A Commentary and Reflection on the Readings for the 18th Sunday of Ordinary Time – Year B. The Liturgical Sense of the Scriptures Podcast, by Catholic Author and Theologian David L. Gray. READINGS: Exodus 16:2-4, 12-15, Ephesians 4:17, 20-24, and John 6:24-35.
The Liturgy of the Catholic Mass is the Richness of God’s Overabundance
On the 18th Sunday of Ordinary Time – Year B, the readings take a second detour from the Gospel of Mark to delve into the dialogues on the Eucharistic Path to Salvation found in the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John. The Roman Catholic Church’s lectionary is structured to encompass an extensive array of Biblical passages across a three-year cycle, offering believers a rich tapestry of sacred Scripture. Apart from the customary readings from John’s Gospel in the Easter Season and certain Solemnities, Year A typically focuses on the Gospel of Matthew, while Year C draws primarily from the Gospel of Luke. This distinctive feature of incorporating the Gospel of John outside its regular schedule during Year B gives the faithful a precious moment to thoughtfully engage with and contemplate the Eucharistic Path to Salvation, which is a significant theological pillar in the Johannine narrative.
Building on our reflection from the 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time about Prophet Elisha’s and Jesus’ Miracles of Multiplying food for the nourishment of the body, the scripture passages we explore today, which include Exodus 16:2-4, 12-15, Ephesians 4:17, 20-24, and John 6:24-35, reinforce the message that God possesses an infinite capacity and magnanimous willingness to provide us with what we need for our pilgrimage back to Him. In other words, God never runs short on being God.
However, the message from today’s First Reading is that His human creations can, at times, especially in moments of suffering and temptation, reject their capacity for God in favor of another failed exercise in spiritual myopia and self-victimizing. That is, we tend to forget what God has done for us when we do not feel like He is doing what we believe we need Him to do for us in the present moment. So, when we forget what God has done for us, our only remedy is to preach to ourselves that sermon of lies called, “Woe is me.”
Within the chronology of the 40-year timespan of the Exodus, by the time the Israelites arrived at the wilderness of Sin, “which is between Elim and Mount Sinai,” it had only been about two and a half years since God delivered from bondage to the Egyptians. Yet, by the evidence of their words, spiritual myopia does not take very long to set in, no matter how awesome God has been for us in the past. The Israelites said to Moses and Aaron, “If only we had died at the LORD’s hand in the land of Egypt, as we sat by our kettles of meat and ate our fill of bread! But you have led us into this wilderness to make this whole assembly die of famine!” It is true; I believe that when people feel as though God has forgotten them, the journey to forgetting about God is much more accessible. As the Israelites, we, too, try to deflect our suffering onto other people or situations, but as Moses reminded them, “Your grumbling is not against us, but against the LORD.”
Another name for this human tendency of desiring to return to our former ways or to Egypt, so to speak, is what the Apostle Paul called in today’s Second Reading “the futility” of the mind, which is corrupted with deceitful desires and deformed from the newness of mind and spirit that we have received through the Sacrament of Baptism.
The text continues: “Then Moses said to Aaron, “Tell the whole Israelite community: Approach the LORD, for he has heard your grumbling. But while Aaron was speaking to the whole Israelite community, they turned in the direction of the wilderness, and there the glory of the LORD appeared in the cloud!” Just as we witnessed with Job’s “woe is me” sermon, God’s response is always to remind us of who He is and who we are in light of Him. For the Israelites, the reminder was that you are incapable of providing for yourselves. They could not provide freedom for themselves from the Egyptians or sustenance for themselves in the desert. So, in response to the human failure of “I” cannot, the divine reminder is that I AM, which is always symbolically represented by the issuing of perfect abundance. That is, not only does God give us what we need, but to assure us that it was His work and not ours, He gives us abundantly more than our mere humanity capacity can obtain or contain.
Christ Jesus repeats and fulfills this divine and pedagogical reminder of the failure of the human “I” cannot, in Himself in today’s Gospel Reading when He tells the crowd that came looking for Him to do again what He had done with the sign of the Multiplication of Loaves and Fishes, saying “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.” Again, God is perfect abundance, which extends from the abundance of food and riches in the Garden of Eden to the abundance of divine food and riches in the liturgy of the Catholic Mass today. The Holy Eucharist is the perfect abundance of God par excellence because it is Himself; the great I AM has made Himself an overabundance and richness of food for the body and the soul.
This is just one way the readings at Mass this Sunday connect to the liturgy and how the liturgy is forming us on how to live our lives in the world. Be in the world what you have received through the liturgy.
