Homily
for August 3, 2008
Liturgical Year A- Cycle II
18th Sunday in Ordinary Time
By Dcn. Ray Alcouffe Topic:
From Death to Life +
+ +
“Give them
some food yourselves.”
We can call this account of Jesus’
feeding a huge crowd of people from a simple offering of bread and
fish, the foundational miracle of the continual physical presence of
God among us. All of the four Gospels have this account and from that
of John, it is clear that it alludes to the Eucharist that we are
celebrating at this very Mass. From Matthew’s account we can see that
we are participating in a movement from death to life which is a good
summary of our Eucharistic prayer.
Jesus has just been told that John the
Baptist has been put to death by Herod. He knows that he is soon to
suffer the same fate and so the time for preparation is now. Thus he
sets off by boat for a quiet, deserted place where he could be alone in
prayer with his Father. Somehow, the people in the neighboring region
heard about his destination so they got there before him. Seeing the
immense crowd and knowing their need, he was moved with compassion to
remain there with them and his preparation took a different turn. He
ministered to all those people at first in his usual way of word and
physical healing. And then he gave them something that they could never
forget. He gave them the food that was the precursor for the food of
new life. However, the disciples would not make the connection to new
life until Jesus went through the prayers of the Last Supper, his
passion, suffer and death on the cross and his resurrection. Let us now
make that connection because this is the process of the Eucharist and
has a direct impact on each one of us present today.
To realize this impact, we need to
realize what the Eucharistic aspect of the Mass is all about. We will
follow Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, from his book,
“God is Near Us.” We begin with the command to “be reconciled to God,”
as St. Paul exhorts us in 2Cor. Our need to be reconciled to God in
some fashion or other has been an impulse of mankind throughout the
ages. Part of reconciliation involves the giving of gifts. All those
who are married especially know that a gift greatly enhances the impact
of our saying, “I’m sorry”. But what can we presume to give to God? We
are not, so to speak, equal partners with God. We cannot give God
something so that he should give us something back. That doesn’t mean
we haven’t tried. We hear God say make sacrifices and we do, but we do
so with conditions. Our presumption is that God owes us upon our
sacrificing. And this has gotten us into trouble and still does. The
prophets of old have told us on many occasions that ritual or
mechanical sacrifices are meaningless if our spiritual life is not in
order.
So with God, our giving has to be
different from all the normal giving we do for one another if we want
true reconciliation. The important aspect of giving to God is this: we
need to draw near to the God who gives to us in order that we may give
to God. There is in the end only one gift that is satisfactory to God
and that is the sacrifice of Jesus. But then you say that is done;
Jesus made that sacrifice and hence has reconciled us to God. So what
is there for us to do but believe in Christ and lead a good life worthy
of Christ and his sacrifice. But remember God does want us to give to
him in order to complete our reconciliation. We are asked to
participate in Jesus’ sacrifice in the here and now. How is that
possible? That’s where the Eucharist comes in. The gift we give is the
Eucharist which is itself a real sacrifice, that is, it is the
presentation of Jesus Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. Jesus instituted
this in the context of the Haggadah of Passover which is a story of the
presence of God and the extraordinary deeds that God did for the Hebrew
people leading them from the death of Egypt to the new life of the
promised land. In Jesus’ continuation of that story with the giving of
the bread and wine as his body and blood, God’s presence continues to
lead us to new life. This institution transforms the former prayers of
thanksgiving to the new prayer of thanksgiving, the Eucharistic prayer.
It is thus a prayer of praise for the presence of God who continues to
support us and leads us from our death to new life.
We can thus say that in the context of
the Passover prayer, Jesus Christ transformed his death into verbal
form - into a prayer that we can participate in. This is the heart of
the Eucharist. In this Eucharistic prayer, Jesus through the Church
gathers up, so to speak, the fragments of our suffering, our loving,
our hoping, and our waiting into a great banquet that is a sharing in
Jesus’ life. Thereby we truly participate in the sacrifice of Jesus and
share its fruit. This sacrifice is the transformation of existence into
thanksgiving and is the true heart of the Mass. Effectively, Jesus, the
Word of God, by putting the words of the Eucharistic prayer into our
mouths, letting us pronounce them with him, he permits and enables us
to make the offering to God with him - his words become our words, his
worship our worship, his sacrifice our sacrifice. Thus God through
Jesus Christ has given us the gift that we can worthily offer to God.
This giving changes our relationship
with God from one where death reigns to one where new life is given to
us. And our life also changes where we can now offer with the psalmist
the prayer: “My sacrifice, O God, is a contrite spirit; a heart
contrite and humbled, O God, you will not spurn". Then comes peace and
joy into our lives as it did so long ago to those people fed by Jesus
in that deserted spot.