When Journeying is a Way of Finding God
Exodus 16:2-4, 12-15; Ephesians 4:17, 20-24; John 6:24-35
There is a story told of a Canadian couple whose marriage was going through a turbulence, so they decided to join a group of pilgrims to the Holy Land, so that God may help them to fix their marriage. While in Jerusalem, Israel, the husband died. Everybody advised the woman to bury her husband in Jerusalem, instead of bring the corpse back to Canada, but she refused. The other pilgrims asked her the reason she was ready to spend so much cash to return the corpse of her husband to Canada instead of burying him in Jerusalem. She responded, “a man, Jesus, once died here and resurrected on the third day, I cannot take chances in case my husband resurrects like Jesus!
The above story helps us to ask ourselves why do we travel, why are we on a journey, the journey of life? In North Atlantic, especially in August, with the children away from school and many parents and families on vacation/holiday, it is the season for traveling. Families journey to spend time together and away from regular routines. It is a period of bonding and sharing of quality time. It is a time to explore other climes, but with the intention to return home. Human life on earth too is characterized by journeys. There is the first journey from God, which we undertake at birth, and the second lap of the same journey begins at birth as we gradually make our way back to God at death. Times and seasons help us to mark our progress through life: “a time to be born and a time to die . . . a time to sow and a time to reap,” says the preacher. All the way and all the times, God journeys with human beings, even if they are not always aware of his presence, but he is there anyway.
Journeys too have their hazards and conveniences, flat tires, police stops, storms and rains, In fact, instead of a marriage fixed during a pilgrimage journey to Jerusalem, death ensued, as in our story! Of course, journeys/pilgrimages can sometimes be smooth all the way. This Sunday, our first reading presents us with the saga of the Israelites journeying out of Egypt to the Promised-land. Their journey was bedeviled by two problems, which the opening paragraph of our first reading puts this way: “Would that we had died at the Lord’s hand in the land of Egypt, as we sat by our fleshpots and ate our fill of bread! But you had to lead us into this desert to make the whole community die of famine!” The first problem was that the Israelites believed that God was with them in Egypt by the availability of food – “fleshpots” of Egypt. So, they would rather have died in God’s presence in Egypt where there was food. The second problem, they believed that Moses was responsible for bringing them to a place without food to kill them through starvation.
It is very current in human reckoning to think that adversity shows the absence of God. The same Israelites who cried out to God to free them from slavery in Egypt now sing the praises of the food they ate in Egypt. Departure from a familiar territory, Egypt, with all its guarantees and inconveniences proves insurmountable to the Israelites. “Adventure” with and “faith” in God were clearly missing from the vocabulary of pilgrim Israelites. Who could blame them after so many years of slavery, with no more souvenir of the good old days before their slavery in Egypt. The Israelites were in a “complain mode”: we need food; we don’t want to die in the desert! Thanks be to God, Moses was sure of who the leader of the mission was – God himself. It was time to experience God in a different way – the God who provides food even in the least likely places, desert!
Every Christian is on a journey towards God. As we grow and age, we are always home bound to be with God. Measuring by time constraints, some arrive at their destination earlier than others. Today, the focus of our readings is on how to sustain the momentum of the journey, so that we may arrive safe and sound in our heavenly home land. The idea is how to overcome the obstacles on our pilgrimage to Heaven, how not to yield to temptations but to remain focused on God and his Kingdom. Generally, therefore, our temptations come in two fold, either remaining captivated by the past, so much so that we cannot move forward, as it is the case in our first reading or an entanglement with ephemerals that we lose focus on the essential of life.
One of the lessons for every traveler is the readiness to be surprised. When one abandons one’s home, adaptation to new circumstances are needed to weather the storm and strangeness of a new culture and environment. For those who are prisoners of the past, the departure from Egypt warrants a new adaptation to God differently from what obtained in Egypt; let bygone be bygone. For those mesmerized by the ephemerals of life, as it is the case in the gospel today, to request free food of Jesus presupposes the readiness to meet the conditions for receiving the bread which Jesus gives. But when human journey has Heaven and union with God as its ultimate destination, then immortal food is what is needed. According to Jesus, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst” (John 6:35). Heaven NOT Earth is the target.
