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Elijah ‘asked that he might die: “It is enough; now, O Lord, take away my life, for I am no better than my ancestors.”’ And he lay down under a tree and went to sleep. It’s a startling image – a great prophet praying for death. It’s even more startling when you consider what happens immediately before this in the Bible. We might expect to read of abject failure or defeat, or some terrible calamity having befallen him, leaving Elijah so miserable that he wanted to die. But in fact, the preceding chapter is quite an amusing account of prophetic derring-do, in which Elijah challenges 450 prophets of the pagan deity Baal to a contest, to see whose god was true. His solitary prayer to the God of Abraham achieved what the combined prayers to Baal of his 450 devotees did not, drawing down fire on a sacrificial offering of a bull. The true God was vindicated, Elijah was triumphant, and the 450 prophets of the false god were slaughtered.

Unluckily for Elijah, while his actions might have brought glory to the God of Israel, they infuriated the Queen, Jezebel, who sent word that she would have him killed. And so, Elijah went, as it were, ‘on the run’. And so starts today’s first reading, with him going a day’s journey into the wilderness, and giving up. His depressed desire for death might seem shocking to hear about in the Bible, even though we know all too well how tragically real that feeling can be for many people.

If we read on beyond Elijah’s declaration that he has had enough, we see how gently the Lord reaches out to him. An angel wakes him, and encourages him to eat and drink, and somehow a cake and a jar of water have appeared at his head. He does so, but goes back to sleep. The angel touches him again and says, ‘Get up and eat, otherwise the journey will be too much for you.’ It is such a beautiful and tender moment. God has recognised Elijah’s utter exhaustion and despondency, but he doesn’t chastise him for his self-pity. Instead, he draws near to Elijah and offers him comfort through the ministry of an angel. It is as it he is saying: ‘You need to continue your journey, but you won’t be able to without me. You need to continue, but you won’t be able unless you allow me to nourish and sustain you. So eat and drink what I have provided for you, and you will be strengthened. Allow me to fill you, to strengthen you and sustain you’…. Elijah did just that. He ate and drank what the Lord had provided. Then, the reading says, ‘he went in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights to Horeb the mountain of God’. Truly, the Lord had provided viaticum – food for the journey – a journey that reached its fulfilment in Elijah encountering the Lord himself, as a sound of sheer silence.

To Elijah, God sent an angel and provided food and drink. But to those who read the Gospel, the message and the nourishment are provided by God himself – for Jesus is both God’s Word and God’s food. ‘I am the living bread that came down from heaven’ and ‘the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.’

He gives his flesh… offering it for the redemption of humanity through his death on the Cross, and giving it for the life of humanity under the appearance of bread. Just as the bread and wine are transformed as the priest gives thanks at the altar, so too are we called to be transformed when we encounter him. As one early Christian writer put it: ‘Our palate will put up with no other taste when it has tasted the good Word of God, and his flesh, and the bread that comes down from heaven. Because he tastes so sweet and so delightful, all other flavours will seem harsh and bitter.’

A deep encounter with the Bread of Life changes everything. If only, then, we could encounter him more deeply, and taste his sweetness more fully, how different the world would be! Maybe that should be our prayer today, that we will allow the Lord to feed us, that we may taste and see his goodness. We would do well to take the advice of St Gregory the Great, who said: ‘Touch the food of life with the taste buds of your heart, so that trying it may make you capable of loving its sweetness.’

The words I imagined the Lord whispering to Elijah could just as easily be the words that Jesus would whisper to us today as we gather to celebrate the Eucharist: ‘You need to continue your journey, but you won’t be able to without me. You need to continue, but you won’t be able unless you allow me to nourish and sustain you. So eat and drink what I have provided for you, and you will be strengthened. Allow me to fill you, to strengthen you and sustain you’.

Jesus offers himself to heal all that is broken in us, to supply all that is lacking in us, to satisfy every hunger in us and to slake every thirst in us. In the Eucharist, ‘the medicine of immortality’, Jesus offers himself as balm to cure every ailment, complex or syndrome that causes us to live lesser lives than we were made to live, so that we may, like Elijah, go in the strength of that food to the mountain of God. He offers us food for the journey, to keep us safe for eternal life. How blessed are those called to the supper of the Lamb!

