20th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Proverbs 9:1-6; Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6: 51-58

“You are what you eat.”
This proverb was, if not coined, 
at least made famous
by the 19th-century philosopher 
Ludwig Feuerbach.
So you’ll have to indulge me
as we get a little philosophical.

In saying, “you are what you eat,” 
Feuerbach wanted to emphasize that, 
contrary to the Christian view of things, 
we humans are purely material beings;
as he put it, 
“in the end we are only patched together 
from oxygen, nitrogen, carbon and hydrogen…”
We are simply the material substances 
that we ingest:
we are what we eat.
Feuerbach thought that Christianity 
had turned this reality on its head,
promoting the illusion of spirit
rather than the reality of matter.
Any notion of “God” or “the soul” or “eternity”
was for Feuerbach simply 
a fiction we humans conjured up—
and a dangerous fiction at that,
since all this talk of God and souls and eternity
distracts us from the true material needs of people.
He said, “If you want to improve the people, 
give them better food instead of denunciations of sin.”
If you want people to know the truth,
give them food, not faith;
as Feuerbach put it: “nourishment 
is the beginning of wisdom.” 

Though his name may be new to you,
Feuerbach’s views are pretty common today,
and you can probably recognize them
in those who would accuse Christians
of indulging in an illusion 
that alienates us from reality
and promotes human misery in this life
for the sake of a false eternity in the next.
But the idea that we ought to focus
on life in this world and not the next,
on tangible material reality 
and not intangible spiritual illusions,
