Homily for the 20th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B ? CACINA

Homily for the 20th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B

Today we are in nearing the end of four weeks of reflections on the Eucharist, the Body and Blood of Christ. The Gospels the last two weeks, this week and next are all a continuation of John?s chapter on the meaning of the Eucharist. We even sing the same psalm for three weeks running.? ?Taste and see that the Lord is good? This is very unusual in terms of Church liturgy and doesn?t happen very often ? usually the themes change every week.? To devote four weeks to the Eucharist indeed stresses the importance that it must be in our lives.

The first reading begins with a reading from the Book of Proverbs and is a description of Wisdom. What do we think of when we hear the word Wisdom.? For some cultures ?wisdom comes with age?, and it is a reverence of those people who have been around long enough to learn a few things.? For some it is a collection of thoughts like Poor Richard?s Almanac might have. As usual, though, the Bible?s concept of Wisdom is different an even somewhat shocking.? First of all Wisdom is depicted as a woman, a woman who gets all ?dolled up?, prepares a sumptuous meal, and then goes out into the streets to issue an invitation. If she did that today, we might get other ideas about this woman. So what is this reading all about?

First of all we must know that God is Wisdom, and that God is portrayed feminine ? more common in the Bible than you might think. And the reading suggests that God is reaching out to the simple, the fools, who lack understanding.? She invites the immature, the foolish, which many of us are at times, to eat her food and drink her wine in order to come to an understanding of life.? Jesus, too, is going to offer us this same wisdom in our our Gospel reading.

In Ephesians, St. Paul or the writer of this letter also offers advice to the foolish and ignorant ? asking? them to be wise by trying to understand what God wants. And we already know that God?s wisdom is different than earthly wisdom.? Paul asks his people not to get drunk on wine, but to get drunk on the Holy Spirit through prayer and music. Why music?? Have you ever experienced a song that you just can?t get out of your head? That is the kind of music he is referring to. We want the Spirit in our heads all the time just as a song that stays with us, even when we don?t want it there. It is through this that we can always be thankful for what God has done for us and the wisdom he gives us.

Then for the third week in a row we are asked to think about Jesus as the living bread that came down from heaven.? In the Gospel of St. John which I told you last week was very different from the other three Gospels because it was written later, and a theology of Jesus had had time to develop more fully, we can see the constant stress on Jesus as the one who came down from heaven. In the very first chapter we hear that the Word became flesh.? The Incarnation of Jesus that we profess in our Creed each week is very simply that God became one of us. What follows throughout the Gospel of John is a theological presentation of Jesus as this God-man, and an attempt to make sense out of it, an attempt to see the Wisdom in it. For what could seem more foolish than Jesus? statement: Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you shall not have life within you?? Certainly anyone in their right mind would find these words ridiculous and foolish, as did his Jewish audience. Because of these statements, it was rumored for years that Christians were a bunch of cannibals! Where is the Wisdom in all of this?

The reading from Wisdom said: Come, eat of my food, and drink of the wine I have mixed! Forsake foolishness that you may live.? In other words, we must stop thinking that our lives make sense only of we have filled it with piles of stuff and forget the one thing that we need most ? closeness to God. This closeness comes from closeness to God himself and closeness to God through others.? This is the true Wisdom.

And Christ gives us the ultimate food and drink in order that we can be close to our God ? so close that he is within us. If we have really loved someone, we know that one of the qualities that love comes with is that we want to be with that person all the time. This is the closeness we are talking about and the closeness that Jesus is talking about: ?Whoever eats my flesh remains in me and I in him.? But there is something more about this closeness ? we don?t just get close to God when we take the Eucharist but we get close to each other, too. Because God comes into all of us, we are all united by that fact and we can truly say that we are one body.

The words that we have been hearing from Jesus about his body and blood come from a section of John?s Gospel, not at the last Supper, when you might think he would have said these things, but an earlier section where Jesus is teaching his followers. As we read them today we cannot help but pick up on the Eucharistic foreshadowing here. The question we might ask is that how could Jesus have spoken these words in the middle of his Ministry and expected them to be understood. Yet, everyone who reads John?s Gospel knows that there are 5 chapters devoted to the Last Supper without a mention of the institution of the eucharist. So Jesus probably did not say these words at that particular time, but John uses this time to develop the Eucharistic concept.

The listeners of Jesus ask: How can this man give us his flesh to eat? It is a question that could be asked today. And it was certainly still being asked when John was writing, 60 years after Christ?s death. The drinking of blood was forbidden to Jews, yet ?eating the flesh of Jesus? and ?drinking? his blood became a common way of describing the way we partake of the Eucharist. Scholars believe that the language developed as a way to show the intimacy, the close relationship, the closeness of Jesus to those who choose to believe in him. So again, the Eucharist is all about closeness, our being close to our God, and our being close to each other.? It is the food and drink that sustains us and brings us life. And not just life till we die, but life beyond this life. John sees the Eucharist not so much as a memorial of Christ?s death nor a continuation of the last supper, but as an extension of Jesus? incarnation ? God becoming man, God becoming close to us and then continuing to be close to us by this food and drink.

Let us this week meditate on the Wisdom of God and his ability to make him or herself part of our lives through his closeness to us ? and how much closer can we be than partaking of our God and being the vessel for him.

And this is the Good News I bring you today.

Fr. Ron Stephens, St. Andrew?s Parish, Warrenton VA

Source: http://cacina.wordpress.com/2012/08/12/homily-for-the-20th-sunday-of-ordinary-time-year-b/

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