NewCreation

Homily for Sunday 18 in Ordinary Time, Year B

Welcome, my sisters and brothers, to this, the homily for the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time. And we're in the second week of St John's treatise on the bread from heaven, St John's unpacking of the feeding of the 5,000, which we were first led up to in our reading of St Mark's Gospel. And this Sunday the Gospel doesn't continue immediately onward from where we left it last Sunday. Remember last Sunday Jesus goes up to a mountain to be by himself, to get rid of – or to escape from – the crowd who, having seen the miracle he had performed, managing to feed them out of five loaves and two fishes which he had distributed amongst them, them sensing this, had tried to make him king, and he'd escaped and gone up the mountain. Well, between then and today's Gospel, some things have happened. Jesus's disciples abandon him. They get into the boat on which they'd come and go back across the lake. They don't consult him, they just go. And the lake becomes rough, wind blows, and in the middle of the night they see Jesus walking on the lake and coming near the boat, and were terrified. And he says to them, "It is I; be not afraid." And they wanted to take him into the boat, and immediately the boat reached the land towards which they were going. It's a very odd little piece. Why have they gone off by themselves? Why have they left? It says it was now dark, which in John means darkness is that which resists the light. So there's something about the disciples having basically despaired of Jesus. There's just a little prefiguration of them all abandoning him, and then him coming back to them on the third day and saying, "Peace be with you." And even the hint of what happened with the disciples of Emmaus: suddenly they got there and he was already there, or he was there and as he came there they got there. It's a very odd little piece, but it suggests that the disciples haven't really got what Jesus is about yet. Anyhow, that's the bit which we miss out. Here we have, which we start, the next day. The next day the crowd that had stayed on the other side of the lake – in other words, they were on the side of the lake where Jesus had performed the miracles. This is the pagan side of the lake. And they saw that Jesus hadn't got into the boat; there was only one boat. They saw the disciples going to the boat and going away. So Jesus hadn't gone to the boat, so they were waiting for him. But then some boats from Tiberias came near the place where they had eaten the bread after the Lord had given thanks. And this is a beautiful detail: the place – you remember last week we heard of the place, which was a place not like the Temple, not a sacrificial place, but a place where they could lay down and recline, the green pasture where the Lord had given thanks, where he had εὐχαριστήσας – in other words, where he had eucharistised, made the Eucharist. So when the crowd saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there, they themselves got into the boats and went to Capernaum looking for Jesus. They thought, no one here, let's go back across the lake. So the crowds in a sense have been much more obedient, waiting for Jesus than the disciples. So when they found him on the other side of the lake, they said to him, "Rabbi, when did you come here?" And it's a very good question. They hadn't seen him come; of course they didn't know that he could go across the lake by himself in the middle of the night. So it's a sensible question. They're baffled by the one who went up the hill to get rid of them and then was on the other side of the lake by the time they got there. And Jesus answers them. Again, he doesn't answer directly. "Very truly, I tell you, you're looking for me not because you saw signs but because you ate your fill of the loaves." In other words, what I'm trying to do is much more than simply feed you. You saw the feeding, I did feed you, it was miraculous, I produced abundance out of very, very small provisions, and none of you were without — just as Elisha had left in the passage which accompanied our reading last time. Elisha had only enough for 20 people; there were 100 people, but none went without. So you were all satisfied. So he's saying, "Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you, for it is on him that God the Father has set his seal." This is mysterious stuff. It's not a proper answer to the question they ask him. They ask him how did you get here? And he says, you've only come to find me, you're only interested in me because I satisfied you. "Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food which endures for eternal life" — the life of the ages — "which the Son of Man will give you." So Jesus is starting to take the people into the realm of understanding the sign, which is what we're really into today. We saw the sign last week; the sign was multiplying all that bread and fish, feeding people in a perfectly straightforward material sense. But Jesus says that's not the real sign, that's only part of it. You're not really getting it if that's what you got from what I was doing. So he says, don't work for that, work for something else instead. So they then said to him, "What must we do to perform the works of God?" In other words, there's quite a genuine hunger and thirst, if you like, for knowledge here. They ask him decent questions. "What must we do to perform the works of God?" So they want the right answer. Jesus answered them: "This is the work of God, that you believe in him whom he has sent." And that's like the mega answer in today's Gospel. We'll see how it ties in further on. But he's saying that there is a work in this, and the work is not so