Sunday Reading Reflections:

22nd Sunday in Ordinary Time
August 30, 2009

by Larry Gillick, S.J.
Deglman Center for Ignatian Spirituality

PRE-PRAYERING:

We are praying for the grace to want to do what is holy, rather than have to do what is expected. This is very difficult for us in the western world. We love fulfilling exactly the expectations of others or an organization and when we do, well, we are guiltless and perfect, in a sense. Completing expectations is not the heart of a relationship. Jesus is inviting us to pray with the truth of his love and the truth of our response. We pray for his love to wash our hearts of fearing God so that when we go to the market and return from the market we will have washed that market with our presence. We will return and bless the potatoes and onions and the dirt from which they have come. We can pray with dirty hands and cleaner hearts to extend those dirty hands in praise of the God who dirtied himself by walking in our mud.

REFLECTION:

The laws and customs which Moses will offer to God’s people, Israel, and which follow in subsequent chapters, are meant as invitations to life and freedom rather than burdens to which to be enslaved. In the previous chapter leading to our reading today from Deuteronomy, Moses has given instructions to the men to prepare to wage war so as to gain their new homeland. The land becomes a sacred reminder of the fruitfulness which derives from trusting the faithful God.

What we hear is an instruction about the wisdom behind these laws and customs. They are wise because they come from the God of Wisdom, the Source of Life. They are wise, because they will prove to be more powerful and influential in establishing their new home than the power of arms waging war. The inhabitants will be won over to believing in the “one God” when they see how well the Israelites live together, fruitfully, justly, and trustingly in their “one God”.
The way the Jews are to live will reveal not only their intelligence, but the closeness of their God to them. This God cares for them, guides them and has revealed to them how to take care of the land and other gifts they have received.

We return to Mark’s Gospel today and find Jesus inviting the scribes and Pharisees to reflect on the why of their customs rather than the what. The religious officials of the Jews have been noticing that Jesus and his disciples do not keep the “traditions” of the “elders”. The “law” is one thing, but these “traditions” are added practices which extend the “law” and the power and prestige of the Rabbis who advance them. Washing of hands and cups is the center of the problem in this reading, but there are other accretions to the “law” to which Jesus takes exception.

The Law of Moses was part of the Covenant which God made with the Jews and was meant to help their relationship or response to this covenanting God. In a sense God is saying, “I have done all these great things for you; keeping these laws and customs is how you live, more than say, thank you.” The practices and little traditions have gotten in the way. They have become responses to the religious officials. The keeping of these has become more important than keeping the relationship which God has initiated, alive in their hearts. “This nation honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me”.
Love is shown in deeds, but so is sham. Having dirt under ones nails comes from doing something outside the body. The deeds of evil come from within and are not erased by washing hands or saucers. Lady Macbeth has been washing the spots off her hands for centuries and will never rid herself of the “damn spot” by all that scrubbing. The list of interior attitudes is quite extensive and encompassing. Jesus did not mince words or leave much to legal interpretation. Worship of God comes from the heart, but the heart hears these other calls as well. As always, Jesus offers the invitation to struggle against foreign voices and do those things which will purify the heart, spirit and soul. In senior year of high school, a Jesuit place, we were told that kissing girls could be dangerous. To avoid such, one of the rules was that a kiss should last only as long as one could say “grapefruit”. It was hard to imagine kissing while saying that word. After some discussion, we decided that saying “graaaaaaaaaaaaape fruuuuuuuuuuuit” was well within the legal limit. We love to figure out ways to wiggle within the boundaries of self-righteousness. How far could we go before having to line up during Monday-morning mass to go to Confession? We were all budding lawyers as well as budding lovers.

Jesus, as Moses before him, offers us reminders of the relationship which God has extended to us. He embraces our interior with its fragilities. The external actions will reflect the status of the battle inside. To pretend that there is no battle going on is to be in delusion. Pretending by strict conformity to rules, laws, customs, and traditions out of fear, may look good, but eventually will result in a confusion, distraction, and disorder of soul and life. Externals are a revelation of a truth rather than a cover-up for a lie. Jesus came to give us our truth and invites us to reveal it.

“O Lord, how great is the depth of the kindness which you have shown to those who love you.” Ps. 31

Sunday Reading Reflections:

21st Sunday in Ordinary Time

August 23rd, 2009
by Larry Gillick, S.J.
Deglman Center for Ignatian Spirituality

PREPRAYING

We are praying with our being invited to declare our personal position in relationship to Jesus in TODAY’S readings. We are aware of all the recent controversies Jesus has been having with his Jewish listeners about his being the “bread of life” and being told to eat his flesh. Jesus creates controversies all through the four Gospels. His invitations reach deeply into our human fears, pride, and self-images.
We pray to receive Jesus’ invitations to follow him from one Eucharistic encounter to the next. We pray that our beliefs may move from our heads through our hearts and hands into the hands, hearts and minds of his sisters and brothers. Our belief in his being, “the Holy one of God”, is a commitment to our letting his life be more a part of our own. We pray to see if there is enough room for both of us in our own personal lives.

REFLECTION

Joshua, in the final two chapters of this book, is having a great farewell celebration. In the previous chapter to the one from which our First Reading is taken, Joshua tells the people of Israel to follow the laws and customs of their covenantal relationship with the Lord. God has been fighting against their enemies and now the land is their own.
In our reading, we skip past a kind of “victory lap” in which Joshua relates specifically the history of the Lord’s care for Israel. In those verses he calls to mind the great people and events that constitute them as God’s own people. What we do hear is the consequence or response Joshua offers his listeners.

