Twentieth Sunday of the Year
‘God is like … mama, who doesn’t think supper is over until the last child is seated and fed’.
Your God is too small.. and so is our notion of what God expects…. What is God thinking about in these times of war, when the gap between the haves and the have-nots is widening and our rulers have abandoned the ideals of equality and justice? In such times God’s heart aches and it is a sin to be silent.’
Janes A Forbes Jr, Whose Gospel?
Last week we commemorated the Feast of the Transfiguration. At the Transfiguration on the mountain a veil was lifted to offer us a deeper glimpse of who we are and how things really are. Again, we are presented with Jesus as the living bread that came down from heaven. Four times Jesus repeats the necessity of eating his flesh and drinking his blood. It is difficult to understand what is being meant if we exclude themes of mutual abiding, unity and communion. It seems to me that God in Jesus is constantly coming out to us in every new ways in and through the ordinary. John O’Donohue (in The Inner History of a Day, Bless the Space Between Us) speaks of the eucharist of the ordinary in:
We seldom notice how each day is a holy place
Where the eucharist of the ordinary happens,
Transforming our fragments
Into and eternal continue that keeps us.
If God is coming out to us each day, then all life is sacrament, a holy space, not doctrine or philosophy but a person who is able to nourish us so that we might nourish others. The wisdom of Jesus is not an esoteric religious message but having a strong social meaning to heal and transform our world. That includes a focus on establishing justice on Earth and making our present world a safe, compassionate, just home for all. It is hard to imagine a Jewish Jesus talking about ‘eating flesh and drinking blood.’ This version of the Jesus story comes late after the other gospels were composed which only refer to bread and wine which are not in John even the last supper. Most progressive Christian scholars say the opening passage belongs to the Johannine community that emerged around this gospel and was not of the Jewish Jesus.
The word ‘wisdom’ calls us to live wisely in contrast to conventional wisdom. In the Bible’s upside-down world, ‘foolishness’ is seen as wisdom where the God who comes endures hatred and rejection; who prefers to be with the weak and unjustly treated; who serves and protects and does not need to be defended. We see that ‘wisdom’ is very much about action and has subversive potential.
In Proverbs, Wisdom is depicted as a woman who reaches out to those considered fools, the senseless and the immature, i.e., people of no account. She is occupied and preoccupied with hosting a feast to build a community, a new people – a new ecology, an ecology of God. As a metaphor for the banquet of life, this feast relates to walking with new and different eyes that include. This ‘wisdom’ can be in short supply when we choose expediency and self-interest over the common good. Corporations measure leaders where profits serve shareholders rather than social responsibility. Religious communities and churches are exempt when they hold on to self-serving beliefs and practices rather than embrace what serves people and the planet.
The wisdom presented in the scriptures shows how God works. God has so often tried to reach out to us in many ways that did not do the trick. Liberation from Egypt did not work. Nor did offering the people the Promised Land. Giving them a king when they wanted one did not work. Then, God comes as one of the ‘least of these’ who are at the bottom in the contemporary pyramids of power. Hardly conventional wisdom! By starting from below, Jesus says things that go against conventional wisdom such as love your enemies, pray for your persecutors, the first shall be last are signs of the nearness of God’s reign. It is hardly conventional wisdom to desire to create a new humanity, a community of equals based on love, rather than on power, privilege, and coercion. It is hardly conventional wisdom to promote nonviolence over revenge. It is hardly conventional wisdom to go slowly rather than quickly. The Gospels reveal how Jesus walked everywhere. When one walks one can also talk, one can stop and have time for others, share food, interact, and touch people. This is how God works through Jesus that enables a particular sensitivity for suffering. It is a way of understanding and looking with open eyes; it is about having a capacity to make visible what is invisible; of paying attention to inconvenient suffering, of taking responsibility for what is broken in our world whether it is directly people or the environment. Pope Francis speaks to this:
‘Only a gaze transformed by charity can enable the dignity of others to be recognized and, as a consequence, the poor to be acknowledged and valued in their dignity, respected in their identity and culture, and thus truly integrated into society. That gaze is at the heart of the authentic spirit of politics. It sees paths open up that are different from those of a soulless pragmatism. It makes us realize that “the scandal of poverty cannot be addressed by promoting strategies of containment that only tranquilize the poor and render them tame and inoffensive’ (Fratelli Tutti, #187)
Without softening his message and teaching Jesus tells in different ways who he is for us, the source of life for us, and what makes life for all. He is the bread of life, and we the bread of life for one another. Saying, ‘This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world’, Jesus identifies with the lowly, the destitute, forgotten and abused. It is an invitation to communion. It also involves questioning authorities and powers that perpetuate injustices and social ills calls us to a journey that liberates and empowers. With him amongst us, we fulfil our calling by loving, forgiving, community building, peacemaking, receiving children and giving priority to all who are vulnerable by being nonviolent, being ready to enter into conversation that embraces our common humanity and open and respectful of all life. John is pointing to a God who overcomes evil and barriers through persistent persuasion.
