SEPTEMBER 16th 2012. TWENTY FOURTH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME
Gospel: Mark 8:27-35
Translated from a homily by Don Fabio Rosini, broadcast on Vatican Radio
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The Gospel tells how Peter recognized that Jesus was the Christ, but did not agree that the Christ should suffer. Jesus responds by telling Peter in no uncertain terms that it is he (Peter) who must follow Christ, and not Christ who must follow Peter. Don Fabio asks us to apply this message to our own lives. Whatever our vocation in life, we are asked to follow Jesus, and this inevitably involves the Cross. Real living involves sacrificial love, fidelity, commitment, trust in God's providence. It is the spirit of evil who whispers that life should be comfortable, easy, involving no commitment or sacrifice. To this spirit Jesus commands "Get behind me Satan!" and demands that we follow him, instead of vice-versa.

Peter's profession of faith, and Jesus' reprimanding of Peter are inextricably linked
This week's Gospel recounts the entire story of the profession of faith by Peter in Jesus. But we don't just read the glorious part where Peter professes his belief that Jesus is the Christ: we also hear of how Peter tries to reproach the Lord, and Jesus responds with the words "Get behind me Satan! You are not reasoning according to God's way but according to human ways." These two moments are inextricably connected to each other, and on Sunday we get to read the passage in its entirety.
Jesus has reached the most northerly point of his ministry, Caesarea Philippi, the furthest place from Jerusalem that his journey take him. He puts the disciples to the test, asking what other people say about him, and then asking what they themselves think about him. This is a fundamental episode in Mark's Gospel and constitutes the structural centre of the Gospel. The entire first half of Mark's Gospel is a lead-up to the moment of this profession of faith in Jesus as the Christ. After this profession of faith, the entire Gospel is oriented towards the Cross. It becomes directed towards exploring the fact that Jesus is not just the Messiah, but is the Son of God, and demonstrating that he is not just the fulfilment of the promises of the past, but is something completely new and unexpected.

Peter has understood that Jesus is the Christ, but he has failed to understand what being Christ entails
Peter has understood that Jesus is the Christ. He is not the first in Mark's Gospel to recognize that fact. Earlier in the Gospel, Jesus had to silence the demons who were aware of the same fact. There is a continual temptation to take possession of the profession of faith in Jesus and to use it to inappropriate ends. We sometimes think that the fundamental strategy of evil is to deny the existence of God. But this is not exactly right. In the Gospel passage Jesus is telling the disciples that they have indeed understood that he is the Christ, but they have not grasped what being Christ entails. Peter has utterly failed to comprehend the nature of Jesus' mission and takes the Lord aside to scold him. This is a dramatic development! Peter considers Jesus to have taken a wrong direction and is not in agreement with him as to how his mission should unfold.

Jesus wants to take the focus off the glorious aspect of being Christ and emphasize the sacrificial aspect
Jesus turns to his disciples and reproves Peter. It is interesting to note that Jesus looks at his disciples while he is correcting Peter, and this indicates that all of them are wrong in their thinking and need correction. It is also interesting to note that Jesus often asks people to keep secret their profession of him as the Christ, but he makes no secret of the fact that being Christ entails that he is destined to suffer. Jesus does not want a one-sided emphasis on the victorious, glorious side of his mission, and on the fact that he is the Messiah. He wishes, rather, to emphasize that victory is something that comes about through defeat and suffering. Victory is not something that is wrought by an easy and comfortable road, but by a process that is more enigmatic.
Peter tries to tell Jesus in secret that he is making a mistake, but Jesus wishes to state publicly that it is Peter who is making the mistake, and he says, "Get behind me Satan!" Peter wants Jesus to follow his way of doing things, but Jesus responds by saying that it is Peter who must do the following. When Jesus originally called Peter, he used the exact same words, "Follow me!" and now he finds that he must repeat it again. This thought alone would be enough to reflect on for this Sunday! It is we who must follow God, and it not God who must follow us! If it is me who is choosing the road then I am no longer with Christ and I am no longer on the road to salvation. I am on the road to nowhere, following vain things that are of no use. To have life in all of its fullness - the life of the Resurrection - I must follow Christ.