For human beings, there are planting and reaping seasons; for God, every time is planting and reaping time because the rains and the plants themselves depend on him. This is akin to what we read in the gospel today. The crowds sought after Jesus to find food, free food; they didn’t need to either plant or reap, all they needed to do was to eat. But when our journeys lead to food, the deification of the stomach, then we lose sight of the essential – God, and union with him. However, beyond the “fleshpots” of Egypt, in the first reading, and the free bread sought by the crowds, is the food prepared and delivered to Israel by God himself – Manna, and Jesus who offers himself as food to the crowds. Even food becomes a means of contact and communion with God, when we go beyond the physical to the invisible God of all that exists. While the Israelites were thinking of material food, God establishes a contact point with Israel and the crowds through food – the Bread of life.
Curiously, Paul tells us the effects of the food which Jesus gives us, when we come to him. Having eaten of the Bread of life, we begin to leave behind us our earthly lives characterized by our sins and inordinate attachments to earthly goodies to the exclusion of seeking the company of Jesus and the kingdom of Heaven. Here is Paul’s advise: “that you should put away the old self of your former way of life, corrupted through deceitful desires, and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new self, created in God’s way in righteousness and holiness of truth” (Ephesians 4:24).
Brothers and sisters, it is ours today to measure to what degree we have configured ourselves to the image of Christ, after so many Masses attended, so many Communions consumed. Remember, “we are what we consume”! Every vacation/holiday eventually comes to an end, we must return home, home to God, but what home shall we be returning to? Only those who have found God can stop journeying, because they have arrived at the last bus stop – God himself! For the rest of us who are pilgrims upon earth, let us keep moving, by moving we reduce the distance, and by moving we are sure that God is with us!
Assignment for the Week:
Could you go for Confession/Reconciliation this week, so that Christ would be welcomed into a happy home – your heart?
A surprised Encounter, When Eating Food Turns into a Blessing
Exodus 16:2-4, 12-15; Ephesians 4:17, 20-24; John 6:24-35
Home, sweet home! Home is sweet, when you have one. Home is sweet, when it has the character of a home: loved ones, kindness, peace, serenity and fond memories. It was at Capernaum, his home village, that Jesus was rejected by his own people who disregarded the miracle he performed and trivialized his genealogy. Today, the setting is different! Jesus is important, he is a super-star with many people crowding around him and asking for food. How quickly the human mind changes from evil to good, especially when hunger is involved. How fertile and receptive the human mind is, when the going is smooth and sleek! Our gospel today begins with the statement: “When the crowd saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there, they themselves got into boats and came to Capernaum looking for Jesus” (John 6:24).
Moses didn’t have it so nice and palatable, in the first reading, when the Israelites complained about their bad meal and hunger. The memories of home, sweet home, in the minds of the Israelites, were the cucumbers and melons they ate in Egypt. Who can blame them? Egypt was the only “home” they knew, its menu the only one they were accustomed to, despite its tragedies of slavery and servitude. The price of freedom became costlier than incarceration because slavery destroyed their taste buds from discerning the savor of liberty. After all, there is an adage which says that “if you cannot go forward, you can at least go backwards!” For Israel, going backwards would have meant a rejection of God and freedom, and an option for a continued slavery – what a tragedy, what a cowardice!
There are always moments when one feels that the end has come, that the energy to move an inch further is no longer there. In the journey of life, there are always moments of discouragements and temptation to give up. It is exactly at such moments that we need to ask for food in order to forge ahead, like Elijah needing food in order to journey to the mountain of God to encounter God. The uncertainties of the Promised-land, which laid siege on the minds of the Israelites, reminds today’s Christian of the doubts our generation cast over the realities of Heaven, Hell, and Purgatory. In fact, we doubt our very origins and devise theories to explain the origins of the human person. Israel’s temptation to remain with the visible and physical is still with us today who are glued only to what is palpable and concrete, and refusing all that is invisible, the denial of the presence of God and the relevance of religion to the 21st century human being.
When the journey of Israel out of Egypt, in the direction of the Promised-land, is taken to mean the human journey from this life to an eternity with God, then the invisible makes sense because where uncertainties abound, there is the need for the presence of God to explain things to us and to help us navigate the uncharted territories involved. Although ships are built to sail the high seas, and never to spend all their time in the harbor, yet, ships are at the mercy of high seas once they set sail! The desert encounter of Israel with God, far removed from the discomfort of Egypt and the uncertainty of the final destination of the Promised-land, is a call to faith and trust in God, the sole master of uncertainties!