Abiding with Jesus enables us to attain that wisdom or ‘mysticism’ that is less about knowledge but a knowing that comes from seeing more. Indeed a ‘mysticism with open eyes’ [after Johann Baptist Metz] with a deep sensitivity to suffering, and not the mysticism of closed eyes that shields, hides and covers up human reality and the dignity of our sisters and brothers. Sharing in Jesus’ flesh and blood, begins a process of revitalising our imaginations where we may realise and see deeply the interconnectedness of all creation brought to birth by a loving Creator. There no ‘them-and-us’ thing between ourselves and God. We are shaken from our indifference, apathy, neutrality and struggle oppose all forms of oppression and whatever dehumanises. It opens us to the brokenness within creation, to the foolishness of war, the disregard for the earth, the starving baby, the homeless refugee, the remote people in the Pacific whose island nations are threatened by climate change. We are one. This act of solidarity has major implications for the way we view one another. In the incarnation, God does not become one with people from the developed world, or with Christians, or with men, or with straight people or any exclusive group. God becomes one with flesh and blood - with all humanity. We breach the solidarity Jesus established by becoming flesh and blood when anyone is treated as ‘other’….and our celebration ‘of the Eucharist is incomplete everywhere’ (Fr Pedro Arrupe sj). Last week we commemorated the 79th anniversary Hiroshima and Nagasaki and reflecting on this Sr. Joan Chittister will not permit a mysticism of closed eyes in our church or world:
“War is a depredation of the human spirit that is sold as the loftiest of livelihoods. To hide the rape and pillage, the degradation and disaster, the training of human beings to become animals in ways we would allow no animals to be, we have concocted a language of mystification.
“We refer to casualties now in terms of ‘collateral damage,’ the number of millions of civilians we are prepared to lose in nuclear war and still call ourselves winners. We call the deadliest weapons in the history of humankind, the most benign of names: Little Boy, Bambi, Peacemakers. The nuclear submarine used to launch Cruise missiles that can target and destroy 250 first-class cities at one time, for instance, we name ‘Corpus Christi,’ Body of Christ, a blasphemy used to describe the weapon that will break the Body of Christ beyond repair.
“We take smooth-faced young men out of their mother’s kitchens to teach them how to march blindly into death, how to destroy what they do not know, how to hate what they have not seen. We make victims of the victors themselves. We call the psychological maiming, the physical squandering, the spiritual distortion of the nation’s most vulnerable defenders ‘defense.’ We turn their parents and sweethearts and children into the aged, the widowed, and the orphaned before their time. ‘We make a wasteland and call it peace,’ the Roman poet Seneca wrote with miserable insight.”
As the body of Christ breaks, may we allow God to break through our blurry eyes, open our hearts and minds. In caring for the vulnerable and the oppressed, we are called to bandage wounds with concrete acts of love; but we must also look for and address the root causes that create the conditions for exclusion, for poverty, for hunger, for any lack of respect shown to the dignity and life of every human being.
Promoting justice is a requirement of our Eucharistic identity. Pope Francis writes: ‘We cannot be indifferent to suffering; we cannot allow anyone to go through life as an outcast. Instead, we should feel indignant, challenged to emerge from our comfortable isolation and to be changed by our contact with human suffering. That is the meaning of dignity (Fratelli Tutti, #68). May we celebrate the gifts of life and community by working to promote policies that ensure all people have access to abundant life and courageously committing to the wisdom of justice, peace, compassion, sustainability, and sharing over the long haul.
Gracious Wisdom,
you have set your table and called us to your banquet.
You allure us with your invitation.
Teach us to recognize and love all your ways, both familiar and subversive,
and place your unending melody in our hearts.
Amen.