18th Sunday Year B - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2009

I want to pick up a couple of issues from today's Gospel. The first is Jesus' comment: The bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world. There is an assumption there worth teasing out: it is the assumption that in some sense, in the sense that matters, the world needs life.

In the Gospel of John, when the author talks of the world, what he is referring to is not so much individuals as such but people together. We're different when we are together: We do things that we wouldn't do if we were by ourselves.  Look at the ways people behave at football matches, young people at celebrity concerts, kids in gangs, men at war – killing, torturing, etc. We will justify things that we would never agree with otherwise by saying that they are in the national interest.  Look at the heartless, brutal ways we deal with asylum seekers – so many of them fleeing regimes where they have been tortured and brutalised, hoping to find a decent country where they will be respected, welcome and safe, and able to live in peace.  Success, power, materialism, human and environmental abuse are all death-dealing in their own ways.

We need each other. It's in our own interest that we band together. That is the stuff of civilisation. Inevitably, we have our social, political, religious, sporting institutions. Yet, unfortunately, we often get our sense of belonging, we often get our sense of security by seeing ourselves as distinct from nameless others who don't belong to our group. We tend to see ourselves as better than .., as superior to ..  We know who we are by being clear who we are not, who we're against, or who are against us - and we come to look for a God who is on our side. But there is no such God as a God-on-our-side. God wants to give life to the whole world.

Even within our own groups, all is not always well. We thrive by competition. Others can be threats.  There is enormous floating anger in our world - road rage, violent protests. We even fight over our sporting allegiances.

We need redemption, not just as individuals; we need redemption when we band together.  Our group dynamics, our social dysfunction, the spontaneous ways we see each other, and treat each other when we're together, need redemption. Left to themselves, our rivalries can even, at times, become murderous.

We need the bread of God that gives life to the world. But, for that to happen, something else is necessary. As the Gospel said: This is the work of God - this is the way to become part of God's project of salvation - that we believe in him who God has sent. Our world will change to the extent that we believe in Jesus.

What is so magic about believing in? What does the Gospel mean by believe in? It's not just saying Yes to a number of statements. It means trusting Jesus, trusting his way; entering into relationship with him; falling in love with him: entrusting ourselves to an open-ended journey whose destination we're not sure of and certainly can't control.

At the end of today's passage, Jesus said: Whoever comes to me will never be hungry; whoever believes in me will never be thirsty. Entrusting ourselves to Jesus enables us to get in touch with our deepest hunger, our deepest thirst, our deepest heart desires. Once in touch with them, we begin to see the sheer superficiality, the emptiness, of so much that drives people.

We see our rivalries, and our self-interest for what they are – and we become free of them. God's project for saving our world gets under way: This is the work of God that you believe in the one whom he has sent.