18th Sunday Year B - Homily 2

Homily 2 – 2012

Which is it over the week-end? Football? or the Olympics? Or switching between both? Or neither?  Even gold medalists grow old.  The winners at Beijing struggle to succeed in London; and probably won't figure at all at the next Olympics.  Glory doesn't last long – unless they can land a job as a TV Commentator.

When I was a lad I used to dream – dream of being named the best on the field by Bro Bill O'Malley at St Pat's College in Ballarat.  The dream never became reality.  When the Redemptorists gave us the annual retreat at the College, I used to dream of being a martyr.  Thank God, that didn't eventuate either!   Dreaming, yearning – desiring.  I suppose we all do a bit of it – whether we're young or old.  Unless I'm mistaken, the Buddhist way of life would see the journey towards Nirvana, the goal of life, as the quieting, and eventual elimination, of all desire.

All this musing has been going on in the back of my mind as I have been reflecting on today's Gospel passage from St John.  There, Jesus spoke about working for food that endures to eternal life.  Eternal life …  He speaks of eternal life as both a now experience and our future destiny.  At the end of the passage, he observed: whoever comes to me will never be hungry; whoever believes in me will never thirst.  Hungering, thirsting … dreaming, yearning … Jesus seems to be saying that eternal life is not the elimination of desire but the fulfillment of all desires through the satisfaction of the deepest desire.

Which raises the question: What might be that deepest desire? Here I think our Christian faith gives us the inside running.  Like Judaism, like Islam, we believe that there is one God.  But the oneness of the God we believe in – the totally Other – is not a sort of solid oneness, a solitary God.  Without really understanding it all, we believe that this one God is somehow Trinity.

Through the action on us of what we call the Spirit of God, we have come to believe that Jesus is God; but yet distinct from the ultimate ground of Being [that we refer to as the Father of Jesus].  Our words fail miserably; but we Christians see our one God not so much as solid or as solitary, but as relational.  For us, ultimate reality is relational.

And it is in the image of that inherently relational God that humanity has been cast.   We are truly ourselves, fully human, only in relationship.  The goal of living is not to stand alone on any podium, but to relate in love, not better, holier, more perfect than others, but faithful in mutual love.   The task of life, the working for God that Jesus spoke of, is to learn to be faithful to others – beginning [or climaxing] with Jesus himself.   In his words: believing in the one the Father has sent, or, more explicitly: whoever comes to me will never be hungry; whoever believes in me will never thirst.  [Believing, of course, in John's Gospel, is not assenting to statements about God or Jesus, but in surrendering, entrusting ourselves, to them in total faithfulness.]

As we will say at the end of the Eucharistic Prayer:  “Through Jesus, with him, and in him, O God almighty Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all honour and glory is yours …”

And we can be faithful to Jesus because he has first been faithful to us.  He truly believes in each one of us.