ordinary time The Sánchez Archives

NINETEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME
Year B

By
Patricia Datchuck Sánchez

Hunger Pangs

1 KINGS 19:4-8
EPHESIANS 4:30-5:2
JOHN 6:41-51

According to the Assistant Director General of the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization, about one half billion of the over four billion people who live on earth are at the brink of starvation daily. Some 200 million children become mentally handicapped or blind due to a lack of nutritious food and another 10 million succumb to other hunger related illness. The World Health Organization estimates that approximately one-third of the world’s population is underfed and one-third is hungry. Four million people die each year of starvation and 70% of children under six are undernourished.

In an effort to alert the well fed to the needs of their hungry brothers and sisters, many communities have organized consciousness-raising programs. For example, Cornell University sponsored a once-a-week rice lunch which raised ca. $12,000.00 toward the alleviation of famine in Africa. A Canadian church held what was called a “starvation banquet”; those who participated ate one meal a day consisting of a small amount of clear soup and a half slice of bread. The money which would otherwise have been spent for an average day’s meals was given to the city’s food banks for the needy. Several years ago in the U.S. Senate, a resolution was presented, designating Monday of Thanksgiving Week as “National Day of Fasting.” All Americans were invited to experience hunger willingly and to re-evaluate their own life-styles and eating habits.

While these efforts are admirable, and although the statistics quoted above are staggering, they pertain solely to physical hunger. Equally alarming are the statistics which estimate that approximately three billion members of the human family suffer from chronic spiritual hunger and/or malnutrition. These hunger pangs must also be recognized as this can be just as lethal as their physical counterparts.

In recognition of this fact, the church puts the gathered assembly in touch each week with the food that will satisfy its hungers. Each week the community is fed with the bread of life, in both word and sacrament; nourished by this essential food, every believer receives the strength needed for continuing to live a committed life.

In today’s first reading (1 Kings), the spiritually hungry are offered the example of Elijah. Dedication to his prophetic ministry had made him persona non grata at the court of Ahab and his scheming bride Jezebel. Just when Elijah thought all was lost and prayed for death, he was renewed by God. His physical appetite was satisfied with a hearth cake and water; his spiritual needs were quenched by the supportive presence of God. Because the prophet spoke forth the truth for God, he was not so suffer the hunger of abandonment and despair.

In his correspondence with the believers at Ephesus, the author of today’s second reading reminds all who draw nourishment from the bread of life that there are certain other “hungers” which must be sublimated. Rather than seek satisfaction in anger, slander, bitterness and malice, Christians are to nourish one another with compassion, kindness and mutual forgiveness.

Continued in today’s gospel is the bread of life discourse through which the evangelist illustrates that Jesus, who had ministered to the physical hunger of the crowd (6:1-15), was also attentive to their spiritual cravings. Breaking open the barley loaves, he had nourished their bodies; now he was breaking open the bread of his teaching in order to feed their minds and hearts. Jesus’ invitation to hear and to learn, to come to him, to eat and to believe so as to live forever is as timely now as it was 2000 years ago. All that is required is a hunger.

1 KINGS 19:4-8

At the risk of sounding bizarre, I must admit that when I read this pericope about Elijah and his “death-wish” I was prompted to wonder. . . what would have happened if the prophet had been able to find a physician who would have assisted in the realization of his wish. After all, it could easily be argued that his “quality of life” had diminished. Elijah was a man-on-the-run, fleeing to escape the wrath of Jezebel who wanted to be rid of the prophet and his message.

The daughter of king Ethbaal of Sidon, Jezebel remained a staunch supporter of the pagan cult of her native Phoenicia (modern day Lebanon). Intent upon eradicating Yahwistic religion, Jezebel banished Israel’s prophets and imported some 450 oracular devotees of Ba’al from her homeland to replace them. According to 1 Kings 18:19-46, Elijah outwitted the prophets and, by God’s power, put them to death. Infuriated, Jezebel cursed the prophet and plotted his death. It is at this point that today’s first reading picks up the thread of the story.

Driven to the desert by Jezebel’s wrath, the prophet traveled from Israel to Beershabah near the southern border of Judah. No doubt, Elijah was fearful of venturing farther into the Judean kingdom because king Jehoshaphat’s son, Jehoram was married to Athaliah, the daughter of Ahab and Jezebel! Miserable, he sought shelter in the shade of a broom tree and prayed for death.

Death wish or not, Elijah was to learn that, however burdensome it had become, his life retained its quality because it had been given to him by God and was filled with the divine abiding presence. Regardless of how disappointing or unsuccessful his efforts appeared to be, Elijah’s life, like that of every other human person, was to be valued as a necessary and integral aspect of God’s inscrutable plan of salvation. Therefore he was not permitted to seek escape in death but to find, with God’s help, a renewed sense of meaning and purpose in life.

Energy for his struggle was given to Elijah in the form of food mediated by an angel or messenger from God. Featured frequently in the Hebrew scriptures (Genesis 16:7, 19:1, 21:17, Exodus 3:2, 14:19, etc.), angels acted as intermediaries of God. In some instances the angel-messengers were portrayed as hypostatizations of divine attributes or activities. Out of respect for the divine transcendence, angels figured into many situations as theological euphemisms for God.