Based on all that the Lord has done for Israel, which way will they choose? They have been invited to look backwards through their national history to see God’s goodness to them. Joshua is asking them about their looking forward. Joshua, as Moses’ replacement declares that he and his folks choose the Lord. The people reply that they too know their history and they are sticking with the winner who has made them victorious themselves.

In the Gospel, we have reached finally the great conclusion of the discussion about Jesus’ being the “Bread of Life”, and his being the one ”sent”. Some of His disciples find these words offensive to their senses and so boggle their minds. They have to leave and return to their former ways of seeing, thinking and believing. They did see the miraculous distribution of bread and fish and ate their fill. Their senses told them something they could grasp. Jesus stretches their minds and asks them to be as open to something even more miraculous, but which goes beyond the information provided by the senses. They choose the path of the “flesh” while Jesus is inviting them to walk the walk of the Spirit. They stumble over what they can not see or imagine.
Many leave, but some stay including Peter. So Jesus puts the big question to them and him, “Do you also want to leave?” As with Joshua, Peter professes that they have seen enough to trust what they can not see with the eyes of their “flesh”.

This communal affirmation comes at the end of the first half of John’s Gospel’s “Book of Signs” in which John presents Jesus’ doing “signs” which actions are sense-based, but intended to lead to such an act of believing as we hear from Peter. In other sections of this “book of Signs”, there are miracles of water becoming wine; blind and lame being healed as well as bread being multiplied. There is evidence, but just enough to allow the act of believing to be made freely, that is that non-believing is also possible. Why do some believe and others just “be leaving”? Jesus tells us that the “spirit” draws some and the “flesh” attracts others.

Most of you are reading this on the Internet. After finishing, you can bring up an almost miraculous amount of data, facts, records, pictures, and collections. You may even grow impatient as you search when something does not come up immediately or you have to click a few more times. Hand-held phones, MP3s, Ipods and all kinds of other devices, allow you to take a great amount of this anywhere you go and you will have maps in your palms and lights to make sure you get there even in the dark. When you do arrive you can phone or email those whom you left behind to tell them you are safe, and to check if there is anything “new”.
I sometimes think faith of any kind and trust in anybody has been injured by our increased reliance on technology .We desire to the point of demanding to see the replay before the play. Signs lead only to wanting clarity and conviction.

It seems that faith in the “beyond” or “transcendent” or “God” was more a part of a time past when night was dark, trails and roads led “out there” and signs were both indicators and invitations to continue.

God continues to offer us invitations, “signs” which are invitations to trust, while they can also be taken as nothing more than non-“sense” and not to be followed. There are signs that can indicate there is no God, that religion is absurd and the Church an “opiate of the people”. Belief is a non-sense experience, in a sense. Faith is a human way of responding to what we sense, but our senses can take us only to the threshold where the signs say, “Go beyond!” Living with and through faith is not an easy way to go. We rely on the Spirit of God to draw us beyond what we can see, taste, touch and reason to. For us, it is the way we desire to go against our technological security-centered human inclinations.

As for me, I’m with Peter who has seen enough, but not enough as his stumblings will prove. As for me, I think after finishing this, I will turn off the computer, the lights, the phones, the radio, the TV, and try to believe that there is life without them all.

“Lord, the earth is filled with your gifts from heaven;” Ps. 104

Sunday Reading Reflections:

20th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
Sunday, August 16, 2009

Proverbs 9:1-6

In this reading from Proverbs, God is imaged as Wisdom and Wisdom is depicted as a woman. She has built a house with seven pillars in preparation for an extraordinarily lavish banquet of meat and wine. She prepares the banquet herself, sets the table, sends out her female servants, and offers a general invitation to the 'simple' or ignorant, the least likely of guests. Her invitation is to share the bread and wine that offer life and the 'way of insight'.

John 6:51-58

If the eucharistic overtones were subtly present in last week's gospel passage (John 6:41-51), they become quite overt as the Johannine Jesus responds to yet another objection from his opponents in this week's gospel.

Like the Israelites of old in the desert wanderings, they are more than ready to grumble: 'How can this man give us his flesh to eat? (6:52).' Jesus does not really respond to the question 'How ...' Rather, he goes on to tell his hearers that 'life' for them depends on their eating his flesh and drinking his blood.

The Johannine Jesus uses the present as well as the future tense. The life they experience in eating his flesh and drinking his blood is a present reality for them as well as a promise of on-going life. Life for the Israelites was in the blood: blood poured out meant life poured out. Clearly 'life' is being used in John 6 symbolically for the quality of life the believers have come to know through their incorporation into the community of the baptised, the sort of life that is not destroyed by death.

Life in the community unites the believers intimately with Jesus as well as with the God of Israel, whom the Johannine Jesus generally calls 'Father'.

The first reading for today reminds us that other metaphors such as Wisdom were available to those of Jewish heritage for portraying the divine. In John's discourse, Jesus becomes wisdom extending an invitation to the banquet of life.

We keep accepting that invitation. It is well to remember that one never enjoys a banquet alone. It is always shared with others who accept the same invitation. In the strength of the sustenance we receive in this banquet, we are also invited to bring a quality of life to those who struggle to exist. The potential for this is as boundless as the generosity of our God enfleshed in Jesus.


by Sr. Veronica Lawson RSM (East Ballarat)