Live Life beyond life. Give Love beyond love.
by Fr. David M. Knight
August 4, 2024
Eighteenth Sunday of the Year
Lectionary 113
Ex 16:2-4, 12-15/Eph 4:17, 20-24/Jn 6:24-35
Inventory
What we are asking for in the Our Father is Jesus, the “Bread” and joy of the heavenly banquet. This is the Bread we receive in Eucharist, where it can be literally our “daily bread.” Is this what you consciously ask for?
Input
The Entrance Antiphon asks, “Lord do not be long in coming!” He is the one who “helps us” and “sets us free.” But not “from afar,” just by beaming down graces from heaven! He “comes to our assistance.” Jesus is God made flesh on earth for us. What “helps us” and “sets us free” is his flesh, his body offered on the cross, given to us in Eucharist, ministering to us in his living body on earth, the Church. The Responsorial says, “The Lord gave them bread from heaven.” We ask for it now.
In the Prayer Over the Gifts, we ask God to “make holy” the bread and wine that we place on the altar, as symbols of ourselves, to be transformed into the body and blood of Christ. Through this gesture, we also ask that “our spiritual sacrifice” will “make us an everlasting gift to you” and to all people on earth. As Christ’s body, we are offered in ministry, “sacrificed” to giving life to others through ministry wherever our live bodies are; through “our flesh, offered for the life of the world.”
In the Opening Prayer(s) we focus on God as the “origin” of life as a gift and ask him to “guide” us through life as a journey. It is only by putting on the “new self” born of grace and growing to the perfection of love that we can have that “life to the full” Jesus came to give: “Only your love makes us whole.”
Guidance does us no good if we don’t have the strength to follow it. The Prayer After Communion tells us God gives us “the strength of new life” by “the gift of Eucharist.” Gifts “without measure” flow from God’s goodness, but the Eucharist is a foretaste of the fullness of the gift we will share in heaven. As a preview of the “wedding banquet of the Lamb” it “prepares us for eternal redemption.”
Our heart’s desire
Exodus 16:2-15 shows God is able to satisfy our physical hunger: “You shall have bread to your heart’s content.”
But there is also a call to faith here. When the people saw the manna they “said to one another, ‘What is that?’ not knowing what it was.” And Moses answered, “That is the bread the Lord gives you to eat.” It is one thing to believe God can give us what we desire. It is another to believe that what God gives us is what we really desire, whether we are aware of it or not.
For example, living by God’s law is what we really desire, because this is the way to live according to the “manufacturer’s instructions.” It is the way to get the most out of life, to use most beneficially the nature God gave us. But sometimes we don’t see this. That is why God calls us to commit ourselves to him in faith, trusting that his way is the true way to the fullness of life and happiness, here and hereafter.
There are times when we feel that living by God’s law is restrictive; that it keeps us from enjoying life to the full. Sometimes we look back to the gratifications we found in sin—to the “fleshpots of Egypt”—and complain that God has “brought us out into the wilderness” to starve us to death. But if we have faith to follow him we find that he does, in fact, give us “bread to our heart’s content.” Then we will “tell the glorious deeds of the Lord, that the next generation might know them, so that they should set their hope in God, and keep his commandments” (Responsorial Psalm). This is a key element of ministry: to recognize and reveal how beneficial it is, even in terms of enjoying life on earth, to live by God’s law. The “fruit of the Spirit” is love, joy and peace. If these are not visible in our lives we can hardly minister to others in the name of Jesus. They will never believe that “The Lord gave us bread from heaven.”
Greater than our hearts
But Jesus goes beyond this. He came that we might “have life and have it to the full,” which for Jesus goes far beyond human fulfillment. In John 6:24-35 he teaches us, “Do not work for food that cannot last, but for food that endures to eternal life.” This, he says, is “the kind of food the Son of Man is offering you.”
Do we really “work” for this? Or do we just try to live good, reasonable lives, keeping God’s laws as commanded, and expect “life to the full” to just happen?
On the one hand, grace is a free gift. We can’t “earn” it by our own efforts or even directly increase it by anything we do. Divine life can’t be the effect of a human cause. On the other hand, Jesus says to “work” for it. And Paul even urges us, “Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.”
When people asked Jesus, “What must we do to do the works God wants?” he answered, “Believe in the one he has sent.” Our first “work” is to believe.
Some Christians think we are saved just by believing in Jesus; by “faith without works,” regardless of how we live. Fundamentalists sometimes accuse Catholics of believing we must “earn” heaven by good deeds. The truth is that “faith” is not just a one-time act, whole and entire in itself, without degrees or development. Just as “grace” is sharing in God’s own divine life, so the act of grace we call “faith” is a sharing in God’s own act of knowing. And we can share more or less in both. The more surrendered we are to living by God’s life, being guided by God’s light, being moved by God’s love, the more “full of grace” we are, and the more we “grow” in faith and love. To grow in grace is to grow in union of mind and will and action with God. To do this we have to:
study his words: his words of creation embodied in nature; words of revelation written in Scripture, words of ongoing inspiration spoken by his Spirit;
surrender to his Spirit enlightening, guiding, moving and strengthening us from within;
give human expression to the divine life within us by embodying our faith, hope and love in actions.
In short, we grow in grace by letting grace (God within us) express itself in and through our human actions. To do this is to do “the work of God.”
The “sign” that encourages us to do this is Eucharist. Jesus gives us his own body – the ‘bread of life” – to nourish our divine life as food nourishes the body. He comes visibly to dwell in us and satisfy all the desire of our being, a desire for more than we can “ask or imagine,” desire for life and joy beyond what is humanly perfect. This adds a transcendent level to “The Lord gave them bread from heaven".
Ultimately, Christian ministry is to bring people to Eucharist: to union with Jesus that makes us one with him in thought, desire and action.
Put on the new self
Ephesians 4:17-24 gives us the goal of Christianity: to “put on the new self that has been created in God’s way, in the goodness and holiness of truth.” The way is Jesus. The truth is Jesus. In him alone is true goodness. He alone is “the holy one.” He alone is the Way, the Truth and the Life. We all must say:
It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me…. I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me.
To “believe in the one God has sent” our mind must be renewed by a “spiritual revolution.” This is faith. This is what is required to “put on the new self.” To bring people to this, to the “goodness and holiness of the truth,” is the focus and goal of Christian ministry:
I pray that you may have the power to comprehend, with all the saints, what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge, so that you may be filled with all the fullness of God.
Insight
Has this Mass converted me to a different understanding of God? Do I see him as fulfilling all my desires? What choices of mine express this conversion?
Initiative:
Be a priest. Give God to others as a gift.
Reflections brought to you by the Immersed in Christ Ministry
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