21st Sunday Year B - Homily 5

Homily 5 - 2021

Some of the TV footage presently coming out of Afghanistan haunts me — seeing people milling about in utter confusion, desperate and hopeless, against a background of relentless, restless small-arms fire. It puts me in mind of Mark’s description of the wretched Jewish crowds who had followed Jesus into the wilderness on the occasion that he fed feed the 5000+ of them with two loaves and five fish. Mark had commented: “They were like sheep without a shepherd”— utterly desperate, rattled, people without leadership, without a vision.

Five weeks ago we had the same incident narrated in John’s Gospel. John’s Gospel version of the same Gospel incident. There, John had remarked how, some little time after the feeding, the crowd had [unsuccessfully] wanted to make Jesus a king. Today we had the conclusion of Jesus’ encounter with them after a second day of trying to teach them: “The Jewish crowd objected strongly … many of his disciples turned away and went around with him no more.”

What had he said in his teaching that had brought about such a radical reversal of mood? Jesus had seen that simply teaching them was not enough. Though at times what he said was striking, it had not led to improvement on their part. They needed to move beyond the familiar and to change — radically.

Jesus held out the possibility of a different lifestyle, indeed of a wholly new “life”, that he referred to as “eternal life”, a life that would gradually recast their perceptions, their values, their commitments, their experience, so transforming them that eventually he could “raise them up on the last day”.

That change would not happen simply by their listening to his teaching. They would need to learn to “believe” in “him”, to trust him, to entrust themselves to him. It would call for genuine interpersonal relationship, involving not just “head” or memory, but heart, soul, mind — an experience more like “falling in love” — gradual, deep, totally transformative — as constitutive of us and as real as the food with which we nourish ourselves.

He drew on the image of bread to state that he was “the bread come down from heaven” — not unlike the manna that had nourished the Hebrew slaves as they escaped from Egypt centuries beforehand, but greater still, so much so that “whoever come to him will never hunger, whoever trust themselves to him will never thirst”. By entrusting ourselves to him, in person, we would steadily find all our other desires and needs losing importance or being met in other ways. We would find ourselves abandoning our former obsessive competitiveness and our instinctive hostility to relate to people spontaneously with respect and attentiveness.

To justify such a depth of commitment to himself, Jesus revealed to his hearers that he had originated from God; that he was indeed “the Son of God” or, as Peter would call him in today’s short passage, “the Holy One of God”; and that he had in fact “come down from heaven”, and that some of them even would live to see him return “where he was before”.

Since he was speaking of real loving commitment that could very easily lead to suffering, he briefly looked forward to his final Supper with his disciples where he would anticipate in sacrament his imminent death on the cross. There, he would take the bread, break it [as the Roman military would break his body on the cross]. He would then give it to his disciples saying, “This is my body broken for you”. Finally, when he would take the cup, he would say, “This cup is the new testament in my blood which is to be shed for you”.

In the light of that Last Supper [which no one else, however, at this stage knew about — apart from the later readers of John’s Gospel], Jesus concluded his message: “My flesh is true food and my blood true drink”.

“It is the spirit that gives life”. How much we need it!