Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle B

Mark 8:27-35

Last Tuesday we remembered 9 – 11, when four jetliners were seized by terrorists who piloted them into the twin towers and the pentagon. It was a terrible day for America, and most of us still can recall the anxiety as we wondered what would happen next. But a good thing came out of this. For a brief moment we had a spirit of unity; we'd forgotten all the petty things that divided us. It didn't last long. Today we seem to be in one of the most divisive periods in our history. And our politicians and publications keep throwing gasoline on the fire. Even in our church, as we hear about the scandals i the clergy and the cover-ups by our bishops, some clergy are calling for the resignation of Pope Francis, who is supposed to be the one who is the very symbol of the unity of the Church.

There is an interesting book I'm reading It's called “In Good Faith – questioning atheism and religion”. The author contends that tribalism is the main source of disunity for humankind, , and the natural tendency for any group of human beings is to define who is Us and who is Them. And the dearest definition of us and them includes us being good and them being bad; as we divide, we also see moral differences. Something becomes an idol that has power over us. And isn't that obvious? The people who oppose President Trump have decided that those who work for him should not be allowed to live normal lives, should be shouted and spit upon in public, should be denied the right to eat among people who hate everything about Trump. And it goes both ways. Our natural state is to be in tribes. In tribes we feel safe, we have peace. But when we are forced to live alongside other tribes, expect trouble. Many of the countries in Europe are ethnically uniform and got along well, developing social policies that increased equality, made health care universal, brought about other good things for the citizens. But introduce a new tribe, Muslim immigrants, and all of a sudden these social democracies are threatened by a rise in the political power of the nationalist anti-immigrant parties.

So what does this have to do with the gospel, you ask, shaking your watch to make sure it is still working. Most of the time when this gospel is written we emphasize that Jesus is disclosing himself for the first time as the Messiah; or we challenge ourselves to answer the question Jesus poses, “Who do you say that I am?” And those are good topics. But I think another area we should pay attention to in this divisive age is the last part of the gospel passage: “whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross and follow me, forever who wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and for the gospel will save it.”

Down through the ages people saw that a remedy for tribalism, for Us vs Them mentality, was to create a larger “Us”. We used to pride ourselves on being a “melting pot” where nationalities from all over Europe became Americans. The English language, the idea that anyone could succeed with hard work and determination, all the other elements of so called patriotism made us a larger tribe. Of course. And when you think about it, that's what is going on in China. They are trying to make a stubborn minority of muslims into Chinese by forcible re-education. Us vs. Them becomes Us and Them, and there is peace for a while. My daughter tells me that in Germany all those immigrants that have been admitted have got to learn German and take classes in citizenship if they want to take advantage of the benefits of society; in fact those who don't assimilate are threatened with eventual expulsion. More Us, less them.

But that is where the radical nature of Jesus shines forth. He lived in an Us vs Them society; Pharisees vs. Herodians, Jews vs. Pagans, and among the Jews many more divisions. Saint Paul even took advantage of this when he was on trial before a Roman judge and stated that he believed in the resurrection; his accusers immediately began arguing among themselves, to the point where the judge called off the trial. Jesus in the last statement we hear in this gospel, proposes that his followers be Us for Them. In other words, to follow Jesus means that we consciously step out of tribalism, and through our actions choose to live a life which recognizes the universal brotherhood of human beings. And this is so contrary to our nature that it is possible only with God's help. And yet it can be done. I think a great example was Mother Theresa, who strongly and passionately identifed as a Roman Catholic religious sister, but saw everyone – religion didn't matter for her view, wealth was unimportant, age had nothing to do with it -she was for the unborn just as much as the elderly – she had reached the point where she was living an Us for Them life, and tried to actualize that in the order she founded.

Where are your dividing lines? What are the boundaries of your tribe? Remember, having a tribe is natural, it's in our genes. But Jesus indicates today, and as you well know in many other places, that the goal of the Christian is to overcome this natural instinct – and through God's help, our goal is to become Us for Them people. Is it easy? Of course not. It's a cross, a cross that Jesus recognizes. But if we take it up, we overcome death, and as we become this new people, those around us will say, “See how these Christians love one another!” and they also will want to live this new way. That is how Jesus wants to overcome the world. You and I, God willing and through our cooperation with his grace, will be part of that revolution.

