18th Sunday in Ordinary Time (B)

Panem et circenses

Gladiator - the young Commodus has succeeded his father as Caesar of Rome - some of the senior senators urge the Caesar to address the civil unrest and other social problems afflicting the city - Commodus responds by launching one hundred and fifty days of ‘games’ at the Collosseum - in time, the senators realise what Commodus is doing: he’s creating a distraction - as one senator, Gracchus, observes: “I think he knows what Rome is. Rome is the mob. He’ll conure magic for them and they will be distracted. He will take away their freedom and still they will roar... He’ll bring them death and they will love him for it.”

This scene depicts the real political practice of ancient Rome. Ancient Roman politicians knew that the easiest way to secure political popularity was to provide the citizenry with panem et circenses - ‘bread and circuses’. Fifty years before the birth of Our Lord, the Roman author Cicero reflected pensively on this political method: “The evil was not in bread and circuses, per se, but in the willingness of the people to sell their rights as free men for full bellies and the excitement of games which would serve to distract them from the other human hungers, which bread and circuses can never appease.”

Panem et circenses. ‘Bread and circuses.’ UberEats and Netflix. A meal and a movie. Food to fill the belly and entertainment to distract the mind. Yes, our society, too, is structured to sate us to such a point that we no longer notice the gnawing emptiness that cripples our souls. We eagerly sate our lower appetites even as we suppress our higher appetites, namely, our hunger for Truth, Beauty, Goodness, Holiness - in a word, our hunger for God.

To many of the Jews, Jesus was UberEats and Netflix rolled into one. He entertained them with His miracles and, as we would have heard last week were we able to get to Mass, He fed them in their thousands by multiplying the loaves and fish. They are so enthralled by Him, they literally chase Him around the Sea of Galilee as we hear today: “The people got into the boats and crossed the Sea of Galilee to look for Jesus.” But when the crowds find Jesus, He rebukes them: “You are looking for me because you had all the bread you wanted to eat.” To the crowds, Jesus is merely bread and circuses, a meal to fill the belly and a movie to numb the soul.

The Living Dead

During my holidays I read an excellent new book by the American Scripture scholar, Scott Hahn, called Hope to Die. Scott Hahn opens the book with a story about his daughter. He writes:

“When my daughter Hannah was in high school, she was fascinated with zombies. I didn’t get it. And honestly, I thought it was a little wierd. Then, I started realising she wasn’t alone. There was the hit TV show The Walking Dead, the best-selling novel World War Z, and even a movie called Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Over the past fifteen years or so, our culture has become obsessed with the concept of the dead who live. And while at first that obsession might seem ‘weird,’ there’s actually something to it - something beyond the blood and gore.”

Culture is a mirror. It is a product of who we are and therefore shows us who we are. Zombies are so culturally popular, in part, because that is who we have become: living bodies with dead souls. We sate our bodies and numb our souls.

Scott Hahn goes on to explain something that was a complete revelation to me. The book of Genesis contains two accounts of the creation of humanity. The first account begins: “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.” Here we see God giving physical life, what the Greeks called bios. Bios is natural, biological life, the life of the body. “But,” as Dr Hahn says, “there’s life… and then there’s life. That is, there’s bios and then there’s zoe. Zoe is the word the Greek version of the Old Testament uses in the second account of creation: ‘Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life [zoe], and man became a living being.’ God didn’t just breathe air into Adam’s nostrils [to give him bodily life, bios]; he breathed zoe - spiritual life, eternal life, divine life, the life of the soul.”

If there are two kinds of life in the each of us - bios, the life of the body, and zoe, the life of the soul - then there must also be two kinds of death - bodily death and spiritual death. When God placed Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, He permits them to eat from any tree except one: “for in the day that you eat of it you shall die”. And yet, when Adam and Eve eat from the tree, nothing seems to happen. They don’t gag and choke. They don’t fall into a faint. They don’t drop dead on the spot. No, Adam and Eve didn’t die spiritually when they committed Original Sin; they died spiritually. They lost something far mroe precious than natural life: they lost supernatural life, divine life, the gift of sanctifying grace in their souls. That’s what original sin is. It’s not something we have done, it’s something we lack. It’s human nature deprived of divine life. And every human ever born has inherited that deprived nature from our first parents. We’re born physically alive, but spiritually dead: zombies, who sate ourselves with UberEats and Netflix even though we know we’re starving for something more.

Food for the Soul

The crowds wanted Jesus to give them bread to feed the life of the body, bread that gives bios. Jesus rebukes them and instead declares that He is here to feed souls, not bodies. “I am the bread of life,” he proclaims. In St John’s original Greek: “I am the bread of zoe.” Indeed, every time Jesus refers to life in St John’s Gospel, he uses the Greek word zoe, the word for the life of the soul. Only Jesus can feed our souls, and He does this chiefly through the Most Holy Eucharist.

This week, we celebrate the feast of the patron saint of priests, St John Vianney. He explains how Jesus feeds the life of our souls:

“When God wished to give food to our soul to sustain it in the pilgrimage of this life, He looked over all the creation and found nothing worthy of it. Then He fell back on Himself and resolved to give Himself. O my soul, how great thou art since only a God can satisfy thee! The food of the soul is the Body and Blood of a God! What beautiful nourishment! The soul can only feed on a God! No other than God can suffice. Only God can satisfy its hunger.”