Martin OSB

8 August 2021

 

18^th Sunday in Ordinary Time B

Glenstal, 01.08.2021, 10 a.m.

Ex 16:2-4, 12-15, 31a 2 Ephesians 4:17, 20-24 John 6:24-3

In the New Testament the Greek word zoë, which means ‘life’, usually refers to the imperishable life that can be found in God alone, and Jesus uses the term precisely in this sense, when he says: I am the way, the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me (Jn 14:6). And also: I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me shall live, even if he dies (Jn 11:25). The main point of these two statements is that through faith in Jesus Christ – upon whom God the Father has set the seal of the Spirit (cf. Jn 6:27) – we come to share in the very life of God and his only begotten Son, or – to use the language of later Theology – we become partakers of the life of the Trinity

In today’s gospel Jesus uses the term zoë again to make yet another extraordinary statement: I am the bread of life – he says –; whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty (Jn 6:35). The implication here is that there are two kinds of bread – one that is perishable like the earthly life it nourishes, and another that endures for eternal life (cf. Jn 6:27). To the first category belonged both the manna that Moses gave to the people of God in the wilderness (cf. Jn 6:31, 49) and the two loaves that Jesus multiplied and distributed to the five thousand by the Sea of Galilee (cf. Jn 6:26). But the other kind of bread is entirely unique – it is a person, it is Jesus himself, who said: I am the living bread which has come down from heaven; anyone who eats this bread will live for ever; and the bread that I shall give is my flesh, for the life of the world (Jn 6:51).

By describing himself as the bread of life (cf. Jn 6:35) and the living bread (cf. Jn 6:51) Jesus is saying that he is the only one who has the life of God in himself to bestow upon the world as a gift. And this is so, because he has come down from heaven (cf. 6:51) – that is to say, he is both the Word that became flesh (cf. Jn 1:14) and the grain of wheat that fell into the earth and died, to yield a rich harvest (cf. Jn 12:24) for God the Father.

While he is explaining all this to the crowds, Jesus insists on the need to eat the true bread from heaven that his Father gives (cf. Jn 6:32). If you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood – he says – you have no life in you. (Jn 6:53) But how are we to understand this urgent invitation to eat and to drink?

In his Confessions, Saint Augustine refers to a personal experience that helps us to find an answer to this question. He reports that once he felt as if Jesus was telling him: “I am the food of the mature: grow then, and you shall eat me. You will not change me into yourself like bodily food, but you will be changed into me” (Confessions VII, 10, 18). This means that to eat the flesh of Jesus and drink his blood is essentially to believe in him, it is to allow ourselves to be transformed into him by a faith that embraces a new kind life – a life no longer centred on our own self, but on Jesus Christ and his body, the Church, of which we are the members.

We are therefore urged to put away our old self, corrupted and deluded by its lusts (cf. Ep 4:22), and to clothe ourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God (cf. Ep 4:24). And this appeal to be innerly renewed and live for God alone becomes all the more pressing every time we celebrate the Eucharist, and literally eat the body of Christ and drink his blood under the species of bread and wine; for if Jesus Christ so gives himself to us as our daily food and drink, we can only repay his gift by offering our own lives to God in union with him.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

For the next five Sundays the Gospel readings are taken from the Gospel according to John. For most of this liturgical year we have been listening to readings from The Gospel according to Mark and will return to these again on the 22^nd Sunday of the year. The reason for this interruption of sequence is that the passages from John fit in very well with Mark’s accounts of the crowds that have been following Jesus and the things he has been saying about himself. 

As in last Sunday’s gospel, the crowd is still following Jesus. Everyone is running after him. One must ask: is it really Jesus they are seeking? The suggestion of the author of the gospel is that the crowd follows Jesus because of the signs he performed by curing the sick. Here we have an example of the irresistible attraction of the human heart to the marvellous, the exciting, the entertaining and indeed the attraction, the lure, of potential benefit.

But Jesus does not despise this psychological reality. He does not dismiss it and least of all despise or reject the people who follow him. However ambiguous peoples’ motives may be, Jesus uses these motives as a starting-point. The question he puts to Philip is intended to test the depth, the perceptiveness, of Philip’s faith.  But, towards the end of today’s passage, when the crowds try to take advantage of his miracles and seize him, even make him king, Jesus flees from them. 