Twenty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle B

Mark 7:31 - 37

Most bible scholars think the Gospel of Mark was written about sixty to seventy years after the birth of Jesus. Matthew and Luke came ten to twenty years later. Both Matthew and Luke follow the general outline of Mark, and sixty percent of the gospel of Mark is found in Matthew; its appears that whole sections of Matthew were copied from Mark. For a long time Matthew was the gospel we used most in the liturgical cycle; we hardly heard from Mark.

To me, though, Mark is one of the most interesting writings in the New Testament. People who know Greek say that his style is very unusual. They used to think he might not have known Greek too well, but now it seems as though he deliberately wrote in this way, to give a sense of movement, of haste. Mark also is always having Jesus tell those who observe his miracles not to tell anyone about them, but they do anyway. We still don't know why this is – it doesn't happen in the other gospels – if Jesus doesn't want the news of his miracles to be spread far and wide, and it happens anyway, why does Mark keep emphasizing the so called “Messianic Secret?” Some people think Mark is writing for a community, probably in and around Rome, who are under persecution, and he's reminding them that they know something their persecutors don't.

There are many other things in Mark that are puzzling. The miracle stories are often worth thinking about. Today, we hear a story that is not in the other gospels – and that in itself is interesting. If Matthew and Luke were reading Mark, surely this story would have seemed worth copying down, but Matthew skips over this and the previous miracle story and kind of sums it up with the sentence “Jesus healed many people”. But Mark really elaborates on this one story, so I suspect he wants his readers to think about it and perhaps see something about themselves in the story.

Think for a minute how isolated this man must have been. Not only could he not hear, but he couldn't speak very well either. People who are deaf from birth don't have the feedback necessary to pronounce words well and some never learn to speak. In our day, the deaf can learn a very sophisticated sign language and can communicate well with each other. In those days, though, this man was probably the only one in the village who had the problem and must have had a terrible time communicating more than basic thoughts.

Think about how he must have felt as his fellow villagers brought him to Jesus and asked that Jesus lay his hands upon him. Did the deaf man know what was expected? Probably not – but the point is that he trusted his friends.

Then notice the Jesus does not lay his hands on the man. Instead, he takes him off privately and puts his fingers in the man's ears and groans, saying “Be opened” and then spits on his tongue. Healing miracles in the other gospels most of the time have Jesus simply commanding something to happen. Only in Mark do we find Jesus doing these kinds of miracles, which have overtones of magic about them. Some people think that Jesus did work his miracles like this but later writers left out all these details because they were trying to emphasize His divinity. But I like another theory, which seems more consistent with Mark's point of view. In another part of Mark's gospel he writes that Jesus could not work many miracles because of their lack of faith. For Mark, faith on the part of the person being healed is a very important part of the miracle. So Jesus uses sign language to indicate what he intends to do, and that allows the deaf man to understand and believe.

So where does that leave you and I? I don't know about you, but I think I have a sort of spiritual deafness. My faith tells me that God is always communicating with me, but I don't hear much of it. I'm distracted, I'm selfish, I don't want my orderly life to be shaken up. If I want to hear God, I've got to train myself to listen better. He speaks through the scriptures so I better read them. He speaks through the events in my life, so I need to ask what he is saying. All of this means that I need quiet and freedom from distraction if I'm going to hear God.

I'm also deaf to the people around me. When I ask “how are you”, do I really want to know? If I say “do you need anything,” am I hoping you will not? And that of course is if I ask at all. And yet Jesus told us that if we wanted to be great in the kingdom of heaven we had to serve each other. The only way to get into the habit of service is to find some way to serve on a regular basis, and once we take up a life of service, we will eventually hear the cries of the poor.

The second thing I think the story tells us is that if we want Christ to make us whole, we have to increase our faith. I'm reminded of the man who said to Jesus, “Lord, I believe, help my unbelief.” We all have room to increase our faith and part of that requires prayer. The stronger our faith, the more we will be able to accomplish in our mission as Christians to bring about the kingdom of heaven. We associate strong faith with miracles like healing, and of course that seems to be the case. But there are other kinds of miracles – and we think perhaps of Mother Angelica who founded EWTN depending all the while on God and God alone. We think of so many other remarkable things the saints did, and we realize that like the deaf man, God will multiply our weak human efforts if we have strong faith.

