17th Sunday Year B - Homily 3

Homily 3 - 2009

The Gospel today said that the crowds followed Jesus impressed by the signs he gave by curing the sick.  At the end of the passage, after he had fed the 5000, we heard something similar: seeing this sign that he had given, they said: This really is the prophet who is to come into the world. In fact, they wanted to make him king, to claim his as theirs, to be counted on his side, to be special.  It wasn't the response that Jesus wanted: he escaped back to the hills by himself.

Perhaps, they thought that with him as king, all would be well for them - they would be free.  But, if that were all, it would just be business as usual, except that, instead of being on the bottom of the pile, they would be on top.  

Jesus' curing the sick, and feeding the hungry, were just signs - signs pointing to something else, something immeasurably more important.  Jesus was on about wholeness. He wanted society – culture – to be truly life-giving. He wanted people really to live. That was easier said than done; easier to dream than to accomplish.

Society, culture – secular culture, and, so often, religious culture, (the world – as John's Gospel so often calls it) - is not really life-giving.  But its effect is so powerful, we're so much part of it, we're so familiar with it, that we often don't realise it. We don't know what really being alive is like.  Sometimes, we are so scared to face our emptiness, our radical dissatisfaction, that we automatically distract ourselves. We believe the myths that the next promotion, a better paid job, a bigger house, a more exotic holiday, a more interesting partner, a better-looking body, would make the difference.  Sometimes, we don't really believe it, but we become so addicted to our substitutes that we don't dare to let go. 

To get back to today's Gospel. If Jesus' healing the sick, his feeding the hungry, weren't really what he was on about, why did he do them?  To make things more pertinent: Sometimes we ask God for things, and sometimes God seems to answer our prayers.  If giving us the things we ask for is not really what God is about, why does God do it?

There might be two answers to that.  Perhaps, only by getting what we want, do we come to realise it's not what we really want – our hearts remain unsatisfied.  To realise that is not a bad spot to be: It may lead us to ask ourselves What do we really want?

Surprisingly, God's not giving us what we want can sometimes have a similar effect: it may encourage us to get in touch with our deepest heart desires.  After all, we can only start from where we are; so, if we want something, by all means ask God – and keep asking.

A second reason why Jesus worked what the Gospel called signs may have been to stir people to ask the question: Who is this?  Now, sometimes people asked, and came up with the superficial answer: This is the prophet; this might be the king we have been waiting for.

But, for some, it got them to go deeper.  Remember the incident right at the start of John's Gospel, down by the Jordan, just after Jesus' baptism.  Two disciples of the Baptist followed Jesus.... Jesus asked: What do you want? They answered: Where do you live? He said: Come and see. And the Gospel added: They went and stayed with him the rest of that day.

In fact, they continued to stay with him, and, in the process, they came to know him, to experience his love, to share his vision, and, in time, to be mightily changed.  Jesus' hope was that, through his signs, people might learn to stay with him, to believe in him (as next week's Gospel will put it), to entrust themselves to him, eventually, to discover what they really wanted, and to find themselves empowered to go for it.

He wants the same for us.