Friday, August 31, 2012

Homily for  Sunday 26  August
1st  reading:  Joshua:   whom will you follow?
2d reading - Paul:  be submissiveto one another
Gospel - John:  will you also leave?


   The readings challenge us with the two great commandments: love God and love neighbor. I would like to expand on the first commandment: there are actually three stages to it: to seek God, to encounter God, and to love God above all things.

The desire to know God is already planted in our hearts; every human being has the thirst to experience something beyond the material reality of our lives. We all seek "happiness," we all need to feel our lives have some meaning. Some people never seem to find it; they remain unsatisfied their whole lives. Most of the time this involves substituting other things, whether material satisfaction or possessions or security, or some ideal or cause, for an encounter with God.

However, many people do encounter God in their lives. Since this is a personal encounter with the living God, there are as many different types of encounter as there are persons.
One of the main purposes of the Church is to offer people opportunities to encounter God.
Most of us are here today because we have encountered God, who gives meaning to our lives. We have reached the second stage of the journey. So most of us can identify with the people in today's Gospel.

The disciples of Jesus, as well as the crowd of 5,000, had experienced Jesus' divine power in the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves. They had met God, and for many of them it was a life-changing experience.  Now, for them as well as for us, Jesus places a challenge: to move beyond the brief encounter to the third step, which is to love God above all things: to believe, and act, in a new way.
As we see in the Gospel, not all did. As powerful as the encounter with God was, it cannot bring about by itself the third step: to make the changes in one's life which are necessary to put God in first place. How many people do we know who are stuck at this point? They have had a real encounter with God, perhaps many encounters; perhaps this encounter has been strengthened and nourished for many years.  After all, this is the second purpose of the church: not only to introduce people to God, but to nourish and strengthen that relationship.
But no one else can make that decision to love God above all things but me. This was the challenge Jesus places before the crowds in today's Gospel: do you believe that my flesh is real food for you to eat? This was a horrifying thought for his hearers; in fact, it continues to turn off people in our day. So most of them turned away. And Jesus asks the Twelve: will you also go away? Peter answers for us all: "Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of everlasting life."

For us, gathered here today in church, believing in Jesus' words "my flesh is real food" seems to be a simple thing. We are here because we believe and follow Jesus. The tradition of the church has paved the path for us. We are no longer shocked and scandalized by his words. We were (most of us) brought to church as children by our families and, even if we have fallen away at times, we are still on the path. We come to communion because we  believe we truly are receiving the Body of Christ. We are nourishing the encounter with God.

But we still must answer the question:  why did Jesus come to us as food? What is it about eating that both helps us and challenges us to know and love God? After all, Jesus could have told us to remember him by coming forward and touching the cross, or could have simply left us with a  scripture or a prayer. Why did he come as food?

(Meditate for a moment)

Because food goes inside.  Food changes us. The calories in food become part of us. Materially speaking, we are what we eat. Every cell in our bodies is made up of food we have eaten. On the other hand, everything unnecessary or even harmful must be disposed of, or it will make us sick.
So if we truly believe that we are receiving Jesus' body as food, then we must accept that he will become part of us, and change us.
So there are three reasons to be scandalized by Jesus' words: first, to believe that his body is real food, that the bread and wine become his body and blood for our nourishment; second, to believe that this divine food will make a real change in me -- that I will become Christ for others; and third, to believe that Christ is also in my neighbor. To love God above all things means that we believe all three of these, and put them into practice. So the love of God is fulfilled in love of my neighbor.
So, to believe in and live by the words of Jesus means that we must take this spiritual nourishment with us throughout the week, and be ready in whatever moment to put it into practice, by loving God and my neighbor. And how do we do that? St. Paul in the second reading gives us an example.
Paul challenges us a lot more strongly and specifically to love, not only a God who is invisible, but our neighbor, who are very visible. He says very clearly that by loving each other, we not only living our own private lives, we are participating in the great mystery of God's redemption. He uses one particular example, the love of husband and wife, to help us understand and experience the love of Christ for the church.
Paul speaks of the relationship between husband and wife. In biblical times, these roles were very different and unequal. Today, in many parts of the world, these roles are still different and unequal. In other parts of the world, especially in our own society, these roles are changing. But Paul insists that difference between the sexes  does not change the basic message. His command is to "be subordinate to each other." It is a mutual love, a mutual self-giving, which is as much of a challenge today as it was in Paul's day.
Paul also gives particular advice to husbands and wives, based on the culture of his day. We have to be careful about taking this too literally-- in other places, Paul told widows not to remarry, and discouraged marriage in general. He told slaves to obey their masters. His advice to people, based on the culture of the time, always invited them to rise above the material, cultural norms of society and see their lives in the light of God's saving plan for us.
Paul was not interested in reforming the material culture of his day, because he believed, as most of the apostles did, that this world would soon be coming to an end. His value to us is his gift for seeing the spiritual reality unfolding in the midst of our material world. He could see, in the love of husband and wife (which he, of course, never experienced) the reality of Jesus' love for the Church. In a larger sense, this gives a deeper spiritual meaning to the connection between the two great commandments; that when we truly love our neighbor as ourselves, we are also loving God.

No comments:

Post a Comment