And perhaps the third thing is that in this story Jesus is there, not like some genie in a bottle granting a wish, but being very human, touching, groaning, giving his all to make us whole. And that, of course, is the whole point of the Eucharist, which is the ultimate sacrifice on Calvary played out in sacramental form.

So Mark is writing to persecuted Christians. He is telling them through this story that Jesus is there in the midst of their struggles, and this is no time to give up. Because he will open our ears and give us the words we need to say, and ultimately make us whole if we but trust him, if we let him do so.

Twenty - second Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle B

Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

When I was growing up in Montana, we used to observe “Ember Days” which came around four times a year. The name came from from the Latin term Quator tempora, which means “four times”. Each set of Ember Days consisted of a Wednesday, Friday and Saturday, in memory of the betrayal of Judas, the crucifixion of our Lord, and his time in the grave. You were supposed to fast on those days, which meant eating only three meals, and refraining from meat except for one meal on Wednesday and Saturday. You couldn't eat meat on Friday anyway. The winter set was in thanksgiving for the olive harvest, which provided the oils we use in our sacraments. The spring set was in thanksgiving for the flowers, which fed the bees who produced wax for our candles. The summer set celebrated the wheat harvest, which provides the raw material for the bread which becomes Christ's body. The fall set celebrated the grape harvest which provided the material that becomes His precious blood. Catholics began celebrating the ember days before the third century. In the tenth century Pope Gregory VI ordered that they be celebrated throughout the whole church.

But today, if you wanted to know when the ember days were, only the Farmer's Almanac keeps track. You don't find them mentioned in our missalettes or catholic calendars.

What happened? During Vatican II, the church fathers ordered that the Church review its traditions and see whether they were serving the purpose for which they had been instituted. The ember days clearly were not, since no one was observing them anymore, and no one remembered why we observed them. So this age old tradition, older than the Tridentine Mass, was eliminated as a universal practice in the Church.

Our readings this Sunday should be looked at together. We have Moses telling the Israelites, including Jesus, not to add or subtract a single thing to the commandments God that he put before them. One of the reasons to keep the commandments was to show the world the way a great and just nation behaves, a nation that is so close to God that God listens to them? Now although Moses received ten commandments on Mount Sinai, there are many more commandments attributed to Moses in the first five books of the bible. In fact Deuteronomy has several, including one which says that if you come across a bird nesting on her eggs or chicks, you can take the eggs and chicks, but not the mother; and if you do this things will go well and you will have a long life. The rabbis ultimately found 630 separate commandments, and of course the most Orthodox Jews try to keep them all, for no other reason than their belief that they came from God.

So then we get to James, who tells us that the essence of religion is to care for widows and orphans, and keep yourself pure and unstained by the world. So much for 630 commandments. And Jesus, of course, condemns the pharisees for pointing out that Jesus' disciples ate without washing their hands. Some of my grandchildren would be in big trouble.

Like the tradition of the ember days, the traditions the Pharisees were so adamant about, all the purity laws, for example, had lost their original meaning. The ritual washings, the detailed way to keep the sabbath holy, the dietary laws, the laws governing clothing – keeping these laws had become the essence of being Jewish, and you could measure how holy someone was by how well he kept the laws. Saint Paul even bragged about how diligent he had been when he was a Pharisee. But Jesus might have said to the pharisees, “why did Moses give you these laws?” And they would have to answer, “so that through them we would give evidence of our wisdom and intelligence and justice – and closeness to our God? Clearly the traditions of Moses weren't doing that anymore, if they ever did. The laws had become a way to keep the Israelites from interacting with the world; to the extent that you kept them, you became more and more isolated from the people for whom you were to be an example, the people who should have been so impressed that they too would want to follow that God of the Israelites.

Jesus is not against tradition, nor should we be. Jesus himself even uses a traditional mode of argument – to quote a prophet. That would not have been helpful if he had been arguing with Pagans. Jesus in fact, according to John celebrated the Passover with his apostles, and probably the other feasts of the Jewish people. But here he tells us how to look at traditions.

First, where did the tradition come from? Many of the laws attributed to Moses were no longer followed in Jesus' time. If you executed your son for talking back to you, the Romans didn't look kindly on that. If you stoned a blasphemer to death, best do it as part of a crowd, since it was against Roman law, but they couldn't pick one person to blame if a whole crowd was involved. And if your brother died you might not marry his widow so you could raise up children who would be legally those of your brother – again, because in addition to being impractical, monogamy had become the norm in Judaism as well as most of the Roman world. God may have given the laws to Moses, but they had to do with a particular time and place, and were never intended to be forever and ever.

