Homily for the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time (B)
If there were an Olympic event for complaining, the ancient Israelites just might take the gold medal. Today, after being liberated from slavery, they ask to go back, forgetting the oppression they suffered in Egypt and remembering the country as an ancient Olive Garden with fleshpots and never-ending bread sticks. Hearing their complaint, God sends them manna and quail to eat, but we know that soon enough they’ll start complaining again—“Manna again? We want leaks and onions, not these leftovers!” And they’ll attack Moses: “Why’d you have to lead us out here? Weren’t there enough graves in Egypt?”
But, if complaining were an Olympic event, the competition would be fierce. I suspect there’s something deep in our human nature—some survival mechanism from caveman days that made our ancestors less likely to be eaten by sabretooth tigers or stomped on by wooly mammoths if they were quicker to see the negative than the positive, more inclined to fear than to gratitude. The problem is if you’re not being stalked by a sabretooth tiger, this instinct for the negative sometimes results in clubbing our friends or retreating into the darkness of our own self-constructed caves.
When the Israelites complain, the Lord does respond to their needs, and gives them—miraculously—the bread that sustains them. Evil and suffering are a part of our world, and it is necessary and legitimate to name them. It’s not wrong to complain to the Lord in prayer; we shouldn’t imagine that all of our prayers must be neat and pretty. When we pray, we should start with what’s most honest. God can handle it. But, in my experience, when I sincerely pray, I am often not quite the same at the end of the prayer as I was at the beginning. Encountering God means being transformed.
Paul speaks about this transformation in his letter to the Ephesians, telling Christians they “must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds.” He warns them against “deceitful desires,” and repeats that they must “be renewed in the spirit of [their] minds.” What Paul is telling the Ephesians is that to be a Christian means a deep transformation in the way we see the world, the way we think about the world, in what we desire.
One of the forms this transformation often takes is to move from complaint to gratitude. Such a move isn’t easy. Developing the habit of gratitude, I think, requires overcoming the defensive caveman instinct that makes us see the negative first. Sometimes, to be honest, our modern Catholic churches seem like Olympic training facilities for complaining competitions. There’s so much negativity about the Church in the corporate media and among our cultural elites that, even if we profess to be Catholic, we pick that up. But this is, to use Paul’s phrase, seeing the world “as the Gentiles do.” And let’s be honest: the Church is a two-thousand-year-old institution made up of more than a billion members; if you want to complain, you’ll be able to find something. But what if, instead of repeating the complaints the world feeds us, we began with gratitude for, oh say, the resurrection, the forgiveness of sins, the Body and Blood of Jesus, the unmerited gift of creation, life itself? Starting with gratitude means that when we do have a complaint, it is likely to be a little more constructive and a little less entitled.
Even if we are religious—if we pray and participate in religious practices—Christianity still requires a transformation of us. At the beginning of the Gospels, Jesus observes rather wryly that people are coming to him because they ate the loaves and saw signs. He provided free food and entertainment. They don’t want discipleship, he implies; they want never-ending breadsticks. And very often we do approach God and our religion as a means of getting what we want. This is the religiosity of pagans. If we sacrifice to the gods, maybe they will give us what we want. If we honor the spirits, maybe they’ll provide us with good weather, a good harvest, or a good hunt. Maybe they’ll take our side, instead of our enemies’.
There is, to be sure, nothing wrong with praying for what we want, and our religion does provide us with many good things. Jesus does feed the hungry crowd with loaves of bread. But he doesn’t stop there. Indeed, he says that if we stop there, we’ve missed the whole point. “I am the bread of life,” he says, “whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.” If we use God to get what we want, we won’t end up with very much. But if we follow him, let him take the lead and conform our desires to his desires for us, we’ll find ourselves hungry for eternal life and, perhaps, unsatisfied with those things we once desired. There is a choice to be made, whether we will become disciples or remain satisfied with being religious consumers.
I’ll close with one concrete suggestion for changing our way of thinking, which, several years ago, changed I understood how to pray at Mass. Often, we ask ourselves, “What am I getting out of Mass?” That’s not wrong, but a better question is, “What am I offering at Mass?” In fact, there is a point in the liturgy designed, as it were, for us to make an offering, for us, in prayer, to reflect on what we wish to give the Lord from our lives and from the gifts he has given us. It’s called the “offertory,” when the gifts of bread and wine are brought to the altar. And just as those meager gifts are, through the power of God, transformed into the Body and Blood of Jesus, the Bread of Life, so too whatever part of our lives we offer to God, he can and will transform. The best question is not, what do I get, but what do I give because it is in giving that we receive.
You have probably heard that the word “eucharist” comes from the Greek word for “thanksgiving.” And that word gives us some indication of the spirit of our offering, and the spirit in which we might most fruitfully participate at Mass. We voice our needs, our desires, even our complaints, but we do so in gratitude. We just might find that if we begin with an offering of thanks, we will receive in return what Paul calls, “a new self, created in God’s way in righteousness and holiness of truth.”
Readings: Ex 16:2-4, 12-15; Eph 4:17, 20-24; Jn 6:24-35
August 4, 2024
St. Isaac Jogues Church, Rapid City, South Dakota
Tony Lusvardi, S.J. 