If God went in search of the Israelites in Egypt to lead them out to the Promised-land, it was the crowds that looked for Jesus in the gospel of today, and they looked for him at home: exile and servitude, in the first reading, are contrasted with home and the presence of God, in the gospel. The presence of God is home, and his absence is exile and servitude. If God proved himself to be among the Israelites by providing them with meat and bread in our first reading, Jesus joins together the meat and the bread in our gospel because he wanted to teach the crowds that he is actually the meat and bread they seek. Indeed, the journey of life is a voyage to God himself, in order to live in his company. If Moses was the visible leader of Israel, in our first reading, God proves that he uses human beings in leadership position to achieve his purposes. If Jesus calls God his Father, in our gospel today, it means that to see Jesus and be in his presence is to see God and be in the presence of God.
God does not worry about the known, but the unknown. He invites us into the unknown, so that the unknown may become as familiar as the known. In fact, even the so-called known encompasses God. This is evident when Jesus says to the crowds, “Amen, amen, I say to you, you are looking for me not because you saw signs but because you ate the loaves and were filled. Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For on him the Father, God, has set his seal” (John 6:26-27). Food is good, but beyond food is the maker of food, God himself. Food is not loved for itself but because of the nourishment and sustenance it provides for human life. The same food, when prepared and provided by God, becomes a source of spiritual nourishment for human soul – a meeting with God. As it were, when the human person works hard to secure food, that kind of food only nourishes the physical body. When a meal is provided free-of-charge by God himself, whether in the form of Manna or Bread, it nourishes the soul and brings about communion with God.
With God is found free food, because God secured that food for human beings. The food God provides is free salvation for humanity, through Jesus Christ. Little wonder Jesus warns the crowds, “Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you”. How difficult is that, just to eat free food provided by God! This is a surprising encounter, when eating food turns into a source of blessing. The bread which Jesus gives is a sign of home coming. One pays for one’s food in restaurants and buffets, NOT at home, especially for a guest needs no grocery shopping. Restaurants have no guests but clientele!
Yes, Paul is right, there is the “new self” that comes from communion with God, from eating the bread of God: “that you should put away the old self of your former way of life, corrupted through deceitful desires, and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new self, created in God’s way in righteousness and holiness of truth”. What must animate a Christian is the desire for holiness and communion with God. The longing for the “fleshpots” of Egypt and the glorification of earthly food, keep one in the past and doesn’t make room for the new – communion with God. The “old” and past are our sinful ways and our attachments to them. The “new” is righteousness and transformation of vices into virtues.
In the very ordinary things of this world, we encounter God. In the unlikely of places, God’s presence is found. In our ordinariness and sinfulness, God seeks to be united with us through food. May our eating and drinking be salvific and grace-filled moments and occasions!
Assignment for the Week:
Could you go for Confession/Reconciliation this week, so that Christ would be welcomed into a happy home – your heart?
Going Beyond the Physical to Seeing the God who is Among Us
Exodus 16:2-4, 12-15; Ephesians 4:17, 20-24; John 6:24-35
There are so many images of God presented to us in Sacred Scripture. God is sometimes presented to us as a Shepherd and ourselves as his sheep. Being a good shepherd, God leads his children to green pastures. Psalm 23 summarizes this image of God. Other times, God is portrayed as Father and we are his children. Being a good Father, God protects, guides and provides for the needs of his children. In fact, Galatians shows how God has adopted every human being as his child. And, God is often shown to be a husband. As a husband, he lavishes love and compassion on his people, just as Jesus loves his spouse the Church and died for love of her. Human beings are called upon to be imitators of all these images of God depending on their state in life, as leaders, husbands and Fathers. The problem is how could one see beyond the visible to the invisible?
In our first reading, Moses plays the role of the leader of the Israelites to lead them out of Egypt. How so often it is the case that messengers receive the flak and punishment meant for the author of the message? When a message is unsavory and insipid, the messenger may get lynched for a message that is not his own, a letter for which he is just an envelope. Good news normally gets standing ovation, and the messenger rewarded for conveying the message. Today, the roles of messengers and the messages they convey bring home to us the contradictions immanent in every divine comedy – the language of God’s grace to human beings – the triangle of sender, messenger and recipients.
As the appointed leader of the Israelites, Moses was leading the people of Israel out of slavery in Egypt into a Promised-land. Neither Moses, the leader, nor the led had the details of the journey and the picture of the Promised-land, yet Moses was blamed for the lack of palatable food on the way and his leadership confronted a rock-solid resistance: “Would that we had died at the Lord’s hand in the land of Egypt, as we sat by our fleshpots and ate our fill of bread! But you had to lead us into this desert to make the whole community die of famine!” (Exodus 16:3). The Israelites exonerated God from what was happening, and Moses bore the brunt of the situation – the lot of a messenger!
