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.
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.