Throughout the Old Testament, bread is a symbol of God’s providence. It is literally the staff of life. Its availability in abundance is seen as a sign of God’s support of his people, its lack a sign of his punishment. In time, bread came also to represent and be a source of community, of sharing, and in the Temple the very presence of God himself among his chosen people.

The Jesus of the New Testament loses no opportunity to point out that the human person cannot live on bread alone. We eat, we survive – and then what? Jesus not only tells us that we need to go beyond living from physical bread – essential though it be – to live from every word that comes from the mouth of God. There is another hunger that only Jesus himself can satisfy. He goes so far as to tell us that he is the one who can satisfy that spiritual, existential, even cosmic, hunger. He goes so far as to point out that he is even the cause of that hunger, that longing, and at the same time the very bread that alone can satisfy that hunger. 

In today’s story, some people give help in the preparations for the meal. Andrew draws attention to the presence of a small boy who gives what little he has – five barley loaves and two fish. And so, if what happens is far from ordinary, the natural order of things is somehow respected. The loaves are not conjured up out of thin air, but thanks to the sharing, and then the multiplication of what a child has in his bag, however inadequate that was, there is enough for all and even some left over.  Whoever among us desires to be a blessing for others should bring to Jesus whatever she or he possesses. The master does not ask us for what we have not got; but in the hands of Jesus, what we are prepared to share works miracles, it fills and satisfies.

The gift of God, superabundant though it be, is not any less precious, none of it should be wasted. This is true of the bread multiplied in the Eucharist. It is also true of ourselves, for all of us are given one to another: the child to her or his parents, brother to sister, bridegroom to bride, friend to friend. Nothing of what Jesus has given should be allowed to be wasted. In today’s second reading, Paul describes the kind of community that results from this sharing: lives worthy of what Jesus calls us to be. ‘Bear with one another charitably, in complete selflessness. Gentleness and patience. Do all you can to preserve the unity of the Spirit by the peace that binds you together…’.

Mention was made above of God’s chosen people. Remembering that no phrase in the Gospels is there purely by chance, we might note that when the hunger of all was satisfied, twelve baskets of food remained. Some scholars interpret this as indicating that the twelve tribes of the chosen people remain, but have now been joined by the rest of the human race, all chosen to feed on the new bread which is Christ.

Everyone should be gathered around his table so that while each shares with others what she or he has received – each his or her own five loaves and two fish –  the gifts of God never cease to multiply.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Today’s first reading and the accompanying gospel, present us with the image of the shepherd. Israel’s prophets and kings were often portrayed as shepherds and then some of them were berated, even cursed, ‘Doom for the shepherds who allow the flock of my pasture to be destroyed and scattered’. But in today’s gospel, when Jesus steps ashore and sees ‘a large crowd… like sheep without a shepherd’ we are told ‘he set himself to teach them at some length’. He is presented as the good shepherd. And his disciples, who have clearly just been engaged in similar work, are also good – to the extent that they are faithful co-workers with him.

This is meant to speak to us today so that we follow the good shepherd but also become shepherds in our time by spreading the Good News. Let us remember that the people to whom Jesus was preaching beside the lake were Jewish. But we, here, today, are of gentile stock, occupying the place similar to that of the Ephesians whose letter from Paul we heard quoted. Paul told them, as he could have us, ‘ do not forget, I say, you were separate from Christ, excluded from membership in Israel; aliens, with no part in the covenants of the Promise; limited to the world; without hope and without God.’ Such was the  mission territory of Paul and it applies to us, here and now, where the Good News continues to need to be preached and witness given by disciples.

In ancient times and to this day, in various parts of the world, the shepherd’s primary function was to see that his sheep had plenty to eat and drink. ‘In fresh green pastures he gives me repose, near restful waters he leads me, to revive my drooping spirit.’ That, metaphorically, is precisely what Jesus was doing in Galilee by his teaching and healing. Coming humbly, as a servant, not for power or possessions, not for him fanfare and the financial gains of the false prophets of his time. Christ was that longed for saviour, sent by the Father to respond to the needs of wayward humanity, peoples stumbling in the dark, not knowing what direction to take or having the strength to pursue paths of peace. With Christ that waywardness, running after shadows, could be overcome.

