Homily for the 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
READINGS:
Responsorial Psalm: Ps. 145:10-11, 15-16, 17-18
Second Reading: Ephesians 4:1-6
Gospel: John 6:1-15
FOCUS: Our greatest human hunger is a
hunger for God – and only He will satisfy that hunger.
Location: Basilica of Saint Francis
Xavier (Dyersville, IA) – 5 p.m. Saturday & 7 a.m. Sunday
Saint Paul’s Catholic Church (Worthington, IA) – 9 a.m. Sunday
Date: Sunday July 29th,
2012 (17th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B)Responsorial Psalm: Ps. 145:10-11, 15-16, 17-18
Second Reading: Ephesians 4:1-6
Gospel: John 6:1-15
The Greatest
Human Hunger is the Hunger for God
The
story of the feeding of the five thousand is unique because it appears in all
four of the Gospels. We’ve been
listening recently to readings from St. Mark’s Gospel, but over the next four
weeks – actually for the entire month of August – the Gospel passages will all
come from the famous 6th chapter of St. John’s Gospel – the chapter
in which Jesus begins His “Bread of Life Discourse.” This passage is uniquely situated at the very
beginning of that discourse as a kind of precursor to what will follow. This is a very important chapter of the Bible
for us as Catholics, because it’s part of the basis for what we believe about
the Eucharist. But I’ll get more into
that during my homilies for the month of August. Here and now, I’d like to talk about the
subject of hunger.
To
feel hungry is a basic human experience.
Our experience of hunger reminds us that we’re not self-sustaining; we
need to be sustained by something outside of ourselves – by food and drink. We know that if we didn’t eat and drink, we’d
eventually die. We get hungry and we
know we need to eat. We get thirsty and we
know we need to drink.
We
might think for a moment about all the hungry people in the world who go
without the basic necessities of life – food, drink, shelter, and clothing,
among other things. The Missionaries of
Charity, for instance, and their work among the poor people of India come to
mind. They have devoted themselves to
helping the poorest of the poor all over the world – people who are always
hungry, who don’t have enough to eat, who daily face the possibility of
starvation, and who are most in need of life’s necessities.
Blessed
Mother Theresa of Calcutta once said, “If
you can’t feed a hundred people, then feed just one.” She also said, “The hunger for love is much
more difficult to remove than the hunger for bread.” She clearly
sought to follow the example of the charity of Christ – His love for the poor,
the hungry, the unloved, and the forgotten.
It was the charity of Christ that she wanted to share with the poor and
hungry people she encountered. She desired
to care not only for peoples’ bodies, but also – and more importantly – for their
souls. She wanted to address not only
the poverty of living without food and drink, but also the poverty of living
without God, Who alone can satisfy the hungers and the thirsts of the human
heart.
Physical hunger is an important need
to address in people’s lives, but spiritual hunger is an even more powerful
need – it’s the hunger and thirst we have as human beings for the presence of God.
In the Gospel, Jesus was clearly in
touch with the peoples’ physical hunger.
He put Philip and Andrew to the test about the need to feed the
people. And when they failed to
understand the Lord’s power, He worked a most amazing miracle for them; He took
the five barley loaves and the two fish, and after He had given thanks, had
them distributed to the hungry people.
And then, “When they had had their
fill, He said to His disciples, ‘Gather the fragments left over, so that
nothing will be wasted.’ So they
collected them, and filled twelve wicker baskets with fragments from the five
barley loaves that had been more than they could eat.”
Jesus created a super-abundance of
food – more than enough to feed the vast crowd of five thousand people. But, in the language of St. John’s Gospel,
this was only a “sign” – a testimony to the identity of the One Who had come
from God. After He had fed the people’s
physical hunger, they realized that they were still hungry for something more,
because “When the people saw the sign He
had done, they said, ‘This is truly the Prophet, the one who is to come into
the world.’” The food that Jesus
multiplied fed their physical hunger, but only the One who had multiplied those
simple elements could feed their deeper, spiritual hunger.
But they still didn’t get it – “Since Jesus knew that they were going to
come and carry Him to make Him king, He withdrew again to the mountain alone.”
Sometimes, no matter what you say or do,
people will still miss the point. These
people also missed the point – they saw that Jesus was able to feed the hungry
crowd and they wanted to make Him king, not realizing that He didn’t come to
end physical hunger (as important as that is); He came, instead, to end the
hunger of our human hearts – these hearts of ours that are always hoping to
satisfy a deeper and more profound hunger – a spiritual hunger.
And that is the drama of our
time. Everyone’s looking for food when
the more important thing is the search for God.
To be very honest, we are living in a cultural context that has removed
itself more and more from God. We’ve
begun looking more for bread than we are for faith; we’ve begun looking more
for temporal goods than we are for spiritual goods; we’ve begun to place a
greater priority on other commitments than on our commitment to God. Somehow, God has become optional rather than
essential – something you can either take or leave rather than something you
can’t live without.
And so it’s no wonder that we’ve lost
our way – socially and spiritually. We’ve
drastically inverted our priorities. It
seems that popular culture is ready to begin an all-out war on religion and
God. Some people advocate having the
phrase “under God” taken out of the Pledge of Allegiance. Some people advocate overturning God’s plan
for marriage and the family. Some people
forbid prayer in any kind of public place.
Some people try to tell Christians that they can’t act on their
fundamental beliefs as owners and operators of business.
But there is hope – there’s always
hope. Even though culture may change –
and sometimes for the worse – our human hearts remain the same. It will always be true that only God can
truly satisfy us. The good news of the
Gospel continues to be proclaimed all over the world and every day more and
more people are embracing faith in the God who alone can feed our spiritual
hunger. And we continue to celebrate the
Most Holy Eucharist – the food that will really satisfy us, the food that can
lead us to eternal life, the food and the drink that will truly satisfy the
hungers and the thirsts of our hearts.
And so let us turn to Jesus not for
the multiplication of loaves and fish, but for the food which is His Body and
the drink which is His Blood. And right here
– at this sacred altar – God will satisfy our hunger for food and our thirst for
drink, and more importantly, our spiritual hunger for Him.