Evil tries to convince us that salvation is possible without the Cross
Jesus addresses his rebuke to Satan - "Get behind me Satan!" What is it exactly that the powers of evil are trying to achieve here? Evil says that we can be saved without the cross. It says that salvation is something easy and comfortable. It says that the fullness of life can be achieved with the affirmation of our egos, by following ourselves rather than Christ. All of this is to think according to human ways and not according to God's ways. It is frightening to reflect on the fact that human beings can think according to Satan's influence, but that is how things are. This passage emphasizes the beautiful fact that people can also think according to God.
Here we have a confrontation between true salvation and something that is only an impostor. True salvation is not easy; it is not something that can be had at a discounted rate; it is not something that you pay for two and get three in return. Matrimony is never like that, the consecrated life is never like that, true friendship or raising a family are never like that, These are not things that are low risk and zero commitment, but involve salvation and love.

The way of God is distinguished from the way of Satan by the Cross
What distinguishes the way of God from the way of Satan is the Cross. Just one minute earlier Peter had recognized Jesus as the Christ, and now he tries to ruin his mission. In the Gospel of Mark Jesus had silenced the demons right up to this moment because they had done the exact same thing as Peter, trying to take Christ's mission as Messiah and fill it with the spirit of disobedience, egoism, and preoccupation with one's own wellbeing. Our interior life is a constant battle that must involve discipline of our thoughts, so that we think according to God's way and not according to human ways. It is our relationship with the Cross that draws the line between God's way of thinking and our way of thinking. We must journey towards that over which we have no dominion, recognizing the paternity and providence of God.
The text ends by saying that whoever loses his life for the sake of the Gospel will save it. To have life according to the Gospel is to radically trust in God, focussing on Jesus crucified on the Cross, and being aware that real living is not a stroll in the park.

SEPTEMBER 9^th 2012, TWENTY THIRD SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME

GOSPEL: Mark 7:31-37

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

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Once again Don Fabio asks us to apply this reading directly to ourselves. We are all deaf mutes insofar as we listen only to the promptings of our own egos and speak only in reference to the things that interest us. To break through the barriers of selfish isolation that we have built around ourselves, the Lord needs to place his fingers in our ears and his saliva on our tongues. This symbolizes our need to open our senses to the way in which the Lord wishes to speak to us. The Lord must open our closed lines of communication and enable us to speak his words rather than the words that flow from ourselves.

A healing that takes place in a pagan context: how relevant is that for us today?

To understand this passage we must pay attention to the geographical context in which it unfolds. The cities of Tyre and Sidon were outside of Israel and were located in an area dominated by paganism and the worship of multiple Gods. In this place Jesus performed an act of healing that has an important role in the Gospel of St Mark. We must ask: why was this particular action of Jesus remembered by the early Church and written down in the Gospel? Not all of the words or actions of Jesus were written down, only those that had a particular significance for the early church. This passage tells the story of a deaf mute who lived in a pagan city. The people take him to Jesus to be healed, but Jesus does not lay his hands on him immediately. He takes the man apart, away from the crowd. In order for this man to be healed, he must be taken out of his familiar surroundings. This is a significant point. Learning to live like a child of God is not an everyday event. Having our means of communication with others healed is not an everyday event. It involves a process of being extracted from the daily mechanism of our lives and our familiar comfort zone.

We are all deaf mutes insofar as we listen only to our own needs and speak only to ourselves

A deaf mute is someone who cannot hear or speak. We encounter deaf mutes every day. Many times in our lives we ourselves are deaf mutes, people who do not know how to speak or how to listen, people whose lines of communication are always busy, whose lines of communication are totally occupied with themselves, people who listen only to themselves and think only of themselves. The deaf mute, in this existential sense, has difficulty being truly present to others. Even if he is physically present, his lines of communication are so occupied with himself that he is not fully in attendance with others. How many people exist in this state! How many people are in desperate need to have their means of communication healed. Many of us find ourselves regularly in a condition where no one can say anything to us that will make an impression on us because we are so full of ourselves. And when we speak, we speak only of things that interest or preoccupy us. Our egos bind us within ourselves and create a solitude that is comparable to that of the deaf mute.

States of solitude or despair are often the occasions when we finally start listening to God

To heal us, Jesus must take us far away from the crowd, far away from the environment that is familiar to us. The Lord often does this, even if we don’t ask him. We find ourselves lost and alone. We ask ourselves why we are not part of the crowd, why no one speaks to us or seems interested in us. Very often unhappiness or unease is the road to change and renewal. Often, being cut off from our familiar comfort zone leads us to start reasoning in a more enlightened way about the state of our own lives. We begin to truly listen.

