19th Sunday In Ordinary Time :: 2009 B

19th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Cycle B) – August 9, 2009 Scripture Readings First 1 Kings 19:4-8 Second Ephesians 4:30-5:2 Gospel John 6:41-51 Prepared by: Fr. Peter John Cameron, O.P. 1. Subject Matter •

God feeds us and provides us with the strength (fortitude) we need; our strength comes from Christ who “loved us and handed himself over for us as a sacrificial offering”

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Imitating God

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Christ the living Bread

2. Exegetical Notes •

“The Lord ordered, ‘Get up and eat, else the journey will be too long for you:’” “In chapters 17-18 Elijah gave strength and sustenance to those in need, was fearless in confronting Ahab, and triumphed over the prophets of Baal in spectacular fashion. Here he is fearful and despondent, powerless to sustain himself. The change evokes the theme of the fragility of God’s messengers, seen earlier with the man of God in 1 Kings 13 and more distantly with Moses’ despondency over the burden of leadership (Numbers 11:15). Elijah is revived by the angel’s food; its marvelous qualities recall the food that sustained him and the widow in 1:1416.” (The International Bible Commentary)

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“So be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us:” “Human nature would never achieve its end except in union with God. He must be imitated insofar as it is possible for us to do so—a son must imitate his father. The charity of God has made us his most dear children. Certainly we ought to follow him in love. When someone sinned he was obliged to offer the sacrifice and oblation which was designed for the sin. This is accomplished through Christ who, in order that we might be cleansed from sin and attain to glory, has delivered himself of us.” (St. Thomas Aquinas)

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“I am the living that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever:” “Eating, which preserves life, is here such that it really overcomes and banishes death. It is striking that the death of the fathers in the wilderness is strongly emphasized. This negative event throws into sharper contrast the promise of the life the true bread which comes down

from heaven can give. In addition it is meant to warn the Jews as they mutter in unbelief that they could suffer a similar fate to their fathers.” (Rudolf Schnackenburg) 3. References to the Catechism of the Catholic Church •

1808 Fortitude is the moral virtue that ensures firmness in difficulties and constancy in the pursuit of the good. It strengthens the resolve to resist temptations and to overcome obstacles in the moral life. The virtue of fortitude enables one to conquer fear, even fear of death, and to face trials and persecutions. It disposes one even to renounce and sacrifice his life in defense of a just cause. "The Lord is my strength and my song." "In the world you have tribulation; but be of good cheer, I have overcome the world."

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1694 Incorporated into Christ by Baptism, Christians are "dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus" and so participate in the life of the Risen Lord. Following Christ and united with him, Christians can strive to be "imitators of God as beloved children, and walk in love" by conforming their thoughts, words and actions to the "mind . . . which is yours in Christ Jesus," and by following his example.

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2842 It is impossible to keep the Lord's commandment by imitating the divine model from outside; there has to be a vital participation, coming from the depths of the heart, in the holiness and the mercy and the love of our God.

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1394 As bodily nourishment restores lost strength, so the Eucharist strengthens our charity, which tends to be weakened in daily life; and this living charity wipes away venial sins. By giving himself to us Christ revives our love and enables us to break our disordered attachments to creatures and root ourselves in him: Since Christ died for us out of love, when we celebrate the memorial of his death at the moment of sacrifice we ask that love may be granted to us by the coming of the Holy Spirit. We humbly pray that in the strength of this love by which Christ willed to die for us, we, by receiving the gift of the Holy Spirit, may be able to consider the world as crucified for us, and to be ourselves as crucified to the world. . . . Having received the gift of love, let us die to sin and live for God.

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1406-1407 Jesus said: "I am the living bread that came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; . . . he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and . . . abides in me, and I in him" (Jn 6:51, 54, 56)…. The Eucharist is the heart and the summit of the Church's life, for in it Christ associates his Church and all her members with his sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving offered once for all on the cross to his Father; by this sacrifice he pours out the graces of salvation on his Body which is the Church.

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1419 Having passed from this world to the Father, Christ gives us in the Eucharist the pledge of glory with him. Participation in the Holy Sacrifice identifies us with his Heart, sustains our strength along the pilgrimage of this life, makes us long for eternal life, and unites us even now to the Church in heaven, the Blessed Virgin Mary, and all the saints.

4. Patristic Commentary and Other Authorities •

St. John of Damascus: “May we too be found worthy of God’s sublime compassion, having become imitators of all who have ever been faithful servants of Christ.”

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St. Thomas Aquinas: “Since man is said to be after God’s image in virtue of his intelligent nature, it follows that he is most completely after God’s image in that point in which such a nature can most completely imitate God. Now it does this in so far as it imitates God’s understanding and loving of himself” (I.93.a4).

