18 August 2024 – 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B)

by Fr Joachim Robert

Dear friends,

In our Gospel today, Jesus invites us and acknowledge who He is. It is an invitation by Jesus to express to the Jews who He is. And Jesus says to the crowds:
I am the Living Bread which has come down from heaven. Anyone who eats this bread will live forever and the bread that I shall give is my flesh for the life of the world.

Jesus brings to them this truth of who He is. The truth of God becoming man and dwelling among us and He gives the Eucharist, Himself, the living presence of God, to be among us.

But this was a difficult situation for the Jews to understand. And the Jews started arguing with one another and the argument perhaps was little foolish as well. Or perhaps some may say quite logical. And he says:
How can this man give us flesh to eat?

And Jesus makes them understand the deeper truth about Himself and He says:
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.

And Jesus continues to express to the Jews who He is.

And as we look through the Readings, dear friends, I would like to ask you this question:
Where have we sometimes struggle in our faith?

We have questions, we have doubts that we are unable to make that assent of faith. And when Jesus calls us, He wants us to understand who He is in our lives because the Jews at that point were looking at miracles and what Jesus was doing in the externals. The miracles He has done, the healing He has undertaken and the evil that He was able to cast out.

So the Jews were looking at magnificence and things that are external but Jesus was inviting them to go deeper and deeper and deeper into the identity of what they need to do as individual persons to make that assent of faith and say:
This is the bread come down from heaven.

And I am sure all of us struggle to do this. We struggle to do this because we often are like the Jews. We want to use logic, we want to use our understanding to understand the wisdom of God.

But the First Reading of today invites us and tells us:
Come and eat my bread. Drink the wine I have prepared. Leave your folly and you will live. Walk in the ways of perfection.

You and I, dear friends, are called to walk in this perfection of life that God is offering us. A perfection of life that leads us towards holiness and to configure ourselves more and more into that image and likeness of God. God knows who we are but sometimes we are not able to recognise or accept the image that God has placed or made in us.

So are you made in God’s image and God’s likeness? Yes? No?

How many of you believe that you are made in God’s image and God’s likeness?

I don’t see many hands. I think it is a time to question and ask ourselves:
Do we believe in this truth of faith that God has indeed made us in His image and God’s likeness?

Because if we believe in this wisdom that God has blessed us through the scriptures, we know who we are and as we see in the Gospel today, we will make that assent of faith and believing that Jesus is the bread come down from heaven and Jesus is truly present in the Eucharist.

And that is what God offers us, freely, not because we are intelligent, not because we are superior but because of His love for us. And you and I, dear friends, are called and are invited to spend that time with God.

And again, in the Second Reading as well, from the letter of Saint Paul to the Ephesians, he asked us to take a deep look at ourselves, to spend time with God and ask this question:
Who are we before God?

And he says: Be careful about the sort of lives you lead, like intelligent and not like senseless people.

And here, intelligence Saint Paul means that we need to understand the wisdom of God. And to understand the wisdom of God is to understand Jesus. Because Jesus is the wisdom of God personified. Jesus the wisdom of God who comes and lead us towards eternal life.

And very often, when we spend our time before the Blessed Sacrament or before God or in our prayer, we are called to dialogue with God. And when we dialogue with God, we are called to fill our hearts with the Spirit and attune our hearts to that wisdom of God.

And when we have tasted, dear friends, of:-
~ how God becomes real in our lives,
~ how God is truly present in our lives,
~ how God continues to inspire us and moves us forward from the darkness of our own situation into His light,
we are able to recognise and taste that beauty and see the goodness of God. And in doing so, God invites us to take a deeper step, another step closer to encountering Him at the Eucharist.

And each time, dear friends, we come to receive, each time we step forward to receive the Eucharist, Jesus wants to give that freedom of life that He promises us. The freedom of life that He wants for us to set us free from our bondage of sin.

And let us pray. Let us pray that as we receive the Eucharist today, and as the scriptures reminds us that Jesus, bread come down from heaven who wants to make a dwelling in us, even though we doubt, let us trust that the truth of faith may continue to resonate in our hearts and leads us towards the eternal life that He promises us and to encounter Him at the Eucharist.

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