Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B 2024

Title

Enlightenment and Feeding

Outline

God continually offers us enlightenment and a banquet

Has it ever frustrated you to observe someone engaging in self-defeating behavior? I can think of many people, but lets take a couple related to me who are intelligent, healthy, and now edging into middle-age. They live for pleasure, therefore before marrying they agreed to no children, he works highly paid contract work, but at the end of a contract they take months to tour the world or ski for a some months or otherwise enjoy life. And this despite at least her having grown up in a conservative Protestant family who were very active in their church (and still are). That is short sighted. It has no future. They are very caring people and are kind to their parents, but this masks that although they are highly intelligent they live in ignorance. But this foolishness is not from God, it is despite God’s spreading a banquet of his wisdom and love before them. That is the concern of Proverbs.

Jesus makes this personal

He makes it clear that he is himself the banquet. “I am the living bread that came down from heaven.” It is not just wisdom serving a banquet, but wisdom incarnate making himself the banquet.

He also makes it clear that it is not just enlightenment but life itself that we get from eating his flesh and drinking his blood. We do indeed continue to have dying bodies, but we are the dying living and the life within us will spread to our bodies in the resurrection, transforming them so they are no longer dying.

That is why Jesus talks about raising us up on the last day. That happens because he is in us, we remain in him and he in us and he is life itself, indeed being itself, as is the Father who is one with him.

Now his Jewish followers will have problems with this, for they are still thinking of the bread they ate across the lake and the manna that took their ancestors through the wilderness. But that, while good for a while, eventually ends up in death, for it merely staves off death. But this foolishness of the world can only be cured by commitment to or trust in Jesus, as we will see next week.

And Paul tells us that this is how we go on in real life

Life in Jesus is not just a one time experience, as many of our Protestant friends think, but a way of life, a wise way of life. That means that we “try to understand what is the will of the Lord.” And to do that we need to continually sit at the table of Lord. We do not get drunk with wine, but with the Spirit, yielding our control to higher wisdom. That is why I pray for the Isaiah ch 11 gifts of the Spirit daily. Or another way to put it would be as in the Anima Christi, “blood of Christ inebriate me.” They world looks at us and hears our songs and thinks we are drunk, even crazy, but in fact we are filled with the Spirit and it is life coursing in us that they see. We walk or bike down the road and the Psalms rise up within us, for we see God’s handiwork, his balance, his wisdom all around us. We look up and see Jupiter with Uranus just above it and realize that the heavens declare the glory of God and that there is a ruler of the universe, although his name is Jesus not Jupiter. Thus we can give thanks always and for everything in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ to God the Father.” We do this just as St Maximilian Kolbe did, thanking God for small goods he found in Auschwitz which enabled him to pray for others.

So, Sisters, let us be content to be foolish in the eyes of the world because we do focus on feeding at their banquets, for we know that they only move us along towards death. We realize that we sit at the banquet of wisdom, and more than that, we feed on wisdom himself and it is in doing that and committing to him that our eyes are opened to see not just true life, but to see being himself.