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St. Thomas Aquinas: “As far as the divine nature is concerned, rational creatures seem to achieve some sort of portraiture in kind, in that they imitate God not only in his being and his living, but also in his understanding” (1.93.a6).

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Ambrosiaster: “When Paul says the Spirit is ‘grieved,’ he speaks metaphorically on our account to show that the Spirit leaves us to our own self-will when we have, so to speak, wounded him by despising his admonitions.”

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St. John Chrysostom: “You are called to imitate God, to become like God. This can happen when you are reconciled to him. Not all children imitate their father, but those who know themselves to be beloved act like beloved children.”

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St. Basil: “For the perfection of life it is necessary to imitate Christ, not only in terms of the meekness, humility, and patience exhibited in his life, but also in terms of his death…How do we achieve a similarity to his death?…What is to be won by this emulation? First of all, it is necessary to break through the form of our past life.”

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St. Jerome: “For though they could not instantaneously become imitators of Christ, it was still a great thing for them if they could be imitators of the imitator. Admittedly much that God has done we humans can hardly be said to imitate. But in the way that he is merciful to all and rains on good and bad, so we may pour out mercy upon all we meet. When we do this, we shall be beloved children. We shall be imitating God himself.”

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Theodoret: “For having called them to be imitators of God, he then urges the same pattern with respect to the Son. the Father has bestowed forgiveness. The Son has loved us and gave up his life for us.”

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St. John Chrysostom: “You spar your friends. Jesus spared his enemies. He suffered on his enemies’ behalf. If you suffer for your enemies as a fragrant offering, you too become an acceptable sacrifice. This is what it means to imitate God."

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St. Catherine of Siena: “First Christ acted, and from his actions he built the way. He taught you more by example than with words, always doing first what he talked about.”

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St. Augustine: “This is the doctrine of grace: none comes, except he be drawn. But whom the Father draws, and whom not, and why He draws one, and not another, presume not to decide, if you would avoid falling into error. Take the doctrine as it is given you: and, if you are not drawn, pray that you may be.”

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St. Ephrem the Syrian: “Take and eat of it, all of you. In this bread you are eating My body. It is the true source of forgiveness.”

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St. John Chrysostom: “In order that we may become members of Christ’s flesh and of his bones not only by love, but in action, let us be blended into that flesh. This is effected by the food that he has freely given to us, desiring to show the love that he has for us. This is why he has mixed up himself with us. He has kneaded up his body with ours, so that we might be one distinct entity, like a body joined to a head. For this belongs to those whose love is strong. This is also what Christ has done in order to lead us into a closer friendship and to show his love for us. He has allowed those who desire him not only to see him but even to

touch, and eat him, and fix their teeth in his flesh and to embrace him and satisfy all their love. Let us then return from that table like lions breathing fire, having become terrible to the devil, ruminating on our head and on the love that he has shown for us.” •

St. Augustine: “They were far from being fit for that heavenly bread and did not know how to hunger for it. For this bread requires the hunger of the inner person.”

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St. John Chrysostom: “He calls Himself the bread of life, because He constitutes one life, both present, and to come.

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Bl. Margaret Ebner, O.P.: “I desired to write down the words that I say as our Lord is elevated at Mass. ‘Lord, I praise you, true God and true man, and ask you, my Lord Jesus Christ, to forgive us all our sins and to take from us all natural defects by your love and grant us yourself with the full grace by which you accomplish your eternal honor in us now and for ever!’ I say that when the priest holds him in his hands. When he elevates him I say, ‘I greet you, Lord of the whole world, only Word of the Father in heaven, only true sacrifice and only living flesh and only totally divine and truly human one. Give us love for you, true hope and perfect love, and strong, firm Christian faith in this life and at the hour of death.’ When he elevates the chalice, I say, ‘I thank you, Lord Christ that you have changed bread and wine into your Holy Body and Blood, that you, Lord Jesus Christ, have deigned in your love, to be offered to your Father by the priest to your eternal honor, and to console, to help and to sanctify us and all Christians living and dead. Now offer yourself today, Lord, for all the evil that we have done against you and for all the good that we have failed to do. And give yourself to us as a sure help in life and in death, and as true power with which we will be able to withstand all human evil by increasing in your heartfelt love.’”

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Venerable John Henry Newman: “What the manna was in the wilderness, that surely is the spiritual manna in the Christian Church the manna in the wilderness was a real gift, taken and eaten; so is the manna in the Church. It is not god’s mercy, or favor, or imputation; it is not a state of grace, or the promise of eternal life, or the privileges of the Gospel;, or the new covenant; it is not, much less, the doctrine of the Gospel, or faith in that doctrine; but it is what our Lord says it is , the gift of his own precious Body and Blood, really given, taken, and eaten as the manna might be.”