          Jesus places his fingers in the ears of the deaf mute, and puts saliva on his tongue. We would not be inclined to allow anyone to put their fingers in our ears or saliva on our tongues! What is the significance of these strange acts? The fingers of Jesus are the fingers of the God who comes to us in the form of Jesus. The “finger of God” refers always to the work of God. To have the work of God placed in our ears signifies to open our senses to the divine order. It signifies to start listening to reality and to stop being preoccupied with our own works, to stop being preoccupied with our own faults and failings.

What does it take for us to start feeling the finger of God in our ears? St Clare of Assisi is supposed to have said, “If one of the sisters breaks a dish, I get annoyed, but if the convent starts falling in around us, then I sit down and start listening, because that is God speaking”. When things get too much for us, God is speaking to us; God’s finger is in our ear, and we must stop being preoccupied with our own works and start asking ourselves what the Lord is doing. We must begin to bow down before the works of God, start listening to his word, pay attention to the stories regarding his works and his deeds. Very often in the spiritual life, before we start talking, we must place ourselves in no-man’s land where we refrain from talking about ourselves and listen to the stories about God’s works. In this way we begin to develop new points of reference for our lives.

I need the saliva of Jesus on my tongue. I need to start speaking with his words, and not words that come from preoccupation with my own ego

The idea of having someone else’s saliva on my tongue is slightly disturbing. But every time we sit down to pray we have someone else’s saliva on our tongues, in the sense that we have the words of others on our tongues. When we pray, we often use prefabricated words like the psalms. Sometimes we complain about praying with prefabricated prayers, but the essential point is that we need words on our mouths that do not come from ourselves and our own preoccupations. I need the saliva of Christ in my mouth. I need the word of God to fill my mouth so that I can speak with his words. I need words that are not my own, for I am deaf and listen only to myself. I am dumb and talk only of myself.

The road to healing for the deaf mute involves moving away from the crowd. He must be touched with the works of God in the interior of his ears and on his tongue. Jesus utters the word, “Ephphatha!” which means “Be opened!” The last part of the rite of Baptism involves touching the ears and mouth of the child, and this action which Jesus performs on the deaf mute is truly baptismal. We cannot take possession of the new life of baptism if we have not seriously listened to the words of God, and taken the words of God into our mouths. I encourage the readers to find the opportunity to distance themselves from their own thoughts and fixations, to distance themselves from the slavery to their own egos, so as to be able to listen and to speak according to the Lord. This is what breaks the solitude of the deaf mute and rescues us from slavish preoccupation with ourselves.

SEPTEMBER 2^nd 2012, TWENTY SECOND SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME

GOSPEL: Mark 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23

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

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Don Fabio challenges us to read this text as if it were directed personally to us today. The modern world is as obsessed with external “ablutions” as the Pharisees ever were. The preoccupation with physical and mental wellbeing has become the religion of our day. There is a tendency to believe that all of our problems have been caused by external circumstances, and that they can be “healed” by altering these external circumstances. But this preoccupation with what is external never brings the wholeness or healing that is promised. It is from within that we must be changed. This can only be achieved by opening ourselves in the depths of our being to the love of Jesus which is capable of transforming us completely.

We might think that Jesus’ critique of the ritualism of the Pharisees is a topic that has nothing to do with us today, but we are wrong!

This discourse of Jesus is concerned with a subject that seems to have little relevance for us nowadays – the ritualism of the Pharisees. But the issue, in fact, is extremely relevant to us. The Pharisees washed their hands and vessels for meals in particular ways, were attentive to the traditions of the elders, and when they returned from the market they performed many ablutions. These are attempts by the human being to purify himself, to resolve his problems, to clean himself of that which makes him dirty and to set his life to rights. The human person has a persistent tendency to think that his life can be put into order and cleansed by external activity. As a result he multiples laws and rituals, and obsessively focuses on the external aspects of daily action and relationships.

