17th Sunday Year B - Homily 2

Homily 2 - 2006

The people were celebrating Passover.  Passover was an annual celebration, a bit like our Anzac Day when we hark back to the glories of a former time.

Passover was the time when Jews remembered how Moses, many centuries before, had led their oppressed, leaderless ancestors through the sea into the wild Sinai peninsula, and eventually to their freedom in the Promised Land.  They celebrated how Moses, when they were without sufficient water, had provided water – water from a rock! without sufficient food, had provided the manna - a food that materialised from nowhere each evening - what they had come to call Bread from Heaven.

They celebrated how Moses had formed them into an organised people. He had given them a vision of what God was like and what life in community could be.  Before Moses died, he had promised that God would one day once more raise up a prophet like himself.

In today’s story John explicitly made the point that the time of year was Passover. The time would serve to give meaning to what he believed Jesus was doing.  As had happened to the Hebrew people, under Moses, Jesus and the disciples had crossed the sea – though this time by boat - to a wild, uncultivated wilderness area.

In last week’s Gospel Mark had commented that the people were oppressed and leaderless. He said that they were like sheep without a shepherd. Jesus had set himself to teach them – to teach them what God was like, and what life in community could be like - opening them to a vision well beyond what Moses had ever imagined possible.

Then Jesus gave them a foretaste of what he was talking about, an insight into what life could be like if people would only trust God and God’s values, and live accordingly: Beyond all probability he fed them, he satisfied their hunger with food that materialised from nowhere.

Some of those present got the point – surely this was the new Moses who would form and lead them – the prophet like Moses who was to come into the world. They wanted to declare him there and then their leader, to make him their king.  They got it half right: while Jesus was not interested in assuming political leadership, he was interested in teaching what society could be like, if people would take God seriously and live accordingly.

That is what we celebrate each time we gather for Eucharist. John wanted his readers to connect their Eucharists with what Jesus had done out there in the wilderness.  John echoed the language that we use at Eucharist: Jesus took the loaves, he gave thanks, he gave them out to all...

Generally as a society we don’t live Jesus’ way. We hardly even get to stage one: we don’t really believe that God loves people, that God is the source of their life and of their dignity – of everyone’s dignity: Jew or Arab, Christian or Muslim or Hindu or Buddhist, employer, employed, unemployed or unemployable.

As a society we don’t see life as always pure gift from God, and not ours to do with as we like.  So often we respond to the sin of the world sinfully, to violence violently, in injustice unjustly.  We close our eyes to people in need - from unborn children in the womb, to old people outliving their usefulness, to those seeking asylum from oppression or seeking liberation from hunger.  And so, not surprisingly, our newspapers and TV screens keep listing an endless barrage of bad news. That’s not the whole story, however.

Some of us do try to take God seriously, to take ourselves and others seriously.  The power we do have (and that we can use without injustice) is the power of our conviction and our own witness, the attractiveness of our own lives, the attraction of truth and integrity, our readiness to take responsibility, to be active in our community, even on occasion to be leaders, to be community leaders.

The vision that animated Jesus animates us, too. A different world is possible – but not without its price.