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Fr. Hans Urs von Balthasar: “Just as Christ, out of love, ‘offered himself up as a sacrifice’, so his eucharistic attitude must become the motif of Christian life, a life lived in imitation of God’s love, an imitation that can only consist in mutual love, compassion, and forgiveness. Through these the ‘beloved children of God’ become for each other a sort of eucharistic nourishment for the journey—something like food that unexpectedly materializes for our neighbors in the middle of the desert of or lives.”

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Msgr. Luigi Giussani: “The imitation of Christ is possible if man acknowledges himself as the adoptive son of God as Father, as mysteriously participant in God’s nature, chosen by Jesus, Man-God, to be part of him in the baptismal mystery, made a member of his Body.”

5. Examples from the Saints and Other Exemplars •

St. Catherine of Siena is reputed to have lived the last ten years of her life subsisting on the Eucharist. She wrote: "You are the supreme and infinite Good, good above all good; good which is joyful, incomprehensible, inestimable; beauty exceeding all other beauty; wisdom surpassing all wisdom, because You are Wisdom itself. Food of angels, giving Yourself with

fire of love to men! You are the garment which covers our nakedness; You feed us, hungry as we are, with Your sweetness, because You are all sweetness, with no bitterness. Clothe me, O eternal Trinity, clothe me with Yourself, so that I may pass this mortal life in true obedience and in the light of the most holy faith with which You have inebriated my soul." •

Appearing in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings and Silmarillion material, lembas is a special bread made by the Elves, also called waybread in the Common Speech. Shaped into thin cakes, it is very nutritious, stays fresh for months when in its original leaf-wrappings, and is used for sustenance on long journeys. Lembas is a closely guarded secret, and only on rare occasions is it given to non-Elves. Like other products of the Elves, it is offensive to evil creatures. Galadriel gives a large store of lembas to the Fellowship of the Ring upon its departure from Lothlórien. Frodo Baggins and Samwise Gamgee subsist on it through the majority of their journey from there into Mordor. Commentators have noted that lembas has Eucharistic overtones in accordance with Roman Catholic teachings. Lembas literally sustains the hobbits' lives, strength and will, while the Eucharist is the spiritual "Bread of Life." Also, Gollum and other evil creatures cannot abide lembas, while Catholics are instructed not to receive the Eucharist if in the state of mortal sin. Further, the Eucharist is sometimes called viaticum, a Latin term meaning 'for the way,' literally the spiritual food for the Christian's arduous journey through earthly life to heaven. The term viaticum was more commonly heard in Tolkien's day than today. In a private letter, Tolkien acknowledged that lembas bore religious significance.

6. Quotations from Pope Benedict XVI •

“Love is transubstantiation, transformation. Corpus Christi tells us: Yes, there is such a thing as love, and therefore there is transformation, therefore there is hope. And hope gives us the strength to live and face the world.”

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“To follow Christ means to accept the inner essence of the cross, namely the radical love expressed therein, and thus to imitate God himself. For on the cross God revealed himself as the One who pours himself out in prodigal fashion; who surrenders his glory in order to be present for us; who desires to rule the world not by power but by love, and in the weakness of the cross reveals his power which operates so differently from the power of this world’s mighty rulers. To follow Christ, then, means to enter into the self-surrender that is the real heart of love. To follow Christ means to become one who loves as God has loved…In the last analysis, to follow Christ is simply for man to become human by integration into the humanity of God.”

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“We imitate God, we live by God, like God, by entering into Christ’s manner of life. He has climbed down from his divine being and become one of us; he has given himself and does so continually. It is by these little daily virtues, again and again, that we step out of our bitterness, our anger toward others, our refusal to accept the other’s otherness; by them, again and again, we open up to each other in forgiveness. This ‘littleness’ is the concrete form of our being like Christ and living like God, imitating God; he has given himself to us so that we can give ourselves to him and to one another.”

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“Today, the Lord alerts us to the self-sufficiency that puts a limit on his unlimited love. He invites us to imitate his humility, to entrust ourselves to it, to let ourselves be “infected” by it.

He invites us—however lost we may feel—to return home, to let his purifying goodness uplift us and enable us to sit at table with him, with God himself.” •

“To become a Christian means to become incorporated in the Son, in Christ, so that we become ‘sons in the Son.’ This is a sacramental, but also an ethical process…. To become one with Christ means to lose one’s oneself’, to cease to regard one’s own ego as an absolute….The belief that we have all become a single new man in Jesus Christ will always call us to let the separating particularity of our own egos, the self-assertion of human selfhood, melt into the community of the new man Jesus Christ. Whoever believes in Jesus Christ has not only found an ethical model to be imitated privately but is called to break up his own merely private ego and merge into the unity of the body of Christ. The ethic of Christ is essentially an ethic of the body of Christ. Inevitably, therefore, it means losing one’s own ego and becoming one in brotherhood with all those who are in Christ. As an ethic of true self-loss, it necessarily includes the brotherhood of all Christians.”