Second, tradition means “handing down”. If the tradition no longer carries the message from generation to generation, it no longer has a purpose. That's the ember days. They were a good idea back when most people lived on farms and most people practiced Catholicism, but for a world wide religion a tradition rooted in western European agriculture didn't mean anything anymore.

Finally, even if traditions are harmless, if they aren't moving their practitioners to the kind of religion James talks about – a religion in which charity toward the poor and abandoned is foremost, and striving in our own lives to overcome our faults and failings and become more like Jesus, then maybe we need to find something else to do with our time, or at least remember how the tradition helps us in these areas. Jesus wants us to look carefully at our traditions – are they helping us or standing in the way of our spiritual journey?

Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle B

John 6:60 – 69

When I was young we never heard about sexual scandals in the clergy. Once in a while a priest would leave the priesthood to get married. The biggest scandal, however, was the alcohol abuse. It wasn't something we talked about openly, but now and then a priest would be sent off to minister to a small hospital or a convent and it was usually blamed on him being unable to drink responsibly.

We are hearing about scandals concerning our Catholic clergy all over the world. Some of the things described in the Pennsylvania grand jury report are so awful that it's hard to believe any human beings are capable of such things, let alone priests. And there is the accusation that bishops and cardinals were asleep at the switch or covered up the crimes of those they supervised, and some were even abusers themselves. And of course with the press and social media the attention of the world is negatively focused on the the Church once again.

There have been many excuses offered as well. Some of the priests were sent to psychiatrists who after a period of time told the bishop that the priest had been cured and could return to ministry. Bishops as well as laity could not believe that priests were capable of such things – it was easier to believe that the children and young people were making things up. And people who were being victimized had no one to turn to – the report covers a time, many years ago, when people still thought that priests were walking saints.

There is a movement now to withhold all or part of one's support for the Church until the guilty parties are drummed out of the priesthood and safeguards are set up so this sort of thing never happens again. There are also people clamoring for an end to the obligation of celibacy – after all, if celibacy is a charism, a gift of God, then it can't very well be an obligatory gift, they say. In the Eastern Rites and Orthodox churches the bishops are selected from mature monks, and the priests are mostly married before they are ordained – in fact, someone who wants to be a priest who is not married is looked at with suspicion.

So what are we, those of us at the Parish level, supposed to think? What are we to do? In the face of this horrible scandal how can we be silent?

The first thing, I think, is to remember that there have been horrible scandals in every generation since the beginning of Christianity. Some were sexual and there were times in the middle ages when priests and bishops and even popes had mistresses And scandalous as well was the way the Church treated Jews and American Indians and many other indigenous people. And yet, even in the midst of the worst of these times, there were great saints; and the same is true today. Those causing the scandals make up a minority, and most priests and bishops are hard-working and holy and take their vows seriously. In the Pensylvania report covering 70 years more than 5000 priests served the Church in the dioceses of the state, while three hundred were accused – not proven, not convicted, but accused. We laity have to protect the good priests and stand up for them. And while what we are hearing is horrible, we need to remember that most of this took place more than forty years ago, and in most of the Church the policies put in place to restore the integrity of the Church are working – and they are being constantly reviewed and updated.

The second point is that we are not Catholics, I hope, because of a priest or a bishop. If our faith depends on someone like that, we can lose the faith just as easily. If we are serious about our Catholicism, we are in the Church because we want to know Christ better; we want to imitate his life and through our relationship with Him, gain eternal happiness. Our Church must survive if it is to continue down through the ages being the Mystical Body of Christ and to be there for the generations to come, including our children and grandchildren. We laity have to redouble our efforts to keep the Church going and growing. Priests and bishops can't do it alone, and in fact it isn't even their job. You and I are supposed to be the light of the world.

The third point is that we have to pray for our Church. When we pray, we are saying good things and asking God for his grace, but when we really pray we are seeking to understand what God wants for me in relationship to what I am praying for. That's why the Lord's prayer is such a great example of prayer; every petition is something God wants for the world and for his people. When we pray it, we align ourselves with God's will and that should be what we seek when we pray for the Church.

