19th Sunday of the Year (B) 2015

 Nineteenth Sunday, Year (B)

(1^st. Kings 19:4-8; Ephesians 4:30 – 5:2; John 6:41-51)

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Obviously it wasn’t easy to hear a man say:

            I am the bread that came down from heaven;

we would think him mad or laugh him out of court!  And so the first thing to notice about today’s Gospel reading is that the Jews did not do any such thing.  No!  They had had some experience of Jesus: they had frequently heard Him speak, closely observed His Personal bearing, and at least heard of certain miraculous ‘works of His hands’.  Consequently, they were not drawn to laughter when such a man made a claim even so extraordinary as:

            I am the Bread that came down from Heaven.

In fact, they felt a certain anxiety before Him and were even irritated with themselves and each other for no apparently good reason; and so they started complaining and grumbling among themselves, saying among other things ‘Come down from heaven, indeed’!:

Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph?  Do we not know his father and mother?  Then how can he say, ‘I have come down from heaven?’

Why did they not just laugh?   What a testimony it was to Jesus that they didn’t!

It seems that only immediately involved professionals, that is, the pagan and brutalised soldiers, along with the hypocritically self-righteous chief priests, scribes and elders would ever be able to laugh at Him.  As regards the ordinary people, indifference to anything that was not directly pertinent to their own worldly concerns was their greatest fault because it would eventually make them so very malleable, even ‘mob-able’, for their leaders’ abuse.

There were others along with today’s murmuring Jews however, who could better explain why they considered Jesus as One not to be laughed at, as One Whom they -- as experienced and/or influential people -- found to be far different from any other man they had ever come across by reason of a certain 'righteousness’ which made Him both mysteriously unique and yet, somehow, dangerous; such, indeed, were the feelings of the wife of Pilate who warned her husband:

            Have nothing to do with that righteous Man;

and of the centurion who, having watched His suffering and death,  spontaneously glorified God saying:

            This Man was innocent beyond doubt!

It was this Personal ‘something’ about Jesus – not just the fact that He had only recently miraculously fed a very large crowd from a boy’s picnic lunch of a few loves and fish – that was troubling the Jews speaking with Him at the present moment; it was a disquietude that somehow something was being asked of them that they were not able or ready -- each of them for personal reasons -- to give, and so they complained in their own hearts, murmured and argued with their companions, until Jesus found it necessary to say:

Stop murmuring among yourselves, no one can come to Me unless the Father Who sent Me draw him.

That was not the way to find the truth about, and understand the Person of, Our Lord.  Instead of complaints to bolster a prejudiced opinion there had be a desire for the truth and a recognition that the truth about Jesus could transcend the limits and the power of merely human appreciation and reasoning.  The truth about Jesus could only be received, ultimately, as a gift – the Gift -- from the Father.

And because people must have a motive to impel them to make the necessary efforts to seek such truth, Jesus added the words:

            And I will raise him up on the last day.

The prophet Jeremiah had foretold that, in the days of the coming Messiah, all men would be taught by God; and here Jesus -- quoting the prophet -- added what were His very own mysterious and provocative words:

            Everyone who listens to My Father and learns from Him comes to Me.

And this is the precise point for our own entry into the drama of today’s Gospel reading!

The Jews seeking Jesus were ‘murmuring’ among themselves about His words, (others translate ‘murmuring’, as ‘complaining’, ‘grumbling’), and Jesus says quite bluntly, ‘Stop that.  Try to listen to My Father (and your Father) and learn from Him.’

Notice that very carefully, People of God; for life’s ultimate decision, Jesus advised that we listen to God and learn; not that we discuss among ourselves in order to arrive at an agreed conclusion, which would be both meaningless and ludicrous!!  Salvation is absolutely personal and relational; involving sincere personal love for, and deep personal commitment to, God.   Note that Jesus did not even say, ‘Discuss it with the Father’, or, ‘Pray to the Father’, because such prayer can with many people so easily become a matter of  ‘discussing  with’ or ‘talking to’ where they themselves are in the driving seat.  Therefore Jesus concentrated attention on one word, listen to His (and their) Father: that is, that they calm their heart in humble acceptance of its emptiness before Him, and still their fevered imaginations and thoughts by unconditional trust in Him.  He advised them, and advises us, to patiently wait upon the Father’s mercy and hope for His blessing; having only our gratitude and praise to offer for His goodness.