The ritualism of today consists in an obsessive attention to physical and mental wellbeing

In our day the rituals we engage in often concern the care of our psyche, the maintenance of our “mental equilibrium”, the care of our body, and the preservation of our health. Physical and mental wellbeing has become a religion in which the human being tries to attain happiness and fulfilment, but he doesn’t succeed. Happiness does not consist in physical or mental wellbeing, and the human being is not cleansed by external preoccupations of this sort. In this passage Jesus says, “Nothing entering a man from without can make him impure. It is the things that come out from man that make him impure.” It is a waste of time changing house, changing job, changing friends, changing our external habits, unless we are changed also from within. It is from within that things are rendered impure, and it is from within that they are cleansed. Jesus, by means of the Cross, has changed from within the meaning of suffering. Incredibly, the man who redeemed the world was in a horrific situation as far as the ritualism of the Pharisees was concerned. Jesus was the condemned outcast; he was dirty and covered with blood. Even though he was unclean from a ritual point of view, he becomes the one who purifies others.

I can be transformed only from within, not by a focus on the alleged external “causes” of my behaviour

Things are changed from within. For as long as we refuse to touch the true origins of our problems, which are the delusions that lie in the deepest parts of our hearts, our lives will remain disappointing, exactly as they are. But our lives can equally become magnificent from the inside. The most ugly of experiences can be transformed from the inside once we learn how to love. This is done, not in forcing ourselves to change by the power of our will, but by a simple exposure to the truth. The human being is responsible for the ruination of his own life, and the source of this ruination is in his heart. Our generation sometimes seems incapable of understanding this. There is a wholesale tendency nowadays to consider ourselves to be victims of the past and of our social and family circumstances. We have developed a refined system of psychological and sociological “explanations” that seek to justify all of our errant behaviour and frustrations. These structures are supposed to heal and change me, but they cannot, because the real me is never really engaged by this focus on what is external to me.

Wholeness of life can be achieved, not through external ablutions, but by allowing the love of the Lord of Life to enter into the depths of my being

This passage denounces a problem, and at the same time announces the solution. It denounces the practice of seeking wholeness from the external aspects of my life, and it proclaims the liberty that is only possible through Jesus Christ. My life comes from God, and if I wish to have life, then I must ask God for it. Until I truly ask for life from the Lord of life, who is Jesus Christ, then I will continue to attribute the source of the problems that surround me to other things, instead of recognizing that it is my lack of adhesion to the Lord of life that is the source of those problems. If my problems really came from without, if I were truly a victim of my circumstances, then I would be condemned to remain exactly as I am. But Jesus instead has proclaimed our liberty, has proclaimed our capacity and responsibility to transcend our external circumstances and take our lives in our own hands. How can this be achieved? By looking at my life from within rather than without; by asking Jesus who is the Lord of life to give me life; by opening myself in the depths of my being to the love of God, and through this to transform whatever situation in life I find myself in.

TWENTY-FIRST SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME

Gospel: John 6:60-69

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

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Jesus gives a discourse describing his total self-giving to us, and the response of his listeners is to complain that his words are too hard to accept. Why do we have trouble grasping the unconditional love of God for us? Don Fabio says that this passage points to two different attitudes we can take when contemplating the words of Jesus. The first attitude (that which originates in the flesh) is to understand his words in terms of normal human relations, where people only give when they receive something in return. This attitude views the self-giving of Jesus with suspicion and incredulity. The second attitude is the one displayed by Peter and is an attitude that originates in the Spirit. We must place ourselves in faith before the Son of God, acknowledging that only he has the message of eternal life, and seeking to understand his Eucharistic words in terms of the unconditional self-giving that is foreign to purely human relations.

Why are Jesus words regarding his self-giving so hard for us to accept?

Jesus had just made one of the most beautiful discourses that is to be found in the Gospels, the statement of the complete, unconditional giving of himself to us as our food. The response of the people is to complain, "This is intolerable language! Who can accept this kind of talk!" Why are Jesus words so hard to accept? Because they are surprising and do not fit in with our normal idea of how to relate with others. We expect human inter-relationship to consist in a form of exchange between equals. We do not expect, nor do we really want, to be offered something as a free gift. We are embarrassed or suspicious when someone gives us a gift without reason. When we go into someone else's house we feel that we have to bring something with us. The idea of only receiving without giving in return is not something that comes naturally to us.