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“The Lord gives himself to his own as peace. He places himself in their hands. As living bread, he unites the Church and leads men together into the one body of his mercy. We must ask him, then, to teach us how to celebrate the Eucharist truly and how to receive the truth that is love and in this way to become, through him, people of peace.”

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“Everyone who believes in the Son has eternal life. The bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh. Living by God means first of all believing, it means being in touch with him, entering into an inner harmony with him. However, since God himself has become body, since he has come among us, has become one of us (and has not ceased to be one of us, for, of course, he is risen), this ‘believing’ no longer means a kind of reaching out in thought, in questioning, in hope and prayer, toward some great, infinite mystery. Now, belief has itself become incarnate. Believing means living by the God whose Body is in the Church; it means being nourished by this embodied God who encounters us in the sacraments and who has ultimately become so incarnate that in the Eucharist he gives himself to us as Body, so that we can enter into his life: just as he lives for us, so we live by him and for him.”

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Quotes from Sacramentum Caritatis: - 7 “In the Eucharist Jesus does not give us a ‘thing,’ but himself. He thus gives us the totality of his life and reveals the ultimate origin of this love.” - 8 “In the bread and wine…God’s whole life encounters us…. It is in Christ…that we have become sharers of God’s inmost life. Jesus Christ…makes us, in the gift of the Eucharist, sharers in God’s own life.” - 11 “[Through the Eucharist] we enter into the very dynamic of Jesus’ self-giving…. The substantial conversion of bread and wine into his body and blood introduces…a change meant to set off a process which transforms reality, a process leading ultimately to the transfiguration of the entire world.” - 71 “The Eucharist, since it embraces the concrete, everyday existence of the believer, makes possible, day by day, the progressive transfiguration of all those called by grace to reflect the image of the Son of God. There is nothing authentically human—our thoughts and affections, our words and deeds—that does not find in the sacrament of the Eucharist the form it needs to be lived to the full.”

- 77 “Today there is a need to rediscover that Jesus Christ is not just a private conviction or an abstract idea, but a real person whose becoming part of human history is capable of renewing the life of every man and woman. The Eucharist, as the source and summit of the Church’s life and mission, must be translated into spirituality…. An integral part of the eucharistic form of the Christian life is a new way of thinking.” 7. Other Considerations •

The prophet Elijah, done in by his travails and his daylong trek through the desert, sits down and prays for death. What Elijah fatalistically takes as the end God intends as a glorious beginning. The Lord himself will miraculously produce a hearth cake and jug of water. The Lord himself will send an angel to Elijah to “touch him and order him to get up and eat.” Left to our own minds—our ideas and devices—we judge the fact of our inability as the sure sign of our demise. But Jesus says: “Stop murmuring among yourselves.” That is: Stop applying a measure to your circumstances, to reality in general, and to Christ himself that is reductive and inadequate. Our “murmuring” is the desert that gets us down. Just as God himself provides us with food, God himself will provide us with the measure for judging reality, namely, Jesus Christ his Son. If we live in our thoughts, any experience of travail or lack will lead us to defeat. Yet, if we are attentive to the need that we are, we will acknowledge that that need is leading us somewhere…that it is moving us, not to give up in pessimism and despair, but to call out to the One who is the author of our need, not begging for death but for life! Jesus says, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him,” and the Father draws us to his Son by way of our hunger (witness the same pattern in the return of the prodigal son). After Elijah ate the heaven-sent bread, he walked for forty days and forty nights to the mountain of God. When we eat “the living bread that came down from heaven” that Jesus gives, we “live forever”, that is, even in our exhaustion, our despondency, and our desolation, we taste new life. We act as “imitators of God” by holding fast to the Event of the Bread of Life instead of to our own barren understanding. Not an angel but the Bread of Life himself touches us, raises us up, and sends us forth to face reality and live.

Recommended Resources Benedict XVI, Pope. Benedictus. Yonkers: Magnificat, 2006. _______________. Sacramentum Caritatis (Sacrament of Charity). Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation. 2007. Biblia Clerus: http://www.clerus.org/bibliaclerus/index_eng.html Cameron, Peter John. To Praise, To Bless, To Preach—Cycle B. Huntington: Our Sunday Visitor, 1999. Hahn, Scott: http://www.salvationhistory.com/library/scripture/churchandbible/homilyhelps/homilyhelps.cfm. Martin, Francis: http://www.hasnehmedia.com/homilies.shtml