And now we come to a great truth about the world we live in, People of God: the Father teaches all and always has taught all. 

I am the bread of life.  Your ancestors ate manna in the desert, but they died.   I am the living bread that came down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die.

See, the Father was already teaching and preparing the Jews as they were being led from their slavery in Egypt.  He was preparing them for Jesus’ coming, by teaching them to look for life in food from heaven.  They accepted that all food came ‘from heaven’ in so far as it was ultimately given them by God.  But all such food originated from, and ended up on, earth.  They had to become able to understand the need for living bread originating from heaven, which alone could give them heavenly, eternal life.

There we have the clearest possible example of God’s Providence with Israel and with us today.  From the beginning of Israel’s history there was a vital question of, and need for, ‘bread from heaven’; and for over more than a thousand years God was guiding Israel towards the possibility of their being able to understand and appreciate something of truly living Bread coming from Heaven in the Person of Jesus of Nazareth.

That is the function and purpose of all earthly realities and experiences!   They are all, under God’s Providence, able to help us to an initial appreciation of the ultimate realities of heaven.   That is what can make life, living, such a wonderful experience:  how can we, with St. Paul, manage to take away the veil so lightly covering the beauty of God?

            Everyone who listens to My Father and learns from Him comes to Me.

Listening to God means not just listening with our ears, it involves the desire of our heart, it concerns the ‘background’ attention of our mind ever hovering around God, and our willingness and ability to drop earthly concerns when Jesus passes nearby:

They came to Jericho. And as He was leaving Jericho with His disciples and a sizable crowd, Bartimaeus, a blind man, the son of Timaeus, sat by the roadside begging.   On hearing that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out and say, “Jesus, son of David, have pity on me.”  And many rebuked him, telling him to be silent. But he kept calling out all the more, “Son of David, have pity on me.”  Jesus stopped and said, “Call him.” So they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take courage; get up, He is calling you.”  He threw aside his cloak, sprang up, and came to Jesus.  Jesus said to him in reply, “What do you want Me to do for you?” The blind man replied to Him, “Master, I want to see.”  Jesus told him, “Go your way; your faith has saved you.” Immediately he received his sight and followed Him on the way.   (Mark 10:46-52)

Bartimaeus there gave a most beautiful master-class in the Christian art of listening, for and to God!

Such listening can make life and our daily living it out a truly wonderful experience, offering personal pointers to heavenly realities; and when we learn to so look at, question and taste, the joys and sorrows, bitter and sweet things of life, then everything becomes able to beckon us ever on and ever more engagingly.

Jesus has yet one more piece of life-enhancing advice for us though:

Whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the Bread that I will give is My Flesh for the life of the world.

Whoever eats this bread which is My Flesh … once again we have one supremely important word which is, this time, ‘eats’.

And notice, once again, that He does not say ‘receives’, but ‘eats’.  We have not only to open our mouths or put forward our hands to receive such food, but we have to ‘eat’ it: some might say we have to ‘chew’ it.  Be that as it may, the essential point for our ‘eating’ is that we each of us recognize the food as essential to, necessary for, my very life.   It is not to be anonymously received, but personally eaten with joy and gratitude.  And according to the book of Proverbs, having been generously given such food, we should give a thought to our returning like for like, in other words we should be stirred to want to give ourselves in return to the Lord Who gives us all.

My dear People of God, living such a life, full of intriguing invitations and loving calls, receiving such daily Personal Food, we are most certainly not alone on our journey through life, but are developing, as the years pass by, an ever greater companionship and intimacy with One Who is of Himself and wills to become for us personally the Love, Truth, and Life of our life.  May we participate in this Holy Mass and hopefully receive Holy Communion with such faith and love as to experience that intimacy and companionship as never before.   Amen.         

18th Sunday (Year B) 2015

18^th. Sunday (Year B)

(Exodus 16:2-4, 11-15; Ephesians 4:17, 20-24; John 6:24-35)

    

Do not work for food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you; for on Him the Father, God, has set His seal.

Here we learn that it is with a view to Jesus, the Son of Man and Risen Christ, that God the Father offers us a heavenly home and an eternal destiny.  Because His only-begotten Son deigned to become one of us: humbly living among us and fully sharing our earthly experience, before finally and most dutifully dying for us on the Cross, God the Father wills that we be offered a share in His glorious Resurrection.

