17th. Sunday (Year B)
(2nd. Kings 4:42-44;
Ephesians 4:1-6; John 6:1-15)
We often hear people say, sometimes
from bitter experience, that ‘looks’ can be deceptive; with Jesus however,
‘looks’ always promote truth: giving teaching and comfort, offering guidance and
help.
When Jesus, in our Gospel passage,
told His disciples to have the people sit down and prepare for a meal, He
undoubtedly remembered Elisha’s words, recorded in the Scriptures (2 Kings
4:43), when he was preparing to miraculously feed one hundred people:
Thus says the Lord, ‘They shall eat and there shall be
some left over.’
And, indeed, there was some left
over; but how much, or what later became of it, we are not told. With Jesus, however, after His feeding of the
five thousand, He had the remaining fragments gathered into baskets which
eventually totalled twelve in all, foreshadowing the complete tally (cf. the 12
tribes in Israel of old) of God’s future Chosen People whom the Apostles and
their successors would feed as shepherds offering -- in the name of Jesus --
eternal life and the glory and fulfilment of a place at the feast of the Lamb in
the Kingdom of God.
Noting the ‘looks’ again, we see
that whereas Elisha multiplied twenty loaves of barley and fresh ears of grain,
Jesus multiplied loaves and fish… what does that difference help us to
understand, in what way does it instruct us?
Jesus’ bread was not just for bodily
sustenance, as His words against the devil seeking to tempt Him in the desert at
the beginning of his public ministry remind us:
Man shall not
live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from the mouth of
God. (Matthew 4:4)
Elisha, being a prophet of God,
provided bread for the bodily needs of his companions, the sons of the prophets
gathered in Gilgal in his honour. Jesus
however was more than a prophet, and so the bread He multiplied was food for the
people’s bodily needs at that moment in time of course, but also and most
significantly, it was a symbol of the food of God’s Word of salvation and
re-creation:
Jesus said to
them, “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.” (John
6:32–33)
Likewise, the fish He multiplied and
gave to eat evoked the end days for which the prophet Ezekiel (unknown to
Elisha) predicted that a stream would flow from the Temple in Jerusalem and
purify the sterile waters of the Dead Sea:
The angel
brought me to the entrance of the temple of the Lord, and I saw water flowing
out from beneath the threshold of the temple toward the east. (The angel said), this water empties into the
sea, which it makes fresh; wherever the river flows there shall be abundant
fish. (Ezekiel 47, 1,
8-9)
That flow of purifying and
life-giving water from the threshold of the old Temple foreshadowed the water
that Jesus, Himself the new Temple, would give (John 7:37-39):
On the last
day of the feast, Jesus stood up and exclaimed, ‘Let anyone who thirsts come to
Me and drink.’ He said this in reference
to the Spirit that those who came to believe in Him were to receive.
The fish in Ezekiel’s prophecy thus
foreshadowed Jesus’ future disciples, ‘fruit’ of His most Holy Spirit bestowed
upon and working in His Church.
The Greek word for ‘fish’ in the New
Testament became an acronym among early Christians for the ancient creed: ‘Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour’; and the symbol of fish -- big
and small representing Jesus and His disciples -- was every bit as common among
Christians in the early Church as is the crucifix in modern times. At Holy Mass, therefore, we Catholics receive
the true bread of God, Jesus Christ our Saviour, Who ‘gives us life’ by
bestowing His Spirit upon His Church … the Spirit given to form us ‘little fish’
ever more and more in the likeness of the Big Fish Himself, for the glory of the
eternal Father. We are indeed called to
worship the Father in Spirit and in Truth!
The hour is
coming, and is now here, when true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit
and truth; and indeed the Father seeks such people to worship Him. God is Spirit, and those who worship Him
must worship in Spirit and truth.” (John 4:23s.)
This nourishment for God’s Christian
People looks like bread and wine because it is to be food for His disciples; but it is not
like ordinary food which we eat and, by digesting, change into our own bodily
substance, since the food that Jesus gives is intended to gradually change the
recipient into a member of the Body of Christ living by the Spirit of
Christ. And that presence of Jesus as
heavenly food for His People on earth we call His Eucharistic, Sacramental
Presence. The glorious Jesus, however,
the One Who is to come at the end of time -- resplendent in all His heavenly
majesty as Judge and Lord of All -- is not, as yet, directly present to us. Therefore we should appreciate that the Jesus
we receive at Holy Communion comes primarily as Food for the way,
as we see foreshadowed in another episode from the life of the great prophet
Elijah (1 Kings 19:7-8):
The angel of
the LORD came back the second time, and touched (Elijah) and said, "Arise and
eat, because the journey is too great for you." So he arose, and ate and drank; and he went
in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights as far as Horeb, the
mountain of God.
