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Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
July 25, 2021
2 Kings 4:42-44
A man came from Baal-shalishah bringing to Elisha, the man of God,
twenty barley loaves made from the firstfruits,
and fresh grain in the ear.
Elisha said, “Give it to the people to eat.”
But his servant objected,
“How can I set this before a hundred people?”
Elisha insisted, “Give it to the people to eat.”
“For thus says the LORD,
‘They shall eat and there shall be some left over.’”
And when they had eaten, there was some left over,
as the LORD had said.
Psalm 145Ps 145:10-11, 15-16, 17-18
R. The hand of the Lord feeds us; he answers all our needs.
Let all your works give you thanks, O Lord,
and let your faithful ones bless you.
Let them discourse of the glory of your kingdom
and speak of your might.
The eyes of all look hopefully to you,
and you give them their food in due season;
you open your hand
and satisfy the desire of every living thing.
The Lord is just in all his ways
and holy in all his works.
The Lord is near to all who call upon him,
to all who call upon him in truth.
Ephesians 4:1-6
Brothers and sisters:
I, a prisoner for the Lord,
urge you to live in a manner worthy of the call you have received,
with all humility and gentleness, with patience,
bearing with one another through love,
striving to preserve the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace:
one body and one Spirit,
as you were also called to the one hope of your call;
one Lord, one faith, one baptism;
one God and Father of all,
who is over all and through all and in all.
1 John 6:21-15
Jesus went across the Sea of Galilee. A large crowd followed him,
because they saw the signs he was performing on the sick.
Jesus went up on the mountain, and there he sat down with his disciples.
The Jewish feast of Passover was near.
When Jesus raised his eyes and saw that a large crowd was coming to him,
he said to Philip, “Where can we buy enough food for them to eat?”
He said this to test him, because he himself knew what he was going to do.
Philip answered him, “Two hundred days’ wages worth of food would not be enough
for each of them to have a little.”
One of his disciples, Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter, said to him,
“There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish;
but what good are these for so many?”
Jesus said, “Have the people recline.”
Now there was a great deal of grass in that place.
So the men reclined, about five thousand in number.
Then Jesus took the loaves, gave thanks,
and distributed them to those who were reclining,
and also as much of the fish as they wanted.
When they had had their fill, he said to his disciples,
“Gather the fragments left over, so that nothing will be wasted.”
So they collected them, and filled twelve wicker baskets with fragments from the five barley loaves that had been more than they could eat.
When the people saw the sign he had done, they said,
“This is truly the Prophet, the one who is to come into the world.”
Since Jesus knew that they were going to come and carry him off to make him king,
he withdrew again to the mountain alone.
While the Lectionary serves up the gospel readings segment by segment, to reach a better understanding I think we need to view whole sections - in this case the whole chapter - at the same time. It would be good to read Chapter VI to discover something of what John saw in this episode of Jeshua providing food for people in their time of need. Much of the symbolism will be easy to identify but my main focus will be on the severe judgement John is making of the belief and practice of his day.
From this starting point the following three Sundays will take us through the chapter section by section. The key to each segment might be summed up in these selections:
A. 18th Sunday: “Amen, amen, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave the bread from heaven; my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”
B. 19th Sunday: "I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.”
C. 20th Sunday: Many of Jesus’ disciples who were listening said, “This saying is hard; who can accept it?” Since Jesus knew that his disciples were murmuring about this, he said to them, “Does this shock you? What if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? It is the spirit that gives life, while the flesh is of no avail. The words I have spoken to you are Spirit and life."
It is often noted that John in his reflections on the Last Supper omitted the institution of the Eucharist narrative, the reason being that he this chapter is already an in-depth treatment of the Eucharist. John's gospel, it seems to me, is an interpretation of the Gospel, equal in rank with the three basic narratives used for teaching the Jeshua story to enquirers seeking baptism. The focus is on misunderstandings that were already becoming common towards the end of that first century, errors that even today trouble and confuse us to the extent that we rarely manage to celebrate Sacrament in a wholesome and beneficial way.
