Year B / Ordinary Time /
Week 20 / Sunday
Readings: Proverbs 9.1-6 /
Psalm 33.2-3, 20-11, 12-13, 14-15 (R/v 9a) / Ephesians 5.15-20 / John 6.51-58
Dear sisters and brothers, have you ever considered the
difference we experience when we clench our fists and we open our palms? The difference
matters: a lot.
Let me begin this week's homily with this story.
Once there was a farmer called Dmitri. He owned the best
olive farm in all of Cyprus. It had the richest soil and produced the juiciest olives.
He himself planted the seeds, watered and tendered their growth and when the olives were ripe, he harvested them with his sons. He treasured the rich,
fertile soil of his olive farm. When he died, his family buried him with this
soil in his clenched, closed fists.
St Peter welcomed Dimitri to heaven. Dimitri eagerly wanted to enter with the soil from
his farm. St Peter said he could enter if he let go of his soil. Dimitri clenched
his fists tighter, “No. I must carry my soil into heaven.” Day after day, Dimitri came with his clenched, closed hands filled with the soil. Day after
day, St Peter turned him away. Then, one day, Dimitri came and said, “I am tired”.
Then, he opened his palms, and the soil poured out, falling onto the ground at heaven’s
gate. Seeing this, St Peter opened the gate. And lo
and behold, Dimitri saw what God had wanted to offer him when he opened his palms to enter heaven -- his farm again, and now larger, lusher and much more luxuriant. “Welcome,
home,” St Peter said as he ushered Dimitri into heaven.
The difference between clenched fists that speak of
Dimitri’s foolishness to have his own way and his opened palms that express a
discerning wisdom to receive all that is good is the message of this story. I’d like to suggest that our readings today offer this same message for our Christian life.
Our first reading is about Wisdom. She is personified
as a woman who has prepared a rich banquet of food and wine for many. She calls
all to this feast, hoping that those who are foolish, because they want to continue living
in their own, set ways, will have a change of heart and step away from them. Then, they will come to eat and drink of Wisdom’s goodness and live.
Who will come to Wisdom? Yes, those who listen, discern
the good she offers and humble themselves.
They will come with opened palms to receive. Who will not come? Those who
hold onto their folly, their foolish ways. They choose to continue living with clenched fists.
Christians must have wisdom to discern their lives and to reject their
foolish ways. St Paul teaches this in the second reading. They are to be very
careful about the sort of lives they lead in the world where evil is real. They
should not live foolish, senseless, and debauched lives. They should live in Jesus’
Spirit, follow God’s will and always be grateful for God’s goodness in Jesus’
name. Here is Paul exhorting them to live wisely in God’s
ways. Those who insist on living their own lives in their ways have clenched
fists. The wiser open their palms to receive God’s life and live in God’s ways.
Closed fists and opened palms, and the choice we must
make between them, matters. It must matter to you and me as Christians because
of what God wishes to offer. Not a what but really who God wishes us
to be with.
And this is Jesus – “the living
bread come down from heaven”. God’s living bread for our nourishment and salvation,
and for the life of the world. This is how Jesus offers himself to the Jews, to
us and to the world. The Jews fear that his invitation to eat his flesh and
drink his blood is an invitation to cannibalism. There are many non-Christians today who share this view
about Jesus in communion.
Jesus is not asking all to eat his flesh and drink his
blood literally. Rather, by eating and drinking he is asking the Jews then and us
today to appropriate and assimilate into our very being all that he teaches,
his vision, his values, his understanding of the meaning and purpose of
life. Jesus wants us to imbibe all that he is to God and
neighbour: to live fully by loving God faithfully and loving neighbour
selflessly. This is how we will have real life.
What Jesus really invites us to do is to lose
ourselves in him alone and completely. To lose ourselves in that radical action
of living in him as he lives in us that we hear in today’s gospel. Some translations articulate "living in" as “remaining in”. To remain in is to abide in another, to be
one with another, with no other purpose then to become like the other.
This how the mystery of God works in and
through the Eucharist. Our offering of simple bread and ordinary wine are given
a new and awesomely profound meaning: they become the very person of Jesus. When we eat this bread and drink this wine,
we are invited to live, abide and deepen our relationship with Jesus by
becoming more and more like him.
In Eucharist, we meet God in this mysterious
and dramatic way of God giving himself to us through Jesus, with Jesus and in
Jesus. In return, we try through our communion
with Jesus to shape our lives, as best as we can, into a loving gift for
God.
Today, Jesus invites us to choose him. It is
a challenging, even dangerous invitation: to choose Jesus is to give God
permission to transfigure us to become what we receive – the Body of
Christ.
Will you and I accept his invitation and open ourselves to God, or will
we hold on to the folly of our sinfulness, the foolishness of insisting that my way
is better than God’s way?
I believe we know our answer. We express it
so publicly by coming to communion. We say it with faith when we open our hands to receive Jesus in the consecrated host. “The Body of Christ”. “Amen”, we respond with hope in our
redemption as Jesus is placed in our opened palms. For a brief moment, we hold
God in our human hands, scarred by sin but always imprinted with God’s love,
filled with God’s life. We then consume Jesus with trust that we will
indeed become what we receive — the Body of Christ.
Isn’t this what we truly desire in communion
and in prayer, in life and at death? To share in God’s life, not just daily and
but eternally? In
the fragility of the bread and wine is strong food and joyful drink. These are
the fruit of God's creation and the work of human hands for us. Together, they
are the gift of God who has become one of us.
It
is however the gift of love because of sacrifice.
We know the quality of such a gift in
our lives and that of others because we too have sacrificed ourselves for others. Sacrificed in those human acts of crying for another's woes or laughing for another's joy, or
holding a hand in sympathy or just listening when there were no answers.
For
Pope Benedict, “we have to rediscover God, not just any God, but the God that
has a human face, because when we see Jesus Christ we see God”.* This is the
beauty of the Eucharist we desire: for it is truly Jesus, and in him we know God
is close to us and all creation.
Clenched
fist or opened palms. This is the demanding
challenge before us today. It is however the more tender and merciful
invitation Jesus is making for us to have life to the full. When we say “yes” to
this, we will surely taste and see the goodness of the Lord (Psalm 33.9a).
Let
us pray for the wisdom to do what is true, what is good and what is beautiful
for God, for ourselves and for others – that we want to come to Jesus and open our
palms to receive him through whom God only wants to “bestow on the world all
that is good” (Eucharistic Prayer III).
Preached
at Church of the Transfiguration
photo:
www.patheos.com
No comments:
Post a Comment