19th Sunday Year B - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2018

I read in the Spectator this week that people in Hamilton lost six million dollars on the Poker machines over the past year – on average, sixteen and a half thousand dollars a day; and it is repeated every day {and I even checked the arithmetic]. That is equivalent of two and a half thousand dollars lost, per family, per year. Given that not every family consistently plays the pokies, then some families must be losing considerably more than that. The figures amazed me. How can some of the people, some of the families, of Hamilton afford that? The thought of it saddens me. So many people persistently hoping that they can become richer, happier, without working [and they don’t – they keep on losing!]. But they apparently continue to believe that one day they will. Like little children, they still fervently believe in magic.

It is so easy for me to tut-tut, to feel superior, to congratulate myself on being so much more sensible. But what do I achieve by that – for them? or for myself? Where am I on the happiness scale, on the inner-peace scale? Perhaps, a bit of magic-thinking plays out in me too, thinking I can be really happy, and grow in it, without consciously working for it, without even thinking about how I might arrive there, or even what it might concretely consist in. Pope Francis noted once that too many Catholics walk around looking like they have just been to a funeral. Hardly advertisements for the joy of the Gospel! Hardly surprising that not too many are lining up to join us! What sort of a model of joy am I, for that matter?

It is against this background that I have been thinking about today’s Gospel. My first reaction was that I have heard it all before; but I have to say something to you – so I looked at it once more, more closely this time. And whatever I might say to you, what is the Gospel saying to me – now, this week? The lines that catch my eye are these: “… No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me… To hear the teaching of the Father, and learn from it, is to come to me… I am the bread of life…, the living bread which has come down from heaven …”. In our experience, life allows of more or less. Some people seem barely alive; some seem only half alive; others are bursting with life. And life can be more fulfilling or less so. As the bread of life, Jesus sees himself as able to nourish people’s lives and to help them become ever more fully alive. That is because he in turn has drawn his life from the Father who sent him, the spring of all being, of life and of love.

Jesus was attractive because of his warmth and love, his sense of justice, his wisdom and constant compassion. These he sourced from the Father who sent him, the Father whose very being he revealed to the world. It was these that made him fully alive. It was with these that he wanted to nourish us.

But not everyone was attracted to Jesus. Not everyone wanted to come to him – only those who already felt their innate attraction to such things as warmth and love, justice, wisdom and compassion. This is where the Father comes in. In creating us, in giving us existence, God made each of us an individual instance of that divine being. In giving us existence God gives us also the capacity, an innate compatibility with and instinct for wisdom, a sense of true justice, compassion, and so on. We access these as we develop our consciences – that inner human depth of ours where we are in touch with God.

We come alive as we come to Jesus, sent from the Father for the very purpose to nourish us, to be our bread of life.