Elijah ate the food the Lord
provided for him in order that he might have strength and power to continue on
his way to finally reach the mountain of God; and today, at Holy Communion the
priest says:
May the Body (the Blood) of Christ keep me (you) safe
for eternal life.
The Eucharistic Gifts do not
directly confer divine life, they strengthen and empower divine life already
bestowed on the recipient, that we – like Elijah -- may fulfil God’s plan and
our vocation to reach the mountain of God and share in the heavenly feast of the
Lamb.
In a similar vein, Saint Paul told
us in the second reading that, for the disciples of Jesus, on the way to their
heavenly home:
There is one
body and one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism; one God and Father of
all, Who is over all, and through all, and in all.
Notice those words: “there is one
body and one Spirit”. “One body” refers
primarily to the Church as the Body of Christ, but it is also to be related to
the one Body, the one Food, for all those who are living members of the Church
which is the Mystical Body of Christ. “There is one Body and one Spirit” because the
Body, the Eucharistic Presence of Christ, is given so that we might be filled –
each and every one according to his or her measure -- with the one Holy Spirit
of Jesus, by Whose power alone each of us will be enabled to follow Jesus and
ultimately attain, in Him, our heavenly destiny.
That is why it is so important for
good Catholics to appreciate the real nature of the Presence of Jesus in the
Eucharist: He is there as food for the way – to sustain those who are
actively on the way. And to those on
the way to what is beyond their imagining and largely hidden in the future, He
says, You have My promises and My presence, so:
Ask, and it
will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to
you.’ (Matthew 7:7-9)
That is what Jesus expects from His
Catholic people: that, unashamedly, we ask and ask again with sure hope and
patient trust; and that, with humble confidence, we persist in our knocking;
because the only good Catholic is one who is spiritually alive, that is, one
constantly searching for Jesus, and in Him -- by His Spirit – looking towards
the Father. Likewise, the only ‘good’
communion we can make is one that opens us up to want to know and love Him ever
more, and to serve Him, His Church, and His people, ever better; a communion
with Jesus that makes us, in and with Him, yearn to know and long to do the
Father’s will. No matter how old or weak
we may become, we can still long and aspire to such knowledge and love, to such
prayerful service and praise of God, in Jesus and by His Spirit.
Finally, let us also learn from the
‘looks’ of our Eucharistic food,
People of God. Jesus’ presence there is humble – a thin white wafer and a sip of
wine -- apparently insignificant, veiling as well as transmitting the Flesh and
Blood of the Lord. Such appearances
should help us appreciate that we can best show our love and appreciation of
Jesus in the Eucharist by walking humbly and with deep gratitude along that
journey whither He is calling us. It is
in and through this daily Eucharistic
food-for-the-way that Jesus communicates to us His Spirit, so that, abiding in us and working with us, the Spirit
might enable us to progress along the way of Jesus and grow in His likeness to
the extent that, on arriving ultimately at the Father’s house, we will recognize
it as our true home:
In My Father's
house are many mansions; if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to
prepare a place for you. (John
14:2)
And so, as we rightly rejoice in the
Lord, let us remember that this food is always a new beginning whereby, as St.
Paul puts it:
Forgetting
what lies behind (and) straining forward to what lies ahead I continue my
pursuit toward the goal, the prize of God’s upward calling, in Christ
Jesus. (Philippians
3:13)
We have before us much walking to
do: along ground both rough and hard, with, perhaps, some ascents to
exhilarating joys, but certainly not without descents into suffering and sorrow;
and, much of the time, indeed, we will be walking along ways that can seem both
wearisome and boring if we allow our love for the Lord to become lukewarm. However if, by the Spirit, we humbly
persevere on that journey and take care to protect ourselves against snares
hidden along the way, we will ultimately behold and worship the Lord Jesus
coming in all His glory to meet us and take us, as His faithful disciples, into
His Father’s presence.
May our whole-hearted participation
in this our Sunday Mass, and our grateful reception of Jesus in His Eucharist
Presence, help us on our way to join those blessed ones whose hunger and thirst
for what is to come continually urges them to cry out with ever greater longing
and expectation: Come, Lord
Jesus, come!
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