August
8, 2021 – 19th Sunday
of Ordinary Time
We all do our fair
share of complaining, sometimes with good reason. We might complain about
the
weather, about our health, about younger people or the older generation, about
Democrats
or
Republicans, about our supervisors or co-workers. We complain about
all kinds of situations or
people. If we are not careful, we can find ourselves
complaining about nothing in particular,
just complaining. We can easily get
ourselves into a very negative frame of mind. We see the
problems, but we see
nothing else. We fail to see the bigger picture which might have brighter
shades in it. Our vision and judgement can be restricted to what is missing or
lacking or
disagreeable to us.
The gospel reading
for next Sunday opens with the Jews complaining to each other about Jesus.
As
far as they were concerned, he was a problem, and they could not see beyond the
problem.
They had always known him as the son of Joseph, the carpenter from
Nazareth; they knew his
family and his mother. Yet, here he was claiming to be
the bread that came down from heaven.
They were scandalized that one of their
own could make such claims for himself. Their response
to Jesus was to complain
about him. Complaining on its own is rarely an adequate response to
anything or
anyone; it is certainly not an adequate response to the person of Jesus.
Jesus calls for a
very different kind of response. He speaks of this response initially as
coming
to him. To come to Jesus is the first step on the way to faith. In the first
chapter of
John’s gospel, when Jesus meets the disciples of John the Baptist for the
first time, he says
to them, “Come and see.” They came, they saw, they listened, and eventually they went on to
believe in him. Jesus’ call to come to him
is given even to those who already believe. He calls
those who believe to come
closer to him so as to believe more fully, more deeply. As followers
of Jesus,
we spend our whole lives moving closer to Jesus. We never fully arrive in this
life;
we never fully grasp him, either with our minds or with our hearts. We
are always on the way
towards him. No matter where we are on our faith journey,
the Lord keeps calling on us to come
closer and closer.
Then Jesus declares
that nobody can come to him unless drawn by the Father. We cannot come to
Jesus
on our own; we need God’s inspiration. The
good news is that God the Father is always
drawing us to his Son. When Jesus
says to us, “Come,” we are not just left to our own devices
at that point. God the
Father will be working in our lives helping us to come to his Son.
God worked
with Ezekiel, in the first reading, to renew his physical strength that his
faith
might also be strengthened. There is always more going on in our
relationship with Jesus than
just our own human efforts. That should give us
great encouragement because we know from our
experience that our own efforts
can fail us in the area of our faith as in other areas. God the
Father is at
work in our lives moving us towards his Son, drawing us towards Jesus. There is
an energy within us that is from God, an energy that will lead us to Jesus if
we are in any way
open to it.
Jesus speaks of
himself as the bread that comes down from heaven and calls on us to come and
eat this bread. When we hear that
kind of language we probably think instinctively of the
Eucharist. Yet, it
might be better not to jump to the Eucharist too quickly. The Lord invites
us
to come to him and to feed on his presence, and in particular to feed on his
word. In scrip-
ture we know, “We do not live on
bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of
God.” We need physical bread, but we also need the spiritual bread of God’s word. The Father
draws us to his Son to be fed by his word. The
food of his word will sustain us on our journey
through life, just as, in the
first reading, the bread sustained Elijah. When we keep coming
to Jesus and
feeding on his word, that word will shape our lives. It empowers us to live the
kind of life that Saint Paul puts before us in the second reading: a life of
love essentially,
a life in which we love one another as Christ as loved us,
forgive one another as readily as
God forgives us. That, in essence, is our
calling to come close to Jesus and become the image
and likeness of Jesus for
others
Fr. Don, cp