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Let us return to the three sections that explain the deeper meaning of the 'miracle' of loaves and fishes.
A. From the first the people were distracted by the 'miracle' itself, that he had made a few loaves of bread to be more than enough for lunch for 5000 plus people. Today we still argue about a theory called 'transsubstantiation'. More surprising are the narrow and distorted views that many have laboured under since childhood. So much about ritual, so much concern about a 'real' presence that would be equivalent to a physical presence: Jesus prisoner in the tabernacle. Uncompromisingly John has Jeshua direct his questioners away from the 'physical' - the abundance of food provided, away from their self-seeking and even away from the great Moses, to the Father who gives the gift of life to the world.
The Eucharist is our gratitude for the gifts that flood our days and nights, our food, our friends, our health, our life itself. Our freedom in being loved of the Father as was Jeshua.
In discussions on the sacrament of Eucharist we could save a lot of time and energy if we kept our analysing curiosity in check and focused on the gift of life for which we give thanks in every meal, in every gathering of community, indeed in every moment.
Worth mentioning too that there is nothing in John's understanding of it that would have us reduce this miracle to a charter for a prioritising social work over spiritual development. Jeshua did not solve the problem of the social inequality that produces poverty, that leaves people starving in the midst of plenty. These things ought to be of concern to every human just on the basic of universal human rights. Jeshua 'work' is to lift us, in whatever situation we are in, to another dimension in which a human relationship with the divine is possible. This relationship is to evolve until it is as natural as breathing, i.e., until we realise that we are well-loved children of the most gracious Father. To live in trust and gratitude does not require us to have a 'religion' or to practice pious rituals. To further this awareness we are best to work at it together as a community.
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B. That bread provided from heaven is not food for the body but it is the Word become flesh who has pitched his tent among us to communicate to us the life of the Spirit. It is Jeshua himself who embodies the 'divine life' that is the gift of the Father's love.
John is uncompromising in his insistence that the divine is manifest in Jeshua. Happily the christian community has been faithful over millenia in acknowledging the Eucharist as a moment of intimate personal communion with Jeshua. Unfortunately the way we persist with the quaint phrase, 'real presence', and the imp[ortance we give to ritual, results in an unhealthy focus on the physical with some bizarre outcomes.
So what are we to make of it when John has Jeshua say "the bread that I will give is my flesh"? John is fully aware of the problem in this and records that 'the Jews began to argue sharply among themselves, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”'
Since it makes no sense to suggest we should canabalise the flesh of Jeshua, clearly John is thinking of 'flesh' in some symbolic sense. Already in the Prologue to the gospel he has summed up the great mystery in these terms: "The Word was made flesh." Some translations have this as "The Word was became human", and this might give us a clue. We are called upon to absorb, to assimilate the humanness of the divine Logos in Jeshua - in this man so like any one of us, so easily mistaken for just another human, where the Divine itself is "made human". To have eternal life we have to accept the Divine in his humanness. This of course leads to accepting the divine in every human person, in you and me and even in one who would be your enemy.
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C. All this was too much for many, even at the time John was writing, and it still is today. We want the divine to be Other than us, up there, out there, distant, uncontaminated and unapproachable. It gives us the perfect excuse to stay as we are, puffed up with high ideals while we allow ourselves all manner of convenient indulgences.
But in this man, Jeshua of Nazareth, everything human is seen to share in the divine. When we celebrate Eucharist this ought to be manifest, obvious to everyone. It must be a human, earthy experience or it will drift away into an ethereal make-believe.
Over the coming weeks we might discuss how the Mass as we know it falls short of John's requirements. Perhaps we could limit discussion to weekly parish Mass. Grand liturgies may or may not have their place, but our primary concern is the normal experience of Eucharist for the ordinary person.