17th Sunday Year B - Homily 1

Homily 1 -  2003

This episode of John’s Gospel is the beginning of a section configured around four major Jewish feasts: the weekly Sabbath, and the annual feasts of Passover in March/April, Tabernacles in October and Dedication (or Hanukkah) in early December.

The Jewish people believed that as they remembered and celebrated the past events of their history, the God who saved their ancestors in the past was present with them in the now and continuing his saving work in their midst (much as we believe about our sacraments).

By this time of their history [as the Gospel was being written some decades after Jesus’ death], the members of John’s community had been expelled from the synagogues, and certainly from the temple, and were therefore debarred, too, from celebrating the feasts with their families and friends. 

The segregation hurt deeply because they loved their God from whose saving activity they felt they were being excluded. These celebrations had meant so much to them. Most of them missed, and probably hankered after, the solemnity of the temple: the incense, the elaborate vestments, the gold, the wonderful singing of the Levites, etc., that had been such a precious part of their faith experience. Their own little weekly gatherings to hear the teaching of the Apostles and to break the bread seemed so unpretentious by comparison.

John’s response is to show that in fact they are missing out on nothing, that, in fact, the past events that the other Jews were celebrating were only shadows cast backwards (as it were) by the incredibly more wonderful person and acts of Jesus. It was the other Jews who were in fact missing out, not the ostracized little band of faithful followers of Jesus. Their Jesus was the fulfillment and bearer of the fullness of the salvation that the other Jews were still mistakenly waiting for.

John’s tactic in this section of his Gospel is to identify the Jewish feast, to recount a significant event in the life of Jesus and to use the event as a framework on which to base his teaching.

In today’s episode, he identifies the Jews’ feast of Passover. At Passover, the Jews remembered, among other things, how God had fed the hungry people escaping from Egypt with the manna, the bread from heaven. As the Jews celebrated the feast every year, they believed, rightly, (and still believe today) that the God who saved his people then was still present with them and saving them now.

Against this backdrop of Passover, John recounts Jesus’ feeding of the hungry crowd out in the wilderness on the other side of the lake. As the chapter continues over the next four Sundays, he will use the event to make the point that the real bread of life is Jesus himself, really present to his little community of disciples.

What do we make of all this as we gather each Sunday twenty centuries later? We believe that Jesus himself is present and active among us. He touches and nourishes our spirit by the message he has shared with us, stirring our deepest desires and strengthening our hopes. He nourishes us with his own life, his risen, irrepressible life, as we associate our minds and wills with his in our offering of ourselves in trust to the same God of Jesus who raised even the crucified Christ to life.

With Jesus we thank our God who "makes all things work together for the good of those who love him". This Jesus, present among us in almost scandalous simplicity and absence of fanfare, we do not see and hear and touch (as did his contemporaries), but we do take into ourselves as we eat and are nourished spiritually by his human body sacramentally present in the bread and wine of the Eucharist.

It is interesting to note the crowd’s reactions to the involvement of Jesus: “This really is the prophet who is to come into the world." “They were about to come and take him by force and make him king.” They thought they were responding well - but they missed the point.  They were measuring Jesus by their own categories, in light of their own experience, seeing him, among other things, as the answer/fulfillment of their hopes and desires.  What is wrong with that? Simply: they were not open to the uniqueness of this person, the mystery of this Jesus who immeasurably surpassed their narrow, limiting definitions. They were taming him, boxing him in!

Their kind of response is pretty inevitable, perhaps. We do that with everyone and everything. We categorise them and miss the uniqueness, the mystery, the wonder.  I look out the window at a bed of daffodils, and say to myself, “The daffodils are out. Aren’t they lovely” - and carry on with my work. A little child, on the other hand, can go up to one and stand entranced before it – wrapped in the beauty, the uniqueness, the “mystery/transcendence” of it.

As I think of the crowd’s domesticating assessment of Jesus, I am reminded of some American evangelists’ image of Jesus. He is their Jesus, made to their image - and I feel angry. But then, don’t I speak to you of my Jesus? Jesus made in my image, or at least the embodiment of my hopes and expectations? That, indeed, is the reality!

Back to the daffodil! What if I am colourblind? I might still be entranced by the colour as I see it – it is not, then, the accuracy of my vision that matters, but the fact that something has led me beyond the colour to the uniqueness, the wonder of the daffodil.

I have to move beyond my vision/assessment of Jesus and be open to his utter uniqueness, the mystery of his person - beyond my capacity to describe, to capture, to understand. In some ways, the accuracy of my perception and my description recede into the background, and may not matter all that much. Hopefully, they may become more accurate in time - by osmosis, as it were!

With regard to yourselves lined up before me Sunday after Sunday. I can only hope that my reflecting on Jesus attracts you, rather than repel you, or leave you cold. But even if it attracts, that is not enough.  You, too, have to stand before the mystery and allow him to touch you – beyond words, beyond images, beyond feelings. An encounter in darkness, really - indescribable, but real. It is the contemplative stance – not all that different from the gaze of the child holding the daffodil.

Until you do that, indeed, until I do that, we are little better than the Jewish crowds in today’s Gospel incident. Our categories and descriptions might be different, but, however enthusiastic or otherwise we may feel, we are still looking at ourselves and our own projections. We are missing the unrepeatable truth, the mystery of the unique person Jesus.  We need to recover the capacity to be contemplatives, that we somehow lost as we grew beyond childhood.