The 20th Sunday of the Year Prov 9:1-6 & 12-15; Eph 5:15-20; Jn 6:51-58 (Year B)
We published this column a week early in our August 10 issue. We apologise for the error
“Wisdom has built herself a house, she has laid her table. To the fool she says, ‘Come and eat my bread and drink the wine that I have prepared. Leave your folly and you will live. Walk in the ways of perception.’ ”
The destruction of Jerusalem and the Babylonian exile devastated Israel’s surviving remnant. Gone was the self-confidence that had been so neglectful of God’s presence, its place taken by a humility that hungered for the reassurance of God’s presence.
Throughout the Old Testament the prophets responded to this hunger for God. Not only would God restore his people; his salvation would be as a banquet satisfying and going beyond every longing.
“On this mountain the Lord of hosts will prepare for all peoples a banquet of rich food. He will remove the mourning veil covering all peoples and the shroud enwrapping all nations.”
The Book of Proverbs understood this banquet as a God-given wisdom and perception, a perception that feeds the spirit.
“Revere the Lord, you his saints. They lack nothing, those who revere him. Strong lions suffer want and go hungry but those who seek the Lord lack no blessing.”
We, no less than those Babylonian exiles, hunger for the presence of God. We hunger for God’s love, for his forgiveness and healing. In the Blessed Sacrament Jesus answers our many hungers as the living bread which has come down from heaven.
In humble prayer let us seek the Lord before the Blessed Sacrament. Let us confess that without him the inner self, known and loved by God, begins to die.
“I tell you most solemnly, if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you will not have life in you. Anyone who does eat my flesh and drink my blood has eternal life.”
Eating and drinking does more than feed the stomach, it establishes a life-giving relationship with the one who provides both table and food.
“He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives in me and I live in him. As I, who am sent by the living Father, myself draw life from the Father, so whoever eats me will draw life from me.”
To kneel in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament is to be held in the eternal fellowship of the Father and the Son. It is, even now, to live that eternal life promised by Father and Son.
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