August 9^th 2015. NINETEENTH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME

Gospel: John 6:41-51

Translated from a homily by Don Fabio Rosini, broadcast on Vatican Radio

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Don Fabio’s homily follows the Gospel

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GOSPEL                                  John 6:41-51

The Jews were complaining to each other about Jesus, because he had said, ‘I am the bread that came down from heaven.’ ‘Surely this is Jesus son of Joseph’ they said. ‘We know his father and mother. How can he now say, “I have come down from heaven” ?’ Jesus said in reply, ‘Stop complaining to each other.

‘No one can come to me unless he is drawn by the Father who sent me,
and I will raise him up at the last day.
It is written in the prophets: They will all be taught by God,
and to hear the teaching of the Father, and learn from it, is to come to me.
Not that anybody has seen the Father, except the one who comes from God:
he has seen the Father.
I tell you most solemnly, everybody who believes has eternal life.
I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the desert
and they are dead; but this is the bread that comes down from heaven,
so that a man may eat it and not die.
I am the living bread which has come down from heaven.
Anyone who eats this bread will live for ever;
and the bread that I shall give is my flesh, for the life of the world.’

Kieran’s summary . . .  It is hard for our minds to grasp how Jesus becomes bread from heaven for us in the Eucharist. One of the great obstacles to faith, according to Don Fabio, is over-attachment to my own presuppositions about things. But God's saving action cannot be limited to what we can understand on the basis of our own presuppositions! That would be like confining a doctor to treatments that his patient could understand. In order to come to a deeper understanding of how Jesus is bread from heaven, we must be willing to accept new teaching from the Lord, opening ourselves to things that go beyond our normal categories of understanding. Eventually a deeper understanding of the presence of Jesus in the Eucharist will come, but only if we take the leap of faith first, opening ourselves to where Jesus wishes to lead us.

Attachment to my own narrow convictions is an obstacle to growth in the faith

Jesus offers himself as a life-giving bread from heaven. The Jews begin to murmur among themselves. "Murmur" is a word that comes from the Greek and refers to the sound that pigeons make. It came to signify also the grumbling sounds made by people who do not want their complaints to be directly heard. Their main bone of contention is that Jesus has said "I am the bread that has come down from heaven". They react to this claim, stating that they know Jesus' family circumstances, and therefore they know exactly where he has come from.

 Here we are presented with one of the major stumbling-blocks to growth in the faith: the obstinate attachment to what I "know". Sometimes the things we are convinced about are obstacles to belief in certain truths of the faith. Maturity in the faith requires the acceptance that our most deeply-held convictions cannot be the ultimate criterion for what is the truth.

God's saving plan for us involves things that we will not be able to understand immediately. 

In the text the Jews attach too much significance to what they know. "We know everything about you," they say. "We know that you are the son of Joseph and Mary. Don't start telling us that you are something different" This is the narrow-minded insistence that Jesus is exactly as they understand him to be. But if God is restricted to doing only that which we can understand, then how can he possible hope to save us? That would be like limiting a medical practitioner to treating his patients only on the basis of that which his patients could understand. Just as a doctor must use his superior level of understanding when curing his patients, so too God's saving action towards us must involve steps that we will not be able to understand immediately.

I must broaden my conceptual categories and allow myself to be taught by God. A student does not understand everything before he enters the classroom, so why should we think that God should conform to our presuppositions about him before we discover who he truly is?

Jesus does not condemn the hard-heartedness of his listeners in this passage. He tries to explain himself as clearly as possible. "Don't murmur among yourselves," he says. "You grumble because you cannot understand. But what is at stake here is the resurrection, and that is something that you cannot understand, nor is it something that you can make present in your lives by your own efforts. Only the Father can achieve this in you."

 Grumbling is an illness that is very prevalent among us. There is a widespread tendency to continually interpret things in a negative way, based on a narrow perspective on life. Jesus wishes to counteract this tendency towards grumbling, this habit of understanding things on the basis of a narrow set of criteria. The set of criteria can be broadened, he says, by allowing ourselves to be taught by God. It is essential that we allow ourselves to be taught by him. It is vital that we rediscover the type of learning attitude that was typical of our childhood when we naturally allowed ourselves to learn new things.

 Jesus is not part of the conceptual categories with which I normally interpret life. We must throw open the doors of our minds in order to be able to come to an intuition of Christ, and such an intuition will only come if we allow God to instruct us. A student does not enter a lecture believing that he knows everything already. We must cultivate the capacity to be able to continually learn and be continually surprised. We cannot understand the mysterious and holy Eucharist, the wonderful presence of Christ among us in the Mass, the celebration of the events of Easter, without stripping away our natural presuppositions, abandoning our original intuitions, and accepting a new way of looking at things from God.

Understanding of the Eucharist will come, but first we must take the leap of faith and believe that Jesus is the bread from heaven that gives life to the world

"I am the bread of life," says Jesus. "Your fathers ate the bread in desert and they are dead." In order to eat bread and not die, we must emerge from the narrow confines of our own intellects and be open to something that God wishes to bestow on us - understanding of a more profound sort. That understanding will eventually come, but only if we make the leap of faith first.