Eighteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time/B
Massimo Palombella
In today’s Gospel (Jn 6:24-35) Jesus calls Himself the ‘bread of life’ and affirms that those who enter into an authentic relationship with Him (stay with Him and believe in Him) will no longer hunger and thirst.
The hunger and thirst to which Jesus refers is, of course, not physical hunger and thirst, but inherent in those deep needs that constitute the heart of our lives.
It is about our need to love, to be loved, our need to exist, to be recognised, needs that represent both our strength and our weakness.
In fact, it is precisely in these needs that the unresolved in our lives are located, what ‘disturbs’ our living, what demands so much of our energy to be placed, ‘controlled’, ‘tamed’.
We are tempted for a bit of affection and consideration, we risk breaking the most beautiful and precious things in our lives for a bit of attention, of recognition. But at the same time, we are capable of generosity, of loving, of motherhood and fatherhood, of perspective and vision precisely because our needs are accepted, placed and transformed into strength and meaning.
The Lord invites us into a relationship with Him in order to start a slow healing process that will lead us, not without effort, to know how to give a precise name to our hunger and thirst, to accept and place what is ‘unsolved’, to transform our weaknesses into the best of our resources, to experience ‘life in abundance’ more and more each day.
Today’s Offertory antiphon is taken from the Book of Exodus (Ex 32:11-14) with the following text:
“Precatus est Moyses in conspectu Domini Dei sui, et dixit:
Quare, Domine, irasceris in populo tuo?
Parce irae animae tuae:
memento Abraham, Isaac, et Jacob,
quibus jurasti dare terram fluentem lac et mel.
Et placatus est Dominus de malignitate, quam dixit facere populo suo.”
(Moses prayed to the Lord his God, and said:
“Why, O Lord, is your anger enkindled against your people?
Let the wrath your mind has conceived cease?
Remember Abraham, Isaac and Jacob,
to whom you swore to give a land flowing with milk and honey.”
And the Lord was dissuaded from accomplishing the evil which he had threatened to inflict upon his people).
The attached music is by Orlando di Lasso from the Magnum Opus Musicum published in Munich at Nicolai Henrici’s Typography in 1604. The live interpretation is by the Choir of the Church of St. Willibrordus in Utrecht.
A blessed Sunday and heartfelt greetings.
