The Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (2024)
Jesus said to them, “Stop murmuring among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him, and I will raise him on the last day.”
—John 6:43-44
When I was about twelve years old, I found an old pre-Vatican II prayer book in my grandmother’s cedar chest. Although I had gone to church growing up, I wasn’t yet Catholic, and I was intrigued by the pictures and information about the different seasons of the Church year that I found in that old book. Most especially, I was drawn to the brief biographies of the saints that I found there. No one could have guessed then that those two and three sentence stories would have a profound impact on the course of my life.
And now, in my mid-40s, I’m still drawn the saints. Although my interest and devotion have matured over time, I still treasure their stories and the truths they have to teach us today.
One of the great lessons these holy women, men, and children offer us is that faith is expansive. It looks beyond what is right in front of us, seeing how God is present and at work in every person and every event of our daily lives.
Part of faith is being able to recognize this Presence in family and friends, beautiful landscapes, inspiring works of art, and in peace-filled moments of grace.
Faith also helps us find God in the poor and vulnerable, in moments of grief and doubt, and in countless unexpected places. These truths pervade the stories and novels of Catholic writers like Flannery O’Conner, Walker Percy, Rumer Godden, Andre Dubus, and Graham Greene—with his “Whiskey Priest” in The Power and the Glory and the unlikely “saint” Sarah in The End of the Affair—as they use their literary skill to hold up a mirror to human experience, helping us to look deeper into our own stories, recognizing how our stories and God’s story are intimately intertwined.
In our world today, religious faith is sometimes dismissed as something that makes people rigid and small-minded. Unfortunately, there are too many examples of violent and hateful acts done in the name of God and faith. Recent years have also reminded us, again, of how religious structures or leaders can sometimes allow abuse and exploitation to take place. However, in the words we hear in this Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus challenges these narrow and jaded impressions of faith.
After the people in the crowd hear Jesus describe himself as the “Bread of Life” they begin to murmur. They were offended that he thought so much of himself. After all, how could the son of a carpenter—someone whom they believed they knew—say “Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me. Not that anyone has seen the Father except the one who is from God; he has seen the Father”?
The people murmured because they could not get beyond their own beliefs about God’s ways and their understanding of who Jesus was. This limited vision caused many to simply walk away. They weren’t willing to look and see with the eyes of faith. As Father Anthony Oelrich has reflected in Feeding on the Bread of Life:
“What faith opens up for us is this bread mediating the living presence of Jesus Christ who fills our lives with deepest meaning and purpose. What we experience, with faith, in the ritual of the Mass, is the act in which Jesus offers his life to the Father for love of us, an action into which our lives are taken up.”
Faith expands our vision. It is faith that allows us to look beyond the ink on the pages of Scripture to discern how God’s Word is living and active today (cf. Hebrews 4:12). It is faith that empowers us to recognize the face of God in the poor and the abused. Finally, it is faith that enables us to recognize the Real Presence of Christ himself—the Bread of Life—in the bread and wine on the altar.
Almighty ever-living God,
whom, taught by the Holy Spirit,
we dare to call our Father,
bring, we pray, to perfection in our hearts
the spirit of adoption as your sons and daughters,
that we may merit to enter into the inheritance
which you have promised.
Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son,
who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
God, for ever and ever. Amen.
-Collect for the Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
