20th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Proverbs 9:1-6 Ephesians 5:15-20 John 6:51-58
For the fourth Sunday in a row we read from the Sixth Chapter of Saint John’s Gospel. This Chapter starts off recounting the great miracle of the feeding of the Five Thousand. It continues to describe how the multitudes followed the Lord trying to gain more and more from their association with him. The new teaching that he gives them about the ‘The Bread of Life’ shocks them. But they want to hear more. Next week’s Gospel will show us how the disciples of Jesus are called to make their choice of following Him or ‘going away’. Today’s gospel is about the reality of the Bread and Wine.
The response to the Psalm today, ‘Taste and see that the Lord is good’, is indeed a generous invitation. Eating together with other people is part of social life and it has long been the way to extend hospitality, to express friendship and to share company and the good things we have received. Of course, sometimes we invite people because ‘we have to’ and sometimes we accept invitations because there is no way out! Such occasions are not life-giving. When the host is generous and the guest is appreciative the hospitality is real and full of life.
Thankfully, most times when food is shared it is a statement of friendship: ‘we welcome you to our table and into our lives’. This is very much the case when Jesus offers us ‘bread’. He offers us friendship of a very special kind in terms of intimacy and permanence: Intimacy – ‘whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives in me and I live in them’: Permanence – anyone ‘who does eat my flesh and drink my blood will live forever’.
This, surely, is the highest form of friendship and it is expressed in terms of food and hospitality. Nothing enriches life like a good friendship and it is great to know that no matter what happens there’s somebody there for us. That’s what Our Lord is saying to us in today’s Gospel reading – ‘I am there for you as your intimate and permanent friend!’
But friendship has two sides. The other side of this friendship is our response, our being there for Him. Being there for the Lord means being part of what He is and what He does. What the Lord does is the Mission given him by the Father. So, friendship with Jesus presents us with the challenge of identifying ourselves in the public image as ‘Christian’. This is not only a name, but a commitment. It challenges us to make time for the Lord in prayer; to live by. His commandments; to witness to him in community; to give thanks for all that we have received; to offer the sacrifice that all this may entail, for the building of the Church. In return, His promise to us is that we will live forever.