Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic Church

Homily for August 13, 2006
Liturgical Year B - Cycle II
19th Sunday in Ordinary Time
By Dcn. Ray Alcouffe
 Topic: The sign of the New Creation
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Gospel
Jn 6: 41 - 51
The Jews murmured about Jesus because he said, “I am the bread that came down from heaven,” and they said, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph? Do we not know his father and mother? Then how can he say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” Jesus answered and said to them, “Stop murmuring among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him, and I will raise him on the last day. It is written in the prophets: They shall all be taught by God. Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father. Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died; this is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.”
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One of the main themes of the Gospel of John is that a new creation is being brought forth through the coming of Jesus among us.  Just as in the beginning, God’s creation of the cosmos was effected through the son, the word of God, so too this new creation is being accomplished through Jesus Christ, the son of the living God.  This new creation is what we call salvation, the ushering in of divine life into the cosmos by the intimate presence of God.  How do we know what this salvation is about and how do we experience it?  John in his Gospel gives us God’s answer.

To come to some understanding of this, let us go to the situation of Elijah, considered the greatest prophet of Israel.  In the first reading, we meet an exhausted and discouraged man who knows and loves God, but things are deteriorating in his life.  The king of Israel at the time was Ahab who had forsaken God and gone over to worshipping Baal.  To make matters worse, Ahab was married to the woman, Jezebel, who was quite a piece of work.  One of her projects was the wiping out of the religion of Israel, and all that stood between her and success was Elijah.  Elijah was in a precarious situation with things looking very dark for him and he wanted God to end his life’s journey. 

Haven’t we all felt that way at times where our expectations for a good life have been dashed and we want to just give it all up?  We say something like, “if this is the way it is going to be, Lord, then just take me now - I’m done.”  It is at these times that we need something positive from God that puts our life in perspective and lifts us up.  We call those things signs, signs from God.  They can be big or little, tangible or something that touches our spirit, or both - whatever we need at the time.  For Elijah it was both - he was given bread for the journey - his destination was the mountain of God - where he was touched spiritually by the intimate presence of God.

We all have these moments in our lives if we are attuned to them.  We experience the effect of these signs when we let them touch us.  Just the other day, I was feeling particularly down and discouraged and I needed a lift, a lift that would in a sense, rescue me.  Then I stepped outside and saw this magnificent thundercloud billowing up over the Jemez.  It was huge, brilliant white in its upper reaches.  It overpowered everything else that I could see.  As I gazed on that growing cloud, I was touched.  My problems seemed small in comparison and I slowly felt that heavy load lifted from me.  Thus, I was rescued from my previous darkness.  I have experienced many such moments, be it in seeing a rainbow, standing on a mountain summit, sitting by a rushing stream in the wilderness, holding a new born baby, playing with a bright-eyed four year old, sharing a quiet moment with my wife and best friend.  I think we can each come up with such a list from our own experiences.  I claim that these are not just coincidences but are all signs from the living God, from God who is an intimate part of our lives and who draws us up to touch the sphere of divine life and thus enriches our otherwise normal life.

Signs also play an important part in John’s Gospel.  In fact, this Gospel is divided into two parts or books - one called the Book of Signs and the other the Book of Glory.  In the Book of Signs , John has put forth seven events in the life of Jesus when he was present to his disciples that give progressively more emphatic signs of his mission on earth.  This mission is to show the transforming power of divine life on our own lives as we become open to receive this power. 

As an exhibition of the progression:

v     John begins with the wedding feast at Cana - the changing of water into wine - a sign of the joy in life. 

v     The second sign is also at Cana where Jesus saves a boys life from destruction. 

v     The third sign is likewise a cure to an enhanced life of a man who had been ill 38 years. 

v     The fourth sign is the feeding of the 5000 followed by

v     The fifth sign where Jesus walks on the stormy waters of the Sea of Galilee.  These two are the signs of the life-giving, calming presence of God with us as explained the sixth chapter of John from which we have today's Gospel reading. 

v     Then comes the sixth sign, the cure of the man born blind where Jesus is shown to be the bringer of new light. 

v     The seventh sign is that of the raising of Lazarus from the dead, this is a sign of the resurrection - a rising from sin to grace.

It is John’s purpose in selecting these works of Jesus to signify the Christ for what he really is - the coming of divine life to all creation and thus effecting a new creation.  At the center of this is the sacrament of the Eucharist, the great sign of God himself being our food for the journey.  The remarkable aspect of this is how this sign rises above the merely symbolic.  It involves the very presence of God as the risen Lord in the vehicle of the sign, the bread and wine.  The bread and wine of the Eucharist are transformed in their very being into a new way of being.  That is the Lord God takes possession of the bread and wine we offer at the Eucharist and lifts them up, as it were, out of the setting of their normal existence into a new order - a new mode of existence [Ratzinger - God is near us].  They are now the presence of God among us - the body and blood of Jesus that is the person and life of the risen Jesus along with his divinity.

Thus, in communion we are receiving not a thing, but a person / the one who changes us to be like him.  As was given to St. Augustine in a vision - Jesus says to him to, “take and eat - in doing so you will not transform me and make me part of you; rather I will transform you and make you part of me.”

That is the power and mystery of God’s realm, God’s kingdom, where ordinary things have the power of the extraordinary - where we are changed, transformed, and thus lifted out of the ordinary.  This is ultimately what the resurrection of the body means - it is a new life, a new existence, where God’s will liberates us from all the restrictions we place upon ourselves.  The Eucharist plays an important part of this transformation.  It is food for our journey toward God where we, like Elijah, are strengthened to proceed to the intimate encounter with the divine.  This is the sign of new creation and thus in a real way the Christian in the church possesses here and now that divine life that is at the same time the goal of salvation.  That is the message of John’s Gospel to us.