We laity are being challenged. How many young men who have considered the priesthood will choose not to become priests because of these scandals? And how will this impact on the moral authority of our bishops, who are charged with teaching not just the Church but the world? . On the parish level we are the Church, and whether Saint Mary's sinks or swims, whether our parish thrives or becomes a relic, is really up to us.

Two thousand years ago after hearing Jesus speak some scandalous words people who had been following Him turned to each other and said, “This is hard to listen to. How can we accept it?” And they went away. And Jesus asked, “Will you also go away?” And Peter spoke up for those who remained and said, as I hope you will say and I will say, “To whom can we go Lord, you have the words of eternal life.”

Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle B

John 6:51 – 58

When I was first ordained I gave a sermon in which I referred to the symbolism of the Eucharist. One of our parishioners decided that I was a heretic and wrote a letter to the bishop, who passed it on to Monsignor Devine, who shared it with me having blocked out the name of the sender. I've had others criticize my sermons since then, but that was devastating. Because I do believe that the Eucharist is the body and blood, soul and divinity of Christ, the place where Jesus is sacramentally present, present in a unique way.

But when we feed on the Eucharist, when we eat his body and drink his blood, we are participating in a symbolic act. Saint Thomas said that if a mouse ate a crumb of the Eucharist, nothing would come of it. The mouse wouldn't go to heaven or hell, wouldn't change a bit except for being a little less hungry, I suppose. And unfortunately, many of us receive the Eucharist something like that mouse. It does not change us.

Today the gospel is a continuation of what we've been hearing for the lasts few weeks. It started with the miracle of the feeding of 5000. The next week we heard Jesus say that he was the bread of life. Last week Jesus insisted that he was the living bread that came down from heaven and those who ate it would never die. Now these passages all use the Greek word for eating. But today is different; when Jesus refers to his body and blood, the word used is more like the way an animal eats. If you've ever watched a hungry dog eating a bowl of dog food, that is the kind of eating Jesus is talking about – chewing, biting, gulping down, paying no attention to table manners.. And although all this talk about eating the flesh of Jesus and drinking his blood sounds very much like Jesus is talking about the Eucharist, I think it's important to listen to exactly what Jesus is saying – because if John's gospel was the only gospel we had, we would not hear anything about the institution of the Eucharist. John is writing his gospel to a Christian community 60 or 70 years after Jesus has been crucified, buried and rose again. John knew about the Eucharist, of course. It was, and still is, the sign of being a Christian. Even the most liberal protestants practice something resembling the Eucharist, and as far as we can tell, all of the early Christians did so as well.

We Catholics believe that the bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ; the bread no longer exists as bread, the wine, no longer as wine. I don't know if John believed in transubstantiation because it was quite a while before our Church settled on this explanation of what happens during Mass; but I am sure John believed that the Eucharist became the Body and Blood of Jesus in some way. And that is why he is emphasizing Jesus' words.

The people John is addressing are probably like us. They are going forward to receive the Eucharist, But John notices that things aren't changing. They go back to their daily lives and when it's not Sunday you can't tell a Christian from a pagan; So in this discourse about the Bread of Life, John is telling his readers what all this means – he is talking about the symbolism of Holy Communion. Now don't send any nasty notes to the bishop.

John is saying that our relationship with Jesus, symbolized in the Eucharist, must be like our relationship with food and drink. If we want earthly life, we have to eat and drink, preferably every day. To eat and to drink require action. We have to use our hands and chew and swallow so that the food and drink become part of us. And Jesus is saying that if we want eternal life, our relationship with him is like that – it isn't just a matter of swallowing the host and taking a sip of the precious blood. For a Christian, as Saint Augustine pointed out, we must become what we eat and drink. We have to become Jesus, we have to “Put on” Christ as Saint Paul puts it in another way. We have to desire Jesus like a hungry dog eats a meal, wholeheartedly, with our entire beings, as though it is the most important thing in the world to become another Christ, because it is. And it is then that he will live in us, and we will share his life, which is the life which comes from the Father.

When you look at the saints, and I think we could find saints among our Protestant brothers and sisters as well as the saints of every kind who have been members of our Roman Catholic Church, what they have in common is that deep hunger for Christ, that desire to have him live through them, that need to put themselves in God's hands to do God's work, and this is what they want more than anything else. Billy Graham no less than John Paul II hungered for Christ in this way.

