Homily for Sunday, 19 August 2018

20th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Proverbs 9:1-6; Psalm 34:2-3, 4-5, 6-7; Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6:51-58

This homily was given at Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church, Sherwood Park, AB, Canada. 

When we gather for a meal, what are some of the things that happen before, during, and after the meal?

First, depending on how elaborate the feast is and how many people will gather together, we may invite people to the meal. And then, whether we are attending a grand feast with hundreds of people or with a small group of friends or family, or one friend, or our wife or husband, girlfriend or boyfriend, or whomever, we need to prepare or have somebody prepare the food and drink. Closer to the time of the meal, we set the tables. We gather at table. We pray in thanksgiving for the food and one another. As we eat and drink, we may tell stories, laugh, sing… We enjoy ourselves. Depending on the occasion, the number of people present, the culture, and so on, the meal may be simple or it may be a several-course feast that lasts all evening, or all day, or longer.

As somebody who enjoys good food and good company, and especially enjoys food and drink from all parts of the world and the cultures and people that inspire and prepare this food, I can think of many meals I have enjoyed over several hours. I think of the devout, generous families I have known and stayed with in places like Spain and France while working or studying there. For these families, meals after Sunday Mass would involve large groups of friends connected through their neighbourhoods or parishes, and would go on for what seemed like forever. I think of the impoverished people of my order’s parishes in Colombia whose doors were constantly open; who constantly offered what little food and drink they had; whose children, from house after house, seemed to stream out into the streets to greet their beloved Basilianos—Basilians. How humbling this giving of abundance out of poverty is when we see it! I think, most recently during my multi-city journey across North America this summer, of when I would enjoy meals with several families during the same day, or have a few hours to be with one family or good friend. Many times, my brother Basilians have put on great feasts. I think of many feasts after weddings, funerals, baptisms…

My sisters and brothers in Christ, we have all been invited to a great feast. When I say this, are many of us perhaps thinking of the Eucharist? If so, I cannot fault us for this. When we think of a great feast, it would be a good sign if we, as Catholic Christians, were to think immediately of the Eucharist. When we hear Jesus promise us his very self for our salvation in today’s Gospel reading from John, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life,” it is natural and right for us to connect Jesus’ promise with our experience of the Eucharist. And yet, while our Eucharist is Jesus really, truly, and fully present among and within us here in this celebration and in bread and wine that we consume, our Eucharist is a sign—we call it a sacrament—of an even greater feast we have yet to experience, the everlasting feast of heaven.

This everlasting feast of heaven requires us to prepare for it. So how, then, do we prepare for heaven? We might prepare for heaven, for a feast for whose glory we can only hope this side of heaven, the same way we prepare for any great feast we have seen and known in this earthly life. The way we prepare for and then partake in meals, everything from small-scale meals with family or one or a few friends to great feasts, goes back before Jesus’ time. We hear of it in the Book of Proverbs. The main character of our reading from Proverbs today is a personified Wisdom. First, Wisdom puts “her house,” a large banquet hall with “seven pillars,” in order. When we are receiving company at home, how many of us, like Lady Wisdom, clean our home? After cleaning, Wisdom prepares the food. She invites guests to the feast, not the rich or the elites first, but from “the highest places in the town,” she invites the poor; those of less-renowned intellect or understanding: “You that are simple, turn in here.” The feast that Wisdom prepares will nourish and strengthen those who enjoy it. They will grow, “live, and walk in the way of insight.”

The letter to the Ephesians picks up the banquet scene where the book of Proverbs leaves off. The feast is underway. The people invited have gathered and are eating, drinking, enjoying themselves, and are amusing one another with stories, humour, and song. Do we not often do the same when we gather for a meal? Sing “Psalms and hymns and spiritual songs among yourselves… giving thanks to God the Father at all times and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,” Ephesians asks of the people invited to this feast. And yet this permission from Ephesians to enjoy ourselves at the feast in God’s name, no less, comes with a call to moderation: “Do not be foolish,” the letter to the Ephesians says.

Perhaps many if not all of us have been to a feast or a party when somebody behaves foolishly; somebody or many people eat, drink, or behave excessively, or speak in a way that is not careful or ruins others’ reputations. “That is debauchery,” the letter to the Ephesians says, when we become filled and fill others with gossip; so filled with worldly food and spirits that we cannot “be filled with the Spirit” of God. As Christians, invited to this feast of the Eucharist, we are called to better than this. We are called to this feast, having already made room to some extent within ourselves and in our world for God; for God’s Son, Jesus Christ.

This making room for God is the wisdom and “insight” to which our readings from Proverbs and Ephesians call us. After all, God has invited us to the feast, so it would be foolish for us to act in ways that ignore the graciousness of our host, just as this would be foolish to do at any meal to which we were invited. And yet it is all too easy, even for usually well-mannered people like us, to fall into excess; to fall into the foolishness that Ephesians warns against. Is our foolishness and even sin not often a product of excess and a kind of impatience? Instead of accepting that heaven, for which we are invited to hope as Christians, remains something not yet fully realized—that the greatest feast is yet to come—sin is when we try too hard, to excess, to impose our incomplete experience of heaven on one another, ourselves, and our world as if it were complete. We abuse the gifts God has given us to enjoy wisely and in moderation; gifts that point us to heaven without revealing everything of the grandeur of heaven all at once: Food and drink, the gift of speaking, our sexuality… And when we try too hard to impose “heaven” on earth instead of hoping, praying for, and cooperating with God through works of kindness, mercy, and justice toward heaven’s full realization, “Thy kingdom come; thy will be done on earth as in heaven,” we end up not creating heaven but hell on earth, for ourselves and for one another.

We hear of this kind of excess, the imposition of a false “heaven,” in our Gospel reading today from John. It is telling that, as Jesus repeatedly identifies himself as “the living bread that came down from heaven,” the people’s response progresses from complaining to grumbling to a full-on dispute in today’s Gospel. If our reading from Proverbs today speaks of the advance preparations for a great feast, and Ephesians speaks of enjoying the feast in moderation, in John’s Gospel Jesus reveals to us what heaven will be in its fullness and how we might taste already the heaven that awaits us: “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in them.”

Do we, then, have the patience to make room within and among us for Jesus, the only “true food” and “true drink” that enables us to “live forever,” and not to grumble, dispute, or gossip among ourselves? Do we have the wisdom to enjoy without mistaking God’s gifts to us in this life, which point us to heaven, as heaven already in its fullness? To the extent we exercise this patience and wisdom, we taste the food of the everlasting feast of heaven to which God has invited us and of which this Eucharist is a sign of our hope.