin to going on spiritual hunger strike. We hunger for love. If this was fully satisfied, then most of our other hungers would disappear. There is one further hunger, a deeper one, and one that underlies all our other hungers, the hunger for eternal life, and the hunger for God. St. Augustine summarises it beautifully when he says “our hearts were made for you O Lord, and they will not rest until they test in you”. To experience this hunger is not a misfortune but a blessing. Every day we see people emerging from supermarkets with trolleys loaded down with food and drink; we see people emerging from shopping centres with loads of bags.  But the bread that satisfies our hunger for God we won’t find in supermarkets, or shopping centres. Only God can give us this food, only God can satisfy our deepest hungers. Jesus in the gospel today, challenges us to face our deeper hunger, our spiritual hunger. We are tempted to live for material things alone. It’s not that we deny the spiritual, but that we neglect it. Physical food sustains life temporarily. But the food Jesus gives sustains life permanently. We are pilgrims on the streets of time and driven by an irrepressible desire for immortality, how consoling these words of Jesus in the gospel today are: ‘He who eats the bread that I give will live forever’.