Do you hunger? Do I? Not as much as I would like to, I guess. After almost 76 years on earth, I am less pleased with myself now than I was when I was young. But maybe that's another way of hungering for Christ, to notice and be concerned about the gap between where you are and where you want to be.

And the Eucharist, that action of eating and drinking Christ, is indeed a wonderful gift to us, when Jesus literally becomes our food and drink. But let John the gospel writer remind us that Jesus gives us this sacrament to remind us that our goal as Christians is to become Christ, and the beginning of that process is to desire Jesus as a starving person desires food. Next week we will hear Jesus tell those who remain after hearing his shocking words, “It is the spirit that gives life, while the flesh is of no avail.” So today when you come forward to receive the body and blood of Jesus, remind yourself what it means – may Jesus be my first, my last, and everything in between. .

Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle B

John 6:24 - 35

When I read this Sunday's gospel, I was impressed by how the vast crowd that had just been fed from five loaves and two fish seem to have missed the larger lesson Jesus wanted them to learn. But even when he explains, they continue to be obtuse. They are following him expecting that they won't have to worry about food anymore; He reminds them that there are more important things than food. He tells them that they should do the works of God which he defines as believing in the one who God sent. They suggest he do a sign, and of course it is for more food; God provided manna for their ancestors, why don't you do likewise? And these are the people that just experienced exactly that. Finally Jesus refers to himself as the bread of life. I'm not sure the crowd was any wiser.

But then I thought about Holy Communion, when we receive the bread of life. We don't understand what is going on any more than these people did. Of course we can talk about transubstantiation, the Real Presence; we can have various shades of faith in the teachings of the Church regarding this sacrament. Someone did a study once which showed that even Catholics who go to Communion regularly don't always believe that this is the real body and blood of Christ. And of course most non-practicing Catholics have ceased to believe in any meaningful way, or they wouldn't have stopped coming to Mass.

When I received my first Holy Communion at the age of seven, I'm pretty sure I had no idea what I was doing. The sisters who taught us made sure we knew that this was not just bread; only the priest could touch it with his hands. After the consecration, the priest would go through the rest of the Mass including the distribution of communion with his thumbs and first fingers touching, only to be used to touch the sacred host, until his fingers had been rinsed when the vessels were being purified. For us receiving, we held our hands over our hearts and received on the tongue; and we knew there would be serious consequences if we so much as let the host touch our teeth. I knew in a vague way I was receiving Jesus, but how that could be and why it was important I did not know.

And I'll share a secret with you. I still don't. I see Christians in other denominations who believe the Eucharist is just a symbol, and they still seem to act like Christians. And there are many theories about how Jesus can become bread and wine besides the official theory of transubstantiation. And there are many theologians who have written about why Jesus chose bread and wine, when he could have picked anything else. But that's all they are, theories.

I think it's interesting that those of us who follow Jesus and consider ourselves Christians kind of pick and choose what to follow; who among us turns the other cheek? There are very few Christians, including our priests and bishops, who literally sell all they have and give to the poor and follow him. And all that stuff about how we treat the least of our brethren? I think I fail pretty much on every count. A few bucks to feed to hungry, clothe the naked. … I do visit the sick now and then. I don't think I've ever visited the imprisoned. After all, with more than a billion Christians in the world, there shouldn't be any poverty or war or hunger anymore. Those of us who claim to follow Christ usually don't do it very well, and it clearly doesn't matter wear you are in the church; bishops and archbishops and cardinals as we see in today's headlines, are not necessarily paragons of virtue.

But maybe that's the point. One thing all Christians do in some form or another is celebrate the Eucharist. They may not believe what we believe, but they did hear Jesus say, “Do this in memory of me” and so they do, sometimes daily, sometimes only four times a year. I suspect the apostles didn't understand either; bread becoming Jesus' body? Wine becoming his blood? And then eating it? What did it mean?

Those of us who are Christians should be spending our lives trying to figure out what this means for us. It means that God became human, but more. It means that we become one with each other in space and time, because there is only the one body, the one blood – but much more. It means that we want not only our souls but our bodies to be changed by this miraculous food which we symbolize by receiving it – but much more. It means that in receiving the body and blood of Christ we demonstrate that we want to be one with him – but much more. And we could keep on going, because there is no exhausting this mystery.

