19th Sunday Year B - Homily 6

Homily 6 - 2024

In last week’s Gospel, Jesus had challenged the crowds whom he had just fed with a mere five loaves and two fish to see the miracle as a “sign” of something deeper, something not unlike the way God had fed their ancestors. As helpless slaves fleeing through the Sinai desert from the oppression of their Egyptian masters, God had fed them with what they came to call “Manna”. Manna was an unfamiliar frost-like coating on the surface of the ground that they concluded had fallen from heaven, that was not only edible and even nourishing, but, given what God is like, was predictably regular, and precisely sufficient to feed all of them each Sabbath.

Jesus went on to liken himself and his teaching about unconditional love as the “real bread from heaven”, sent to the world by God, his Father. By his readiness to feed them miraculously, Jesus himself had just shown, in practice, remarkable yet typical compassion to the ones who had followed him out into the desert. A key element of his preaching was to challenge his hearers to cultivate similar compassion towards each other, to respect and even to love not just their friends but especially their enemies. For Jesus, love, even to the point of unconditional forgiveness, was the concrete shape of “life to the full”; and Jesus himself was its inspiration, its attraction, and the source of its possibility. God gives with abundance — as illustrated by the disciples filling twelve baskets with scraps left over from the five loaves and two fish. With God, and so with Jesus, everything is gift.

Last week’s Gospel finished with Jesus referring to himself as living symbol of the true “bread from heaven”, source of true life, the life, indeed, that we are called to live into eternity. But, to experience such life, we personally need to live that way of love in practice. Today’s Gospel takes up that point, and speaks more concretely of his heartfelt desire to give that “bread” to whoever would take him seriously, to all who would trust him, “believe in” him, and “come to him” by entering into genuine personal, one-to-one, heart-to-heart relationship with him and his way of consistent unconditional love. Today’s Gospel passage then concluded by clarifying further: “The bread that I shall give is my flesh for the life of the world”.

I find this a wonderfully challenging reference to Jesus’ death on the cross, the consequence of his determination never to go back on his insistence on unconditional love — as illustrated by his physically and psychologically tortured death on the cross. The “flesh” that he would give spoke clearly of his utter vulnerability. It was equally a clear message to us, his would-be followers, that in a world still largely unredeemed, respect for and love of enemies inevitably has its price. The “life of the world” often comes at the cost of suffering and mockery. Its possibility depends on our readiness “to come to him” and allow him to transform and to empower us.

Pondering that could fruitfully keep us occupied throughout this coming week.