2015/08/09 — 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time

This Sunday we continue to unfold the Bread of Life Discourse and consider what it means for us to live as members of God's chosen people, God's holy people.


The first reading — 1 Kings 19:4-8 — presents an incident with Elijah. The background is that King Ahab of Israel had married a pagan princess, Jezebel, and had turned to worshipping her gods. Elijah had defeated and killed the prophets of Baal in a public contest. (1 Kings 18:1-40) Jezebel was enraged and threatened to have Elijah killed. So Elijah fled for his life.

Elijah, in effect, attempts to resign from his vocation as prophet, but God refuses the resignation. Instead he miraculously provides food which enables Elijah to reach Mount Horeb (another name for Mount Sinai), where he would have a vision of God, as Moses had. This transformed his flight into a pilgrimage. There are other resonances with the story of the Israelites in the desert. There is the miraculous food, the manna provided to the Israelites. Elijah's 40 day walk to Horeb recalls the Israelites' 40 years in the desert and Moses' 40 days on Mount Horeb receiving the law. (Exodus 24:18 - 34:28 It also parallels Jesus' 40 days in the wilderness prior to the beginning of his public ministry.


The responsorial psalm — Ps 34:29 — invites us to "taste" the goodness of the Lord, who sends his angel and protects us as he protected and fed Elijah.


Today's gospel — John 6:41-51 — flows from last Sunday's, in which Jesus promises the people the true bread from heaven; but it takes it one step further. Jesus now identifies himself with the bread from heaven — more specifically, his flesh is the bread from heaven, and he will give it for the life of the world.

Jesus fulfills the prophecy (Isaiah 54:13, cf. Jeremiah 31:34) that the people will be taught by God: he is, in fact, God teaching them. The faith which is necessary to receive the eternal life conferred by the bread from heaven is itself a gift from the Father — one he will give to all who will accept it, since he wants all to be saved. All who have that faith, which is adherence to Jesus, already have eternal life.


In the second reading — Ephesians 4:30 - 5:2 — Paul spells out an aspect of the meaning of our having been brought into God's people. We have received the Holy Spirit, who now dwells in us. He is grieved by unloving attitudes, words, and deeds. (Note that here Paul does not speak of sins of sex and violence, which he writes against elsewhere. here is more to Christian life than avoiding those sins.) Kindness, compassion, and forgiveness make us imitators of the self-giving Christ. Our goodness rests, most fundamentally on our being children of God, rather on simply following some system of ethics. Bt if we are God's children, we live as such. So we do need to have our consciences formed according to the truth that sets us free.


St. Bernard says, "I love because I love, I love in order to love;" and St. Augustine teaches that receiving the Body of Christ — the bread from heaven which gives life to the world — makes us the Body of Christ. This is what we do every Sunday at Mass.

Last week I suggested the hymn "Bread of Heaven" as a meditation on the gospel and first reading. This week, the hymn "Panis Angelicus (Bread of Angels)," with a text by St. Thomas Aquinas, can serve. Here's a video with Luciano Pavarotti. The opening words are taken from last Sunday's psalm, whichsays, "Man ate the bread of angels," and the first two lines paraphrase the line. The word "figures" sees the manna, which the psalm refers to as a "type," a prefiguring, of the sacrament of the Lord's Body and Blood, which Jesus calls the true bread from heaven. The stanza ends in an expression of awe at this sacrament.