It has ever been so, for it was in view of the Son of Man, Jesus the Messiah, Who was to be born of the future People of God, that God decided to lead those chosen captives out of the slavery of Egypt to freedom in a land of their own , and guide them towards an endowment replete with sublime privileges:

To them pertain the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the giving of the Law, the service of God, and the promises, of whom are the fathers, and from whom, according to the flesh, Christ came, Who is over all, the eternally blessed God.  Amen.  (Romans 9: 4-5)

Now, in the beginning, those slaves called out of Egypt did not, could not, truly appreciate or fully understand what God was doing with them or offering to them.  Their sufferings under the Egyptians had made them truly hate their oppression, but only their experience of God’s power through His servant Moses had given them hope that freedom could be theirs.  However, they also had to learn from experience that freedom did not come cheap or easy; and so, as the going got hard in the desert, they began to hanker after the fleeting moments of pleasure that had occasionally come their way in slavery: those few hours each day when they might be able to rest from their forced labours and enjoy a restricted allowance of Egyptian food.  Fearing that their present journey through the desert might cost more than they had anticipated and forgetting their desire for freedom, they began to fantasize over those occasional bits of meat -- quail, was it -- they had been given in Egypt.  Wouldn’t it be wonderful to taste the like again!  Imaginations of that sort indulged in and shared with relatives and friends in private conversations soon led to public grumbling and ultimately confrontation with Moses and Aaron as we heard in our first reading:

The Israelites said, “Would that we had died at the Lord’s hand in the land of Egypt, as we sat by our fleshpots and ate our fill of bread! But you had to lead us into this desert to make the whole community die of famine!”

The people were being led by God on ways unknown to them: freedom and food … these were longings God heartily approved of in His People, but these desert wanderers could only imagine eating something satisfying and tasty, appreciate something they could immediately be proud of!

The Lord said to Moses: I have heard the grumbling of the Israelites.  Tell them: In the evening twilight you shall eat flesh, and in the morning you shall have your fill of bread, so that you may know that I, the Lord, am your God.

We can imagine with what eager anticipation and reckless abandonment many of them awaited and then embraced that evening hour of peace and relaxation as -- reconciling themselves to slavery once again -- they recklessly yielded to the enticement of cooked quail after weeks of difficult desert travelling on a daily allowance of unappetizing food:

But (as we are told in the book of Numbers 11:33) while the meat was still between their teeth, before it was chewed, the wrath of the Lord was aroused against the people.

The Lord God, with Jesus in view, was preparing a homeland of His choice for their good -- a land of milk and honey – a temporal sanctuary for them to be at ease with and grateful for, a motherland where they might live in freedom and gradually learn what freedom in its fullness could mean and demand.

In their desert trials they came to learn that freedom had to be fought for and could only be truly appreciated through a socially well-ordered and disciplined experience of it.  That experience would bring with it -- in God’s Providence -- a further vision and a deeper calling to another, and supremely true, freedom:  freedom from the slavery to sin with a view to an eternal and glorious destiny before God.  For such a transcendent prospect, however, they would have to learn how to persevere in the ways of God and become holy before Him.

But now, by choosing to wallow in a pottage of pleasure, they were disposing themselves to go back to earthly slavery after the example of Esau who had despised his birthright for one miserable dish of pleasurable food:

            Esau sold his birthright to Jacob, and Jacob gave Esau bread and stew of        lentils; then he ate and drank, arose, and went his way. Thus Esau despised his birthright. (Genesis 25:33-34)

They were, accordingly, punished severely for doubting the goodness of their Maker and disdaining the dignity of their choice as God’s prospective People:

            The Lord struck the people with a very great plague.

The only food suited for God’s people being led from earthly, freedom-sapping, delights, had to be -- as we learned last week -- a very special and supremely sustaining food-for-the-journey: wafer-thin manna, foreshadowing – even in its physical nature – the outward aspect of our saving Eucharist.

