Monday of the 22nd Week of Ordinary Time September 3, 2018
Fr. Albert Our Lady Queen of Peace, Lafayette
“Jesus made Himself the Bread of Life and the Hungry One”
“Is this not the son of Joseph?” Though it seems like a simple question, this comment hides behind it a hardened heart. This is in Nazareth where Jesus “had grown up.” The people here knew Jesus. They saw the child play games in the street. They saw the boy at prayer with the community. They saw the hungry one, a man like any other, who had to work daily with his father to earn the bread he ate.
Yet now, here he is, proclaiming himself the fulfillment of Isaiah’s promise. How can he be the one to bring glad tidings to the poor? He is poor himself! That’s true, Mary and Joseph certainly did not raise Jesus in a life of wealth, luxury, and comfort. But that is no obstacle because the glad tidings he brings is not the end of poverty – at least not yet – but rather the satisfaction of what makes poverty so frightening: hunger. We know what the people of Nazareth are not ready to accept: that Jesus is the Bread of Life, not just in the Eucharist, but also in the sense that he satisfies our deepest longing in addition to providing our daily bread.
And Jesus’ rebuke could be easily misunderstood. Are the people of Nazareth doomed to not accept the Truth just because he was born there? Is faith and salvation reserved only for those who are foreign, who didn’t know Jesus as a child? No, and Jesus’s reply alludes to the solution to their problem. The problem with knowing Jesus as a child is they are blind to their own poverty of knowledge. They think they possess knowledge of who Jesus is and so are unable to receive.
And Jesus alludes to the solution in both his examples. The widow in Zarephath was not only foreign, she was poor. She knew that she lacked bread and was doomed to death. So, when she encountered a prophet of God who offered bread, she accepted. Naaman the Syrian very nearly missed out on the power of God’s prophet because he hesitated to admit his poverty. He was told to bathe seven times in the river and he did not understand why. His poverty was his ignorance of the ways of God. Fortunately, his servants prevailed upon him, enabling to admit that he did not possess the answer, that he was poor enough to accept what was offered. Thus, he was healed.
But the lesson was lost on the people of Nazareth. In fact, they were so infuriated about the comparison that they nearly killed Jesus. How dare he compare us to those foreigners! We are the chosen people of God! We have what they do not! In reality, even though they knew Jesus as the hungry child, they did not recognize him in the hunger of the foreigner, the poor, the ignorant. Because they would not admit their own hunger, they could not recognize him as the bread of life.
Let that be a challenge to you tonight, to all of you who celebrate Mother Teresa and who join in this novena. This great saint, this great lover of the poor always pointed us to the reality of poverty. Poverty in Christ himself who chose to become man to share our weakness and to experience our hunger. Poverty in those who lack the material goods to satisfy their hunger for food. Poverty in our own hearts and minds that can only be remedied by Christ, the bread of life.
Mother Teresa herself stressed that recognizing Jesus in the Eucharist was essential to recognizing Him in the poor. Do you recognize Him there? Or do you just take – not receive! – but take the little wafer, pop it in your mouth and move along! Acting like, oh, is this not just another piece of bread? Like the people of Nazareth who think they knew Jesus, do you think you know this bread? Or are you willing to admit the poverty of your understanding, to approach the Eucharist as it truly is? The Eucharist is familiar, yet foreign, rich food yet the food of the poor, a truth known to us, yet a mystery beyond our ignorance. It is with good reason that we say “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter…” before we receive. We admit out poverty in order to recognize the hunger for life that is satisfied by the bread of life.
And it cannot stop there. Christ in the Eucharist cannot be separated from Christ in the poor. When you walk out of Mass, do you, like these Nazoreans, look down on the foreigners? Those other people who are not like us, who do not have what we have? Or do you recognize the hungry Christ in them? Hungry for respect, hungry for the truth, yes, even hungry for ordinary bread? Jesus Christ feeds us so that we might feed Him in return… feed him in the poor and hungry ones all around us.
This is how Mother Teresa lived: rejoicing in and feeding on the presence of God in the Eucharist; then recognizing and responding to the Hunger of God in the poor. She urges us to do the same, lest Christ, as at Nazareth, should “pass through the midst” of us and go away. Oh, how great that poverty would be, how great the hunger that would consume us then!