There are two attitudes we can take when contemplating Jesus' words: An attitude informed by the Holy Spirit, or an attitude informed by the flesh

We continue to place ourselves before God with the attitude of not wishing to abandon ourselves completely to his love for us. The Holy Spirit seeks to teach us a different attitude, and this is what Jesus is referring to when he say, "What if you should see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before?" Jesus is asking that his followers inform their attitudes with a contemplation of the redemptive self-giving of the Son of Man that is unfolding before their eyes. Instead, his followers are interpreting Jesus words according to the "flesh". Jesus here does not intend to disparage the flesh. We are Christians, not Platonists, and we believe that the human being is a union of body and spirit. But what Jesus is warning about here is an attitude that springs from the flesh, that springs from human relations, and he is contrasting it with an attitude that comes from the Holy Spirit. In fact, later on he says, "No-one can come to me unless the Father allows him." In order to understand what Jesus is saying regarding the Eucharist, it is not sufficient that we base our thinking on our experience of human relations. Instead we must base our thinking on a contemplation of what God has done in giving himself to us unconditionally. Most of us have been Christians for a long time, but we have never really opened our hearts fully to God, to his self-giving, to his love that has no conditions.

Peter demonstrates the right attitude, and places himself before Jesus in the faith that only Jesus has the message of eternal life

Peter replies "Lord to whom shall we go? You have the message of Eternal Life, and we believe and know that you are the Holy One of God". In Peter we see the correct attitude for following the Lord. This attitude does not seek to understand everything Jesus says in human terms. It consists rather in the acknowledgement that there is no life to be found anywhere else except in Jesus. If Jesus is the source of life, then all our belief and our understanding must be founded on the words of eternal life that come from him, the words that help us to believe and know that Jesus is the Holy One of God. I invite all the readers to place themselves before God in this way that Peter has done, contemplating what God has done for us, what God has gifted to us. Our attempts to understand the words of Jesus must find their point of departure in this attitude, and not in the natural instinct of the flesh to view all things suspiciously, even that come from God.

TWENTIETH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME

Gospel: John 6:51-58

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

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The words of Jesus seem difficult to understand, but it is only because they are difficult to believe

Jesus words in this passage from the Gospel are so direct that they seem difficult to understand. "If you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you will not have life in you. Anyone who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink." These words are shockingly clear and direct, but we nevertheless have trouble comprehending them. Why is this so? Because we have not developed the mental categories to grasp the concept of someone who can love us in this way. The Eucharist proclaims, shouts, cries aloud the nature of God. We are to eat bread and drink wine in memory of him, and this bread and wine have the real presence of Jesus in them. This notion is so simple that we cannot understand it, and it even seems absurd and scandalous. The idea that God places himself at my complete disposition, and becomes completely assimilated by me, is a shock to our normal way of thinking and leaves us bewildered. The immense God who created the galaxies and who cannot be contained by the universe places himself at my complete disposal! This is so scandalously beautiful that we do not have the courage to believe it. 

Our ability to believe in these words of Jesus is hampered by our difficulty in believing that God accepts us unconditionally

All of us have wounds of love. All of us have been traumatised in our relationships. We have grave difficulties receiving affection and in considering ourselves to be completely accepted by others. These wounds hamper our ability to grasp the notion that the ultimate action of God towards us is one of  unconditional acceptance, an acceptance that asks only to be believed.

"He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives for me". Certainly! Just as a child believes simply in the unconditional love of his parents for him, so we too must cling to the love of God for us and believe in it without qualifying it. These words of Jesus are not difficult but scandalously simple! The problem is not understanding them but believing in them, and Jesus entreats his listeners to believe in him. Why is it so difficult for us to believe these words? All of us latently believe that God really wants us to be food for him. We believe that God created us so that we would serve him. We think of God as being a source of authority and power who in the end requires that we do certain things for him. We go to church and listen to the Scriptures, and we constantly think, "When is the payback? What is it that I have to do to get the benefits from God that I want?" But in this Gospel passage Jesus is telling us that there is no payback! He places himself at our complete disposal and asks nothing except that we believe. We are not God's food, he is ours. Jesus has become our servant. He has died so that we can have life. This passage calls us to live with Christ without feeling that we are constantly under scrutiny, feeling that we are insufficient and unacceptable to the Lord. There is someone who loves us simply because we are, not because of how we are.

