Homily - 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time B - Bishop McKeown

Sunday, 28 July 2024

These five Sunday passages from St John are packed with invitations to think very deeply about the mystery of the word made flesh. St John's Gospel was written some decades after the death of Jesus and is the result of a lot on meditation both on who Jesus is and on how the early church celebrated the mystery of Christ among us, our hope of glory. What do we learn on this first of five Sunday where the Bread of Life imagery is at the centre?

Firstly, this is the only miracle story that St John shares with the other three Gospels. But a careful reading shows that the story is full of hints and connections, born of years of meditation on the meaning of who Jesus is and how he remains with us. This 6^th chapter begins with a reference to it being near the time of the Passover – using almost exactly the same phrase with which John introduces the celebration of the last Supper in Chapter 13. Furthermore, this is an event where the people misunderstand him and want to make him king – and finishes with many of his followers walking away. The crucified Jesus always asks us to go beyond our comfort zone. The call to follow Jesus is always an invitation - and some will choose to walk away because they want a Jesus who does not challenge them or ask too much from them. This miracle is intimately linked to the Old Testament imagery of manna in the desert during the Exodus journey out of Egypt and the heavenly banquet that will accompany the coming of the Saviour. But it is also linked to the Cross and the Lamb of God sacrificed to take away the sins of the world. This passage was written down after decades of prayer and meditation. It needs to be meditated upon and not merely read.

Secondly, the story shows Jesus in a world of enormous need – but a world where we all have a great deal to give. Last week we heard of Jesus seeing the crowds as harassed and dejected, like sheep without as shepherd. He asks us to see the enormous hungers of our world and to view people, not with an eye that looks down upon and condemns but with a heart that has endless compassion. For example, we heard during the week about the need for more prison places in Northern Ireland, because the total number of people imprisoned has reached 1,900. When I looked up how many people we had in prison 30 years ago when the Troubles were still going on, the figure I got was less that 350. Having stopped civil conflict, we now have more than five times as many people in prison and over 600 of them in our prisons for violent assault – and this is supposed to be a time of peace. Add to that the numbers trapped in addiction and mental illness. But civic leadership seems to be stuck on how we pay for managing the growing problems rather than asking what we are doing wrong that is feeding the problem. We need to nourish people with vision and hope, rather than merely providing more prison cells and hospital beds. Jesus asks his followers to see the deep hungers of our time. We can feel tempted to react like Philip or Andrew in the Gospel passage and shrug our shoulders helplessly, aware that we apparently have few resources to deal with an enormous problem. But Jesus invites the apostles to do something with what little we have and to leave the rest to God. As with the whole of the life of the Word made flesh, Jesus begins with the concrete problems of little people. Our spiritual life is about ministering like a field hospital, not about a spiritualised escape from human pain and hunger. Jesus wants to feed the hungry and the lonely – not just the pure and the perfect.

Thirdly, the words used in this story link us closely to the mystery of what Jesus does at the Last Supper. St John tells us that Jesus took the loaves, gave thanks and gave it out for the disciples to distribute to the crowd of thousands. The early church does not want us to spend time wondering about how this all happened. The miracle always point beyond themselves as a sign of who Jesus is and how he sees his mission. Very early on, the Christians knew that their life was centred on the teaching of the apostles, the community, the prayers - and the breaking of bread (Acts 2:42). As St Paul suggests, the bread broken for us is the source of our unity and of the peace that binds us together. It is easy to see Sunday Mass as an unnecessary burden, an event to be viewed on webcam or visited occasionally when it fits in with the rest of our priorities. But right from the beginning of the church, believers were aware that they had to place central importance on coming together as the Body of Christ to celebrate the breaking of bread together and be nourished by the Bread of Life. In a lonely world, where individualism is prioritised, Jesus calls us to build committed outward-looking communities who will model both the importance of human relationships and the possibility of tackling the broken nature of much of our society. Our Sunday Eucharist is always a call to go out, never a safe refuge where we can escape from the messiness of life. The Cross would never allow us to do that.

Over the next four weeks, we will see Jesus as he takes the crowd from being fed with bread to being asked to eat his flesh and drink his blood. Many will walk away, but he is asking us all to trust him in his message and his life-style. He asks us to love him and to be in relationship with him, not merely to accept those parts of his teaching that we like and to drop the parts that our society feels uncomfortable with. The early parts of the Gospel were comparatively easy to accept. Now he wants us to enter into the mystery of God through Jesus, the Bread of Life.

Are we ready to accept what he is teaching, even when it makes us feel uncomfortable?

+ Donal