Maybe in the end Jesus does not want us to understand; maybe in the end he wants us to approach the sacrament as his first apostles did – wondering what it means, what it means to me, today, now.

In fact, maybe explanations stand as barriers between us and what He wants for us. He said, “This is my body … This is my blood....Do this in memory of me.” He is saying, perhaps, “Spend your lives bringing divinity into the world, making the material world sacred, uncovering the divine in every being, human and otherwise. I want all to be one, as I and my Father are one.”

Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, cycle B

John 6:1-15

If you've ever thought about why the New Testament is so important, especially the gospels, it's because reading and understanding these writings is as close as we can get to the minds of the first Christians – the people who were formed by the preaching of the apostles. When we read the acts of the apostles or the letters of Paul, the basic message keeps coming through – God sent his Son into the world to suffer, die, and rise again, and in so doing, make it possible for those who become part of his people, part of his mystical body, to be with God forever. As the people who had walked with Jesus during his ministry went around preaching this message, they threw in stories about what he had said and what he did. That's only human; we all love to learn more about people in whom we have an interest. And so a large collection of stories existed before even the first gospel was written. When the gospel writers began to set down on paper the story of Jesus, the stories, parables, and even the details would reflect the author's particular take on Jesus – his theology. And we always have to think about who they are writing for, and why. Mark is writing to Christians in Rome who are being persecuted; and his gospel reminds us that Jesus was persecuted, and nobody really understood him during his lifetime. John, writing much later, probably to Christians in Turkey who made up of Jewish exiles and pagan converts, but who are all wondering why Jesus hasn't come again, and some of whom are being tempted to go back to Judaism, wants us to see that Jesus was indeed the Son of God come to earth, the Messiah predicted by the prophets. And that is the background for this story, which is told in different ways by each Gospel writer.

Notice that it begins with Jesus taking pity on the crowd. In those days the Romans were building a great city in Northern Israel, and it takes a lot of food to feed a city. Farmers all over the land were being conscripted to produce this food, leaving very little for their families. Failure to produce meant your land was taken and given to someone else, and that's one of the reasons there is a great crowd following Jesus in the middle of the day – they have no land, they have no work, they have no food.

John has Philip and Andrew both show us readers that feeding this crowd is impossible. Philip refers to mare than half a years' wages, but also the notion that they'd have no place to buy the food if they had the money. John tells us that a little boy offered to share his lunch, a few small barley pancakes and a couple of fish. But John has already given away the plot – Jesus knew what he was going to do.

Jesus tells the crowd to make themselves comfortable. In the Greek he tells them to recline. Now this is significant because people generally reclined to eat at banquet and formal meals. The rest of the time they ate standing or sitting. John also wants us to notice the green grass. John's readers who were familiar with the scriptures would hear an echo of a familiar psalm “The Lord is my shepherd, there is nothing I shall want, he makes me lie down in green pastures ...”The Jesus does something that the host of a banquet or the father in a formal meal would do – he takes the food and blesses it. If you were at a formal banquet, the next step would be that the servants would serve the people invited to the banquet; if you were having a formal meal at home, like the sabbath meal or Passover, the serving would fall to the mother of the household. John surprises us, thought by telling us that Jesus handed out the food. In the other three gospels, Jesus gives the food to the disciples to distribute. John wants us to notice that Jesus takes the role of the host as well as the role of the servants.

So in this story which we've heard so often, John reminds us that Jesus is the good shepherd. The prophets predicted that there would be a banquet at the coming of the Messiah. Isaish says “And you who have no money come, buy and eat Come, buy wine and milk Without money and without cost.” John shows us that Jesus is the Messiah, who would call his people to be fed, and would be the servant who feeds them as well. And finally, there is the boy who brings the bread and fish. When Matthew, Mark, and Luke tell the story there is no boy. I think John wants to remind us that Jesus will see to it that whatever we do for him, no matter how small, He will use it to build up his kingdom, he will multiply our gift beyond measure.

John's audience, the exiles along the Turkish coast, the ones who were beginning to wonder when the Lord would return, the ones who were finding the new life of being a Christian difficult and perhaps longing a little bit for the old life – John is reminding them that the prophecies have been fulfilled, that Jesus is the promised one, the shepherd, the Messiah, the Lord of the banquet, to servant, and last but not least, the God for whom there is no such thing as scarcity, the God who promises to multiply our gifts beyond measure.

And we should be reminded as well.