much to do anything — or rather, it is to have something done to you, to allow yourself to be stretched by God convincing you through the one he has sent. It's going to be this shape of allowing yourself to be stretched by the one whom God has sent that's the shape of God's work in you, which is what is going to be emphasized now throughout, because that's going to be the thing that's really difficult to understand. So they said to him, "What sign are you going to give us then, so that we may see it and believe you?" In other words, we want you to do something to prove that you're the person we should listen to. And that's not quite what Jesus means. It's not entirely stupid, but it's not quite what Jesus means. "What work are you performing?" They'd seen the multiplication of the loaves and the fishes. So that's the work that he had performed. But they want to understand what it is about. What's the work that you are performing? How does that enable us to understand God? And then they have a parallel: "Our ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness. As it is written, he gave them bread from heaven to eat." That phrase in exactly that form doesn't appear in Exodus, which is our first reading this Sunday. It appears in that form in the book of the prophet Nehemiah and in the psalm which is our responsorial psalm this week. The Exodus message is very slightly different. "He gave them bread from heaven to eat." Then Jesus said to them, "Very truly I tell you, it was not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven, but it is my Father who gives you the true bread from heaven." And I think that there are two things going on there. They refer to their ancestor, but the quote was concerning God, who had given them bread from heaven. He's saying it was not Moses who gave you this — this is not a thing in the past — but it is my Father who gives you this. This is something in the present. This is a continuous act of the Father speaking. This is rather important, because he's previously referred to himself — while it's not clear to them that it's himself — as the Son of Man: "which the Son of Man will give you, for it is on him that God the Father has set his seal." And that's a very strange phrase, the setting of the seal on somebody, because the setting of the seal was almost invariably referred to either onto a book as a kind of a signature, or onto a tomb or something that needed to be closed. But principally, the principal references to setting a seal on something are confirming a treatise, putting on text to show guarantee of something. So the Son of Man is the guaranteed word, if you like; it's the guaranteed promise. So it's my Father who gives you — he's continuing to give you — the true bread from heaven. "For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world." Now it's interesting that obviously there's a word play here with the word "heaven." Manna came down from the sky. Manna in the Exodus account, which is our first reading this week, appeared as a daily gift for as long as it was needed to give people physical strength to get through the wilderness. And as we were to see, getting them through the wilderness wasn't in fact enough, because the entire generation — with the exception of one or two people who got through the wilderness — died. So it was physical sustenance, but no more. There was no heavenly content, if you like. It was, as it were, a gift that came from the sky. But it wasn't God keeping people alive for perpetuity. That is something which is ongoing, consistent, persistent, and which is related to Jesus. So when they understand the distinction he's making between that which Moses gives, which came from the sky, and that which God gives, which is part of God's eternal life, "Sir, give us this bread always," then Jesus says to them, "I am the bread of life. Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty." This extraordinary phrase at the end. Now notice something which I think is very important that Jesus is doing. He's trying to get their head away from celestial thinking. He's trying to bring down the understanding of God to the person in front of him. You want to understand the things of God? You want to understand how it is that God opens you up to eternal life? It's going to be… horizontally. It's because you learn to believe in the one who he has sent. And everything that one does, the whole of his life culminating in his death and the distributing of himself, is what is going to feed you and nourish you for eternal life. But this is not a handout from heaven. This is the gift of life which opens you up to heaven, and it's God opening up at this horizontal level. And that's quite a tough thing to do, because in one sense he is bringing out something that is heavenly, but he's bringing it down to earth. He's trying to get them off tripping on celestial handouts, and saying no, the work of God is to believe in the one whom he has sent. It's to be able to look at this human being who is in front of you, who is in fact God's Son, who speaks God's truth, who is going to live out what God's love is like. And your work is to believe in him, to allow yourself to be opened up by this other, this human other at the horizontal level, who is the enactment in our midst of what God's love for us looks like. It's like it's the de-celestializing of the gift, and turning it into something much more concrete, much more present, and much more symbolically rich. How to get us thinking of Jesus as bread, how to allow us to imagine that all of this is to nourish us, that it's to take us beyond celestial handouts, if you like, and to turn us into bearers, signs of this eternal life which is being brought about by Jesus.