Here is my homily for the 19th Sunday of Ordinary Time – August 9, 2009. The readings can be found at https://www.usccb.org/nab/readings/080909.shtml. As always – thanks for reading and all your feedback! Fr Jim
So this past week there was horrible, tragic, earth-shattering news that got headlines all around the world . . . This past Thursday Twitter was shut-down due to cyber-attacks (oh, and Facebook suffered a bunch of glitches because of the same attacks).
For those who don’t know, Twitter is a social-networking thing where people can send messages to those who follow them. The messages (also known as “tweets”) are about 140 characters maximum and they are sent as a message on your cell-phone. So when Paula Abdul had to break her horrible, tragic, earth-shattering news that she would not be returning to American Idol, she sent it over 5 or 6 messages to people all around the world (fortunately she was able to get this incredibly important news out before the blackout of Thursday).
As computer savvy as I’ve gotten; as addicted as I’ve been (accused of being) to Facebook (I know denying it only adds fuel to the fire, but I’m really not addicted to it), sure, this cyber-attack would be a nuisance but, did it really warrant international attention? CNN’s headline on their website said, “Twitter blackout left users feeling ‘jittery’ and ‘naked.’” It went on to describe the near-panic people felt: “I was pretty upset, actually,” one young woman said. “It feels like a lifeline for me. I tell people every detail of my life by updating Twitter.” Another individual just kept saying, “I CAN’T UPDATE! I CAN’T UPDATE.”
The fact that we as individuals seem to think that we know everything is nothing new, in fact one thing that makes us fallen, sinful creatures is the belief or conviction that we think we know everything. What makes us different here in 2009 is that the need to share those thoughts with the entire world as quickly as possible are within our reach. How else can we explain the panic some people felt at Twitter going down for a few hours! And for those of us who aren’t into Twitter, well, we all know there are multiple ways and means for us to get our messages across on a variety of topics and venues.
You have Talk radio – and whether you’re the host or a listener calling in, it’s not people really discussing issues but individuals telling everyone everything they know about Sports or Politics. Cable TV does the same thing. Don’t host your own show? Well, you can video something and put it on You-tube or start a blog of your own. You don’t even have to be an expert in any particular field.
This creeps into our faith lives too. And this is for all of us – priests, clergy, religious, people in the pews. A sentence starts, “The problem with the Church today is [BLANK] (insert your complaint of the day…funny, that could actually be a Twitter message). And the blank could be:
– Our priest is (blank)
– The parishioners are (blank)
– Our Bishop is (blank)
… yeah that’s the problem.
We think we know it all, and can’t wait to share our insight with the whole world!
I was thinking about all this, because imagining today’s Gospel scene in a modern context, we could rewrite it as, ”the Jews were twittering tweets.” The Gospel says they were “murmuring” or in other words they were complaining. They thought they knew it all, and didn’t mind sharing those thought to everyone around them:
“WHAT’S JESUS TALKING ABOUT????” they might start off. “We know who he is” – “He’s Joseph’s Son” -“Yeah, I know his Mother and Father too” -“Who’s he kidding with this ‘I’ve come down from heaven’ – he didn’t come down from heaven, he came from down the street!” (And if it were in true twitter tweet fashion there’d be a lot of “LOL’S” and “OMG’s”) Yeah, they knew it all and were all too happy to vocalize and share these downright disbeliefs to anyone and everyone around them.
Amazingly, they seem to have forgotten that Jesus had just one day earlier fed all of them in abundance (thousands of people in fact) very miraculously with just five loaves of bread and two fish. They also seem to have forgotten that now that they were hungry again; they were the ones that had come looking for Jesus (which is why they were in this dialogue with him in the first place). And rather than performing another miracle for breakfast for them, Jesus had probed there hearts a bit further to say, “I know you’re hungry physically, but you’re hungry spiritually, too, and I can fulfill that hunger for all eternity for you.”
What happened?
They were so busy focusing on what they thought they knew that they couldn’t even begin to remember these more important realities.
This is setting things up for the choice that will have to be made - the choice between Belief and Unbelief. Either Jesus is the Son of God; He’s the Christ; He’s the Bread of Life come down from Heaven; He’s our food, our nourishment; He’s the satisfaction of the deepest hungers and longings of our hearts and souls… or he’s not.
That same stark choice still remains for us, today. It’s true – Christianity is divided to this day over whether this piece of bread and cup of wine actually become Jesus’ body and blood – whether Jesus becomes really, physically present in the Eucharist – whether Jesus really is who He says He was – who He says He is - or if He was something else.
Sure it’s a mystery - God’s not asking us to understand it all fully, He’s just looking for a little humility, a little reverence on our part. To move away from knowing it all, and, being okay with that, to simply allow ourselves to be overwhelmed by the love that God is sharing in this intimate gift.
Imagine if we started to really believe that, to live that, to know that, with certainty – and couldn’t wait to ’update’ that to the entire world.
