20th Sunday Ordinary Time
Fr. Peter Robinson
Preached: August 18, 2024
One of the pleasures at our weekend masses is noticing how often the Lectionary readings fit together. Obviously, a great deal of scholarship (and prayer) have gone into the Lectionary’s current form. For example, did you notice that (on Sundays) we follow a three-year cycle of Bible readings — from the OT, the Psalms, from the NT, and then a Gospel text; whereas on weekdays, we follow a two-year cycle. At Sunday mass, we read through one Gospel per single year. We Catholics are truly “people of the Book” (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
In today’s OT reading, we turn in the OT to Proverbs 9. Here, God’s divine Wisdom is represented as a beautiful woman. Why? Perhaps because the word “wisdom” is in the feminine gender in both Greek and Hebrew. Whatever the reason, this lovely woman, Wisdom, invites to her banquet all who are willing to come. There is only one qualification, though: If you wish to RSVP with a yes, you need to be simple and open to learning (that is, people whom Jesus called “meek and humble of heart”).
You see, when the Israelite refugees returned from 70 years of Exile in Babylon. They found Jerusalem and the Temple utterly devastated. Think, for a moment, of those grainy black-and-white photos you have seen of European cities after WW 2. The returning Israelites realized that they could NOT rely on their own strength and wisdom. They had to turn to God in humility and confidence. And therein lies a lesson — God can use your most devastating experiences to make you a more spiritual person, more like Jesus himself.
Now, I know we are still several months out from Christmas. But think of the Bible readings we have all heard about the birth of Christ, where all the characters are poor and ordinary folk. Think of the parents of John the Baptist and of Jesus … of the shepherds … of the senior citizens, Simeon and Anna in the Temple. Then Jesus arrives, and whom does he meet with? He scandalizes the religious leaders by dining and relaxing with his disreputable and disadvantaged friends. And Jesus still does so — look around at all the ordinary people here right now. These he invites to the banquet of the Eucharist, including even me! We simply come acknowledging our times of helplessness and need.
Think then of the Jesus we see in our Gospel reading from St. John. Here we see Christ as the Wisdom of God. It is Christ, who must be accepted and believed. It is Christ himself, who is the sacrament of the bread of life
Now, I think we would all agree that we are very diet-conscious these days. It is quite obvious that the food we eat affects us. So, please take this spiritual insight with you into this coming week: By eating Christ (sacramentally) we are assimilated into him. As the saying goes, “we become what we eat.”
However, this truth is also critical: If I am feeling sick, food does me no good — it can even do me harm. So, if I eat Christ sacramentally without wanting to be moulded into him, it does me no good at all. St. Augustine made that point 1600 years ago: That if we consume Christ in the mass in an unbelieving manner, then the Host passes through us like any other piece of bread.
Clearly, the same applies to drinking (sacramentally) the blood of Christ. Blood is the sign of life – if there is no blood, there is no life. This means that, if I receive Christ’s blood I take on his life, his divine life … as the gift of God. But that privilege has alarming side-effects: It means I share Christ’s life with other Christians. We all live with the same life’s blood. So, do I really share my life, my talents, my goods with others in our parish … knowing that I share the same bloodstream with my sisters and brothers at mass?
Let me close with a challenge by Venerable Fulton Sheen. He was a beloved American bishop, who died in 1979. And hold in the back of your mind the image of Lady Wisdom as I read the quote:
“When a man loves a woman, he has to become worthy of her. The higher her virtue, the more noble her character, the more devoted she is to truth, justice, goodness, the more a man has to aspire to be worthy of her. The history of civilization could actually be written in terms of the level of its women.”
Mary, Seat of Wisdom, pray for us …