Strengthened by the food God provided and rested from his nap, Elijah moved on from Beersheba to Horeb (another name for Sinai), where he was to be further gifted an intimate experience of God and recommissioned for service as prophet to his people (see 1 Kings 19:9-18). Elijah’s experience cautions against devaluing or despairing of life, even in the most wretched and difficult circumstances.

EPHESIANS 4:30-5:2

Two college students, one Hindu and the other Christian met while they were taking the same seminar on the ethical demands of the gospel. Over a period of time, they became good friends. One day the Hindu said to the Christian, “I am aware that Gandhi was greatly influenced by the Christian gospel and tried to live according to its teachings. But Gandhi was an exceptional man; for myself, I think the demands of the gospel are too difficult for ordinary people.” The Hindu was surprised when his friend agreed with him, but then listened carefully as the Christian went on to explain: “Jesus’ teachings are indeed challenging, but even that which seems impossible becomes attainable because of the gift of the Holy Spirit.”

In this excerpt from his letter to the Ephesians, the early Christian author makes a similar point. Those who have been sealed with the Spirit in baptism are thereby empowered to embrace and to realize the challenges of a committed life. To that end, bitterness, anger, slander and malice are uprooted in order to give way to the kindness, compassion and mutual forgiveness that are to characterize believers of Jesus. Mutual forgiveness (charizomai in Greek) signified more than the remission of debts and/or faults; this quality of self-forgetful love included a magnanimity that habitually placed the needs of others first without ever keeping a record or tally of misdeeds.

By referring to the bestowal of the Spirit as being sealed (v. 30), the Ephesians author recalled for his readers the varying functions of seals in their society. In use as long ago as the sixth millennium B.C.E., seals originated as flat stones carved with an insignia or logo, which was pressed or stamped into soft clay. In time, cylindrical seals and signet rings also became popular. . . Seals were used: (1) legally to signify ownership of objects, to conclude contracts, etc. an official seal was equivalent to a signature; (2) artistically as jewelry; (3) cultically, seals were left in shrines as votive offerings to a god; (4) as status symbols . . . the gift of a seal was understood as the conferral of authority.

Given these varying functions of seals, Christians could by comparison understand their baptismal sealing with the Spirit as being: (1) legally bound and covenanted to God in Christ; (2) identified as a believer and child of God; (3) a beautiful (artistic) vessel or temple of the Lord’s presence; (4) a sharer in the power and victory (authority) of Jesus over sin.

Finally, the ancient author held out to his readers the ultimate standard for their behavior with the exhortation, “Be imitators of God” (5:1). William Barclay (“Ephesians”, The Daily Study Bible, St. Andrew Press, Edinburgh: 1976) reminds us that Clement of Alexandria picked up this exhortation and proclaimed daringly that the “truly wise Christian person practices being God”. . . a tough act to follow but the only act worth following!

JOHN 6:41-51

Murmuring is an all too frequent motif, woven insidiously throughout the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. The Israelites murmured against God and Moses in the wilderness when their hungers and their expectations were not met. Similarly, the crowd that followed Jesus to Capernaum murmured when he disappointed their hungering for more bread. They murmured further when Jesus attempted to stretch their messianic hungers and expectations in order to find their satisfaction in him as the way of salvation and as the giver of the bread of everlasting life. Call it what you will - murmuring. . . groaning. . . complaining. . . grumbling. . . or just plain griping, this human foible springs from a basic lack of faith.

In his consideration of this matter, Richard J. Clifford (“Exodus”, The Jerome Biblical Commentary, Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs: 1990) has suggested that murmuring is a refusal to allow God to be God by distrusting the divine leadership, providence and constancy. Rather than allow his critics to continue to murmur against him and against the God in whose name he had come, Jesus challenged them to move beyond their disappointed expectations and come to faith. He offered the further assurance that everyone who comes to him will be raised up on the last day (v. 44) and that whoever believes has eternal life (v. 47). No one, explained Jesus, can come to him or believe in him without being drawn by the Father. As Raymond E. Brown (The Gospel According to John, Anchor Bible Series, Doubleday and Co. Inc., New York: 1970) has explained, the rabbis used a similar expression, “to draw nigh to the Torah” as a description of the process of conversion. “The natural desire of one who has love for his fellow men is to bring them nigh to the Torah for this means to make them sharers in the fuller knowledge of God” (Pirque Aboth, 1, 12). In his love for his brothers and sisters, Jesus wished to share the fuller knowledge of God through the bread of his teaching.

Those who were called to know God by drawing near to Jesus and accepting to be fed by the bread he offered had a rich background for understanding the implications of such an invitation. Traditionally, the rabbis equated the Torah with bread, bread which nourishes, gives life, reveals God, etc. (Strack and Billerbeck 2, 483ff). Jesus’ offer of himself, i.e. his teaching as bread, bread which nourishes, gives life and reveals true knowledge of God was an indication that, like so many other institutions of Israelite religion, the Torah was to be replaced by Jesus himself. To recognize and accept to be fed by the bread Jesus offered required a deep spiritual hunger, whetted by God. . . “no one comes to me unless the Father draws him” . . . “everyone who has heard the Father and learned from him comes to me” (vv. 44, 45).

In next week’s gospel, the murmuring of the hungry crowd will intensify as the Joahnnine Jesus challenges them to look beyond the bread and fish which filled their stomachs and even beyond the bread of his teaching which filled their hearts and minds to accept the bread of his very self, taken in death, blessed by God, broken on the cross and shared freely with all for the life of the world.

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