Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Reading I
1 Kgs
19:4-8
Elijah went a day's journey into the desert,
until he came to a broom tree and sat beneath it.
He prayed for death saying:
"This is enough, O LORD!
Take my life, for I am no better than my fathers."
He lay down and fell asleep under the broom tree,
but then an angel touched him and ordered him to get up and eat.
Elijah looked and there at his head was a hearth cake
and a jug of water.
After he ate and drank, he lay down again,
but the angel of the LORD came back a second time,
touched him, and ordered,
"Get up and eat, else the journey will be too long for you!"
He got up, ate, and drank;
then strengthened by that food,
he walked forty days and forty nights to the mountain of God, Horeb.
Responsorial
Psalm
Ps 34:2-3, 4-5,
6-7, 8-9
R (9a) Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.
I will bless the Lord at all times;
his praise shall be ever in my mouth.
Let my soul glory in the Lord;
the lowly will hear me and be glad.
R Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.
Glorify the Lord with me,
Let us together extol his name.
I sought the Lord, and he answered me
And delivered me from all my fears.
R Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.
Look to him that you may be radiant with joy.
And your faces may not blush with shame.
When the afflicted man called out, the Lord heard,
And from all his distress he saved him.
R Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.
The angel of the Lord encamps
around those who fear him and delivers them.
Taste and see how good the Lord is;
blessed the man who takes refuge in him.
R Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.
Reading
II
Eph
4:30—5:2
Brothers and sisters:
Do not grieve the Holy Spirit of God,
with which you were sealed for the day of redemption.
All bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling
must be removed from you, along with all malice.
And be kind to one another, compassionate,
forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ.
So be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love,
as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us
as a sacrificial offering to God for a fragrant aroma.
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."
Commentary
To
understand today’s First Reading, it must be put into
context with the purpose of the prophet from the beginning.
Israel, through its king Ahab and his wife Jezebel, were worshiping Baal
as the god of storms and fertility. Elijah
had proclaimed a drought thereby directly assaulting the Baalist religion which
would come to its climax in a contest on Mt. Carmel (18:21-40).
Discouraged by the evilness of Ahab and Jezebel, and the threat upon his
life, Elijah flees to Horeb (Sinai; the same mountain where God spoke to Moses
through a burning bush and later gave him the Decalogue).
Ironically, having fled to preserve his life, Elijah now asks God to take
his life away. Elijah is instead
protected and nourished by God just as Israel was during the Exodus.
Twice an angel awakens him to eat, the second time suggesting the journey
he is to undertake. Just as the
Israelites wandered through the desert for forty years, so too Elijah wanders
through the desert for forty days and nights.
In the Second
Reading, the writer asks that the community not offend the Holy Spirit.
The community-centered nature of the exhortations suggests that any
offense against a fellow member is an offense against the Holy Spirit, since all
Christians together form a living temple in which the Spirit lives.
He then incorporates a list of vices that are disruptive to the
community: bitterness, fury,
anger, shouting, and reviling. The
reading closes with the exhortation: “So be imitators of God,
as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and handed himself
over for us as a sacrificial offering to God for a fragrant aroma” which
is a manner of life that is to characterize every member of God’s household.
Love of neighbor, being one of the defining characteristics of
Christianity, is modeled on the love that the Son of God manifested in his
sacrificial death.
In today’s Gospel, we are presented with a dispute over Jesus’ origins. The people murmur: "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'?". This is reminiscent of the murmuring in the desert by their ancestors. While in the desert, Israel’s murmuring gave way to the gift of water (Exodus 15:24) and the manna (Exodus 16:2, 7, 12). Murmuring is a sign of unbelief. Here, the writer of the Gospel uses Jesus’ origins to present the crowd’s assertion that he cannot be from heaven. Jesus commands the crowd to stop murmuring and gives a series of sayings which encapsulate the Johannine community’s theology of belief:
·
Only those drawn by God believe in Jesus
·
Jesus it the one who resurrects
·
God is the one responsible for the faith of the believers
·
There is no knowledge of God apart from Jesus
The
reading concludes with the verse: “the bread that I will give
is my flesh for the life of the world", thus shifting the topic from
Jesus as revealer of the Father, to Jesus as the Eucharistic bread that gives
life. A contrast is then clear
between the manna from the desert which their fathers ate but still died, and
the Eucharistic bread that Jesus gives which gives eternal life.
Reflection
Have you ever really given thought to what hunger is? Normally everyone thinks of not having enough food, or of starving children in some third-world country, or of the famine that has struck so many African nations. Without a doubt, anyone who has not eaten food in a while will be hungry, but does that constitute real hunger? Every day there is about a half billion men, women, and children who live on the brink of starvation. For these children of God, life is a daily battle against the consequences of malnutrition which, aside from the fear of impending death include blindness and mental retardation.
But hunger is also a desire or a need. It’s a yearning for something. It’s a wanting that has us constantly searching for that specific thing that will satisfy us. For some people that hunger can be food, and for others it’s that next drink or cigarette, and still for others it’s the hunger for sex or power. Everyone is constantly searching for something that will make them feel complete – for that one thing that will satisfy them. In today’s Gospel Jesus offers us the only thing that will truly satisfy all our hunger pangs. He offers himself! No matter how much we search, we can never find that one thing that will satisfy: if it’s money – there’s never enough; if it’s sex – we want more; if it’s power – someone always has more than we do. The list is endless.
Because we are both body and soul, we confuse the needs of one with the other. Our soul is in constant desire to be with God who created us, yet we respond by minimizing our soul which we can’t see and try to satisfy our bodies which we do see, and that’s why we are constantly hungry. This is our human condition which has not changed since the days of Jesus. To satisfy our hunger we use whatever we can and do whatever we can even if it means destroying our neighbor. We live in a world of ruthless competition that leads to a path of self-destruction. Jesus offers us the solution: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever”. Our constant search and hunger is for God and that’s why Jesus offers himself to us. It is in living according to his every word, in imitating him, and becoming one with him that our hunger is satisfied because through him we receive eternal life. This should be our desire, our yearning – our hunger. What do we hunger for?
Biblical Sources
New American Bible; Brown, R. K., and Comfort, P. W. (trans.) and Douglas, J. D., (ed.) “The New Greek-English Interlinear New Testament”; United States Conference of Catholic Bishops; Ishida, T. (ed.), “Studies in the Period of David and Solomon”; Jones, G. H., “1 and 2 Kings”; Bruce, F. F., “The Epistles to the Colossians, to Philemon, and to the Ephesians”; Swain, L., “Ephesians”; Sanchez-Bosch, Jordi, "Escritos Paulinos”; Alegre, X., y Tuñi, J. O., “Escritos Joánicos y Cartas Católicas”; Barrett, C. K., The Gospel According to John”; Brown, R. E., “The Community of the Beloved Disciple”; Schnackenburg, R., The Gospel According to St. John”; Segovia, F. F., “Love Relationships in the Johannine Tradition”; “The Collegeville Bible Commentary”; Brown, Raymond E., S.S., “Introduction to the New Testament”; Brown, Fitzmyer, and Murphy (ed.) “The New Jerome Biblical Commentary”.
Reflection
Deacon Lazaro J. Ulloa