We have a choice: we can murmur against these words of Jesus and say they are absurd; or we can believe that God give's himself to us totally regardless of our actions

To refuse this love is the most foolish thing we can do. In last week's Gospel we read how the people murmured against these sayings of Jesus, closing themselves in the narrow confines of their own intellects that could not comprehend love of this sort. Instead of murmuring against Jesus' words, we must head in the opposite direction - towards the clamorous, unexpected, scandalous love of God for us. God does not keep an account of our actions, holding back his love until the account is in his favour. God is father, a father without limits, and Jesus is our servant.

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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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.

EIGHTEENTH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME

Gospel: John 6:24-35

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

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The crowd are following Jesus because they want to satisfy their physical hunger, and they are hoping he will perform another miracle like the multiplication of the loaves. Physical hunger can be satisfied today, but will return tomorrow. Jesus exhorts the people to strive instead after a food that satisfies eternally. Much of our sinful behaviour derives from trying to satisfy our hungers with "food" that is transitory. Don Fabio tells us that trusting in the existence of a providential Father, and of a Son that offers us salvation, rids us of the constant "hungers", anxieties and fears that are felt by those who do not believe in a loving God.

The crowds follow Jesus in order to satisfy their physical wants

The multitude are following Jesus as a result of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes. When they catch up with him, Jesus gets straight to the point. "You are following me not because you saw the signs, but because you had all you wanted to eat". In other words, the crowd was pursuing Jesus in order to satisfy their material wants. They had utterly failed to recognize the wider significance of the multiplication of the bread for their existence. Jesus tells them to stop putting their efforts into seeking food that doesn't last, but to strive instead after the food that endures to eternal life.

The human being has need of different kinds of nourishment 

In order to live we must eat. Without nourishment we cannot survive. There is a direct relationship between living and eating. It is an absolute necessity for us that we nourish our biological existence with food. But on a broader level there are in fact many different kinds of "food" with which we are nourished, and there are many different appetites that we seek to satisfy. The human being strives to see, to listen, to understand, to touch. We become frustrated if we are deprived of these other sources of nourishment. In every moment we assimilate into ourselves all of these various "nutrients" that we encounter in our daily lives.

Much of our disordered behaviour derives from trying to satisfy our hungers with "food" that is transitory

Despite this continual nourishment, our beings are never fully satisfied. No matter how much we eat, we will never get rid of our hunger in a final, definitive way. No matter how many ideas our minds assimilate, we will never arrive at a point where we attain a full understanding of life. No matter how much our eyes see, our hunger to see more completely and more deeply will remain unsatisfied. We eat today and are full, but we do not know if we will eat again tomorrow. We think we understand something now, but we do not know if this "understanding" will still make sense tomorrow. Our anxieties about how we will be satisfied influence much of our behaviour in a negative way. Sin often involves trying to obtain satisfaction from life in a way that is disordered and illegitimate. In the Gospel passage Jesus tells us to stop seeking after "food" that does not satisfy us in a definitive way.

Believing in Jesus satisfies our deepest hungers, anxieties and fears

There is another food, however, and Jesus offers himself as this new form of nourishment. In next Sunday's Gospel, the offering of himself as food is made more explicit. But in the Gospel we are considering this Sunday, the emphasis is placed on the importance of believing in the one whom God has sent. Jesus is the bread of life, altogether different from the manna in the desert that satisfied for one day only. If my daily existence is dependent on my own efforts to provide for myself, then I need sufficient energy and personal resources to eke from life the bread that I need to survive. If, by contrast, I believe that God is my father and Jesus is my saviour, then my life becomes completely serene. I know that I have a providential father. My life is not in the hands of nothingness or chance. I am freed from the latent anxieties, fears and desperations of those who do not trust in a providential God.

To live with faith in a God who provides for our deepest needs is a key to another type of existence altogether. Many of our errors and sins derive from pursuing solutions to hungers that are not definitive solutions at all. We pursue possessions and objects, thinking wrongly that they can give us the securities that in the end only God can give. My ultimate security consists in my relationship with God. I feel secure when I consider that God is my father, when I consider that every aspect of my future is in his hands, and that he will never abandon me. I am at ease when I reflect on the fact that Jesus is bread for me, that he is all I need, that he is the imperishable nourishment that I yearn for. Christ is the food of eternal life. He is what dissipates the persistent anxiety about how I am to be satisfied tomorrow. I find peace and fullness in believing in the paternal love of God for me, and in the salvation that the Lord Jesus offers me.