Even though the Israelites exonerated God from what was happening, Moses was convinced that the mission and message he carried was at God’s command. The realization that every messenger depends on his/her sender is the first step towards success. Moses proves that the ignorance of the sender of the message he represented by the Israelites was no excuse for him not to trust in the presence of God, his Sender. Moses saw beyond what the people could see, and called on the Lord of the mission to take charge of his mission. If the God of Elijah could answer by sending fire to consume the holocaust, the God of Moses sent bread from heaven to feed his hungry children. What is more, God proved that there was no need going to the past – to Egypt – to find food, the past could come to the present because the God of the past is still the God of the present.
A lesson in leadership is that a situation only becomes hopeless when the leader and the led both are oblivious of the presence of their Lord/sender. Miracles happen when we recognize the presence of the Lord. When Moses invoked the God of Israel who entrusted the job of leading his people out of Israel to him, hear what follows: “I [God] have heard the grumbling of the Israelites. Tell them: In the evening twilight you shall eat flesh, and in the morning you shall have your fill of bread, so that you may know that I, the Lord, am your God” (Exodus 16:12). The “grumbling” of the children of Israel was an opportunity for them to experience the presence of the Lord. It was also an opportunity for Moses to prove his faith in God. It is only when one goes beyond the physical to discover the invisible present in the visible that God’s presence becomes compelling.
Food, as mundane as it might be, is one of God’s mediums of presence. Hunger for material food brought the Israelites into close contact with an invisible God they only knew through stories in Egypt. When, without going back to Egypt, God provided food for his children in the wilderness, the stories they were told of a loving Father-God became a reality. A God who provides food free-of-charge and rains down bread and meat from the sky must definitely be more powerful than Pharaoh who only provided food from the sweat of Israelites’ servitude in Egypt. For the Israelites, it is the power of the goodness of God that can obliterate their attachment to Egypt – the point proven by the miracle of the Manna. The years of slavery and alienation of God’s love in Egypt is gradually being replaced by the idea of a provident and magnanimous God. Yes, the end game is to realize that it wasn’t Moses who leads Israel out of Egypt but God himself – the ever present God!
After the long journey to Capernaum in search of Jesus, the crowd was still blinded to the personality of Jesus: “Amen, amen, I say to you, you are looking for me not because you saw signs but because you ate the loaves and were filled. Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For on him the Father, God, has set his seal” (John 6:26-27). Hunger and the desire for cheap food blinded the crowds from recognizing the God that was among them, just as the “fleshpots” of Egypt made Israelites dwell in the past and prevented them from recognizing the God who was among them!
Even in our daily quests for food and material sustenance for our lives on earth, God encounters us right there. When the going gets tough, we sometimes romanticize with the past and forget the God who opens new possibilities for us right before our very eyes. The crowds that came to Jesus for bread discovered a different kind of bread – Jesus as the bread of eternal life: “Jesus said to them, ‘I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst’” (John 6:25). Physical bread is only good for pilgrims not for residents of God’s house. The Israelites needed bread as they journeyed to the Promised-land, but the crowds of the gospel were already in the presence of God in Jesus Christ, so they needed God and not physical food!
If it is true that for someone suffering from jaundice everything appears yellowish, Paul admonishes us today that our lives, as Christians, must reflect our faith and inner transformation: “I declare and testify in the Lord that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds”. It is through what a Christian does that his Christianity comes alive. “Love” in its abstractness becomes concrete and palpable through acts of love. Yes, the life of every Christian is an opportunity for Christ to be shown forth to the world.
For all those who occupy the positions of leadership and have to bear with not being understood by the led, today is an opportunity to hand over your problems to God. Like Moses, God is the real leader for whom you stand. For all those haunted be a glorious past, like Israel’s obsession with Egypt, realize that your trials are just opportunities for a more glorious dawn to come. For all sinners who think that they are already condemned, remember the patience of God that put up with Israel in the desert for 40 years. For all those who are far away from their home and loved ones, see your present situation as a period of rejuvenation before your return home. And for all of us, may we ask God to open our eyes to see him present in all our situations, and be the miracle we urgently need!
Assignment for the Week:
Could you go for Confession/Reconciliation this week, so that Christ would be welcomed into a happy home – your heart?