Dear People of God, let us just pause here in our considerations and learn from the mistakes of those Israelites, still largely slaves in their attitudes and expectations and for whom that God-given manna occasioned yet further grumbling.  Let us learn from their failings and resolve here and now, as true disciples of Jesus, to ever dutifully and wholeheartedly give thanks to God for our ‘manna’ (our experience of God’s goodness and love in our lives to the present moment, our confidence in His Spirit’s guiding Providence over our future, and our hope for our eternal fulfilment in the heavenly home Jesus has gone before to prepare for us)… all of which can be summed up in our gratitude to God for our reception of the most  precious Body and Blood of our dearest Lord and Saviour in the Eucharist, our sole and supreme sustenance for the Spirit-led journey to our heavenly Father’s home.  We must, by faith, accustom ourselves to the fact that we – like those desert-wandering Israelites of old -- are being led to what is at present, though not unknown to us, nevertheless, vague and shadowy, and so far above our natural abilities and capacities that only by self-committing patience and humility, backed up by steadfast perseverance, can we learn to appreciate and rejoice in God’s plan of salvation as it gradually transfigures us for heavenly life.  Here, the words of our Apostle Paul are typically direct and hard-hitting because they are so very pertinent for too many present-day Catholics wanting to be true Christians but yet trying to live it up with those around them enjoying what the world seems to offer them:

I declare and testify in the Lord that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds; that is not how you learned Christ.  You should put away the old self of your former way of life, corrupted through deceitful desires, and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new self, created in God’s way in righteousness and holiness of truth. 

As you heard in the Gospel reading, Jesus said to the Jews, the best living and most spiritually aware of people in the world of those days:

Do not work for food which perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.  For on Him the Father, God, has set His seal.

People of God, just as human beings cannot find happiness living like animals for the immediate satisfactions of food and debauchery, likewise, one called to become a child of God cannot find authentic happiness and fulfilment by pursuing a merely human plan for life, be it mediated as a ‘pronouncement’ of the United Nations or filched directly from the European Union’s poisonous legacy of French Revolutionary ideas.  Our Catholic and Christian calling demands that our lives be both human and divine in the likeness of Jesus Who, though God, became one of us, in order that we fallen human beings, might, in Him, be able to live a divine life of righteousness as adopted children of God in the power of His Spirit.

The great modern tragedy is that our Western societies have the power and the technology to make endless opportunities for people to enjoy the things of this world.  After having imperfectly learned over the centuries something of God, many Christians are now despising their heritage of a heavenly calling, as did Esau and Israel  of old: the imperfectly understood and little appreciated promises and teachings of Jesus and His Church seem ‘old hat’ in comparison with the always ‘new’ and immediately available pleasures of modern life, with the result that many are preferring to grab what they can for themselves now, rather than to rely on and commit themselves to the goodness of One Whom they cannot see, for blessings which seem – to faithless hearts and opaque eyes -- to be nothing better than empty promises of unverifiable things to come.

However, they should not forget what history has to teach us, for we have heard what happened to Israel in the desert.  And, to the Jews of His time, likewise wanting ‘food’ for present pleasure and fulfilment, Jesus declared:

 You seek Me, not because you saw the signs, but because you ate of the      loaves and were filled.

They and their contemporaries wanted not the signs of the Messiah of God but what was tangible: ‘teaching’ subject to their own scrutiny and traditions, and ‘popularity’ bought by the food and plenty a victorious King and leader might bring them. Jesus however, offered them then, as He does us now, the teaching of the Only One Who has ever seen God the Father, the Only One ever sent by God the Father, and His own Eucharistic Flesh and Blood -- prefigured by the desert manna -- as the true Bread from Heaven and as Food for a long and difficult journey, indeed, the only ‘proper’ Food for those called to follow Him on pilgrimage from this world to their Father’s heavenly home:

            I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.

Each of us, People of God, has to make this choice in our life, and it has indeed ever been so; for Moses warned the slaves escaping from Egypt:

            I call heaven and earth as witnesses today against you, that I have set      before you life and death, blessing and cursing.  Therefore choose life that    both you and your descendants may live; that you may love the Lord             your God, that you may obey His voice, and that you may cling to Him; for        He is your (very) life and the length of your days.  (Deuteronomy 30:19-20)

One greater than Moses speaks to us today; therefore let us learn from the Scriptures to hear His message, let us apply our minds to understand the teaching of His Church, finally, let us try to respond to His call with faith and follow His example with courage and perseverance.    

17th Sunday Year (B) 2015

 17^th. Sunday (Year B)                                                      (2^nd. 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!