August 9, 2009
Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
By Rev. Joe McCloskey, S.J.
[Elijah] lay down and fell asleep under the broom tree, but then an angel touched him and ordered him to get up and eat. He looked and there at his head was a hearth cake and a jug of water. After he ate and drank, he lay down again, but the angel of the LORD came back a second time, touched him, and ordered, “Get up and eat, else the journey will be too long for you!” 1 Kings 19:5-7
This is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world. John 6:50-51
Piety
“Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.” The refrain for this Sunday is an invitation to love. To love another so much that you would want to eat them up. The truth of genuine love is an invitation to oneness. How can I love another and not want to share their life? How easy is it to be with people who make us comfortable! We enjoy another for what pleasures us in their way of thinking and acting. Love goes a lot further. When we love another we become the giver in how we share our life with the other. The ways that we try to make the other comfortable and how we help them are reflections of our love for another. How much of self we share with the other is a good measure of our love. Christ gives all of himself. Eucharist is total gift. Christ holds nothing back of himself. He is willing to be all of us in our very act of communicating. Christ brings us into himself by our sharing Eucharist. He gives us life everlasting as the promise of the ultimate meaning of Eucharist. He would have us with him for all eternity.
Study
Love includes sacrifice. Parents give their lives for their children. A job that there is not enough pay for is parenthood. Christ by his sacrifice takes to himself all our sinfulness in his dying for us on the cross. The Tree of Glory is shared by us when we sacrifice ourselves for our friends and our families.
Love includes the good and the bad of another. We love the person, not necessarily what they do. The claim Christ has on our hearts comes from the Father. Unless the Father draws us to Christ we would never come to see His cross as the glory of God’s love for us in his Son. Because the Father draws us to his Son, the Son will raise us up on the last day. Our claim on heaven is our closeness to Christ. There is so much about Christ that we come to love by realizing that all love is a reflection of Christ in our brothers and sisters. Therein lays the Challenge: “to be imitators of God as beloved children.” Thus we live in love as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us as a sacrificial offering to God. How we sacrifice ourselves, bring the joy Paul talks about in Col. 1, 24; thereby we fill up what is wanting to the suffering of Christ’s body, the Church. We become present to Christ by our oneness with the hungry and the thirsty of life. We become Christ‘s presence to our world.
Action
The Body and the Blood of Christ open our hearts and help us to reach beyond our limitations to the problems of our world. Eucharist makes us sensitive to how Christ would handle the problems we face in life. Communion graces us with the energy and the love necessary to make a difference in our world of indifference. My years of communicating almost every day created a hunger for what Christ is in my live. How could I be any different than the Christ that would empty himself out of Godness to be so completely one with us? We are truly saved by the humanness of Christ. It is too easy to say that God can not suffer and forget that it is Christ in his humanness that is putting himself out for us. The call to do likewise is the call for divine likeness in our hearts that would cuddle up to Christ that we could be totally his.