And Christ makes of us his disciples to continue his work which is one of witnessing, at a minimum. The church is full of  examples of this: the married couple is a powerful witness to love because nothing less than unconditional love is required of married partners. A temporary contract, until one of them finds something better, will not do for a Christian marriage.
Secondly, it is a Christian service, a holy service to mankind, to recall core Christian values that make fraternal community relations possible: speaking the truth in the public arena, seeking the common good beyond personal profit, justice and reverence towards all as we face common challenges. Never before has the need been so great, in these climate changing times.

Thirdly, to distinguish right from wrong, endow society with a moral compass, is a Christian testimony for all to share. Morality reminds us that an action is not right simply because it is legal. Nor is everything good although it may be technically possible.
And as for the challenges at the end of life, death is not made dignified by personal scheduling or choosing when we have crossed a subjective threshold of being a burden on society. Death can only be dignified, if at all, by entrusting oneself to the love of the Father, after the manner of Jesus. For the believer death opens onto eternal life by God’s gift. Our testimony is to teach that hope.

However it was not only by teaching the Way and the Truth that Jesus was the good shepherd but also by giving his life for us. The mystery of the cross was at the heart of Jesus’ mission as the Good Shepherd. It was the great service he rendered us. He gave himself. And it was not just once in a distant past. The sacrifice of Jesus on the cross, the union with God that it brings and the life that it transmits to us, is made present for us daily. It is for us every Sunday on the altar, in the eucharist.

To conclude: in ancient times the sculpure of a shepherd bearing a lost sheep on its shoulders evoked an ideal and gentle world. For Christians it naturally became an image of Christ who had set out in search of fallen humanity. It became the image of Him who seeks us, in our meanderings through the sparse deserts and darker valleys, only to put us on his own shoulders and return us to the true pasture. He continues to be our shepherd and invites us in turn to show the Way, the Truth and the Life, to others in these difficult times – to find those ‘green pastures which give true repose.’

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The life of St Benedict revolves around two recurring themes, being in love and being on the move.

As a young man, Benedict fell in love with learning. To follow his love, he left his family and the familiar surroundings of Nurcia and went to seek out that learning in the schools of Rome. The decaying city of Rome proved a disappointment for Benedict, but during this time, he slowly nurtured a new love, the love of righteousness. Eventually this love drove him out of Rome in a search for solitude, which he found in a cave near Subiaco looking down on the ruins of the Emperor Nero’s villa, a constant reminder of the decaying ancient world all around him.

His years of solitude fostered the growth of a third love, a love of intimacy. This intimacy with God led him to abandon the austere solitary life as followers began flocking around him. He formed them into small communities of twelve monks each and later, after much torment, found himself on the move one last time to Monte Cassino, where he established his largest community and finally wrote his Rule for monks.

That Rule opens with famous words taken from the Book of Proverbs, ‘Listen my son to the precepts of the Master…’ The Rule is the fruit of Benedict’s love and his journey. He did not come up with the precepts of his monastic Rule in one sitting, but in one lifetime. The Rule speaks from Benedict’s own monastic journey of seeking and loving God. It is full of learning, the fruits of years spent in solitude with God, lessons learned from leading a community of monks and the wisdom and discretion of old age. It charts a long journey encompassing many new beginnings. Benedict can truly say with St Peter “Lord, we have left everything to follow you”.

Benedict insists that the love of Christ must come before all else, finding expression within the dynamics of community life in the love of others, where mutual obedience and care in all humility are live out, as described in the Acts of the Apostles.

Today, we face the challenge of being faithful to that love of Christ while adjusting to a fast-evolving world. We are living with a global pandemic and the challenges of a rapidly changing society. What does it mean for us to constantly love and leave behind the familiar and our personal preferences for the sake of this love? No matter how effective former ways may have been, we are urged to embrace the new ways that God invites us into: new ways of praying, of working, of relating with one another, of using the earth’s resources; but always for the sake of the love of Christ. For only then, does leaving the familiar behind and embracing the newness of life make sense.

Benedict has shown us the way. He felt the urge to leave behind the familiar in the pursuit of this love. He had the strength and courage to do so only because he loved God first. This is the key for all of us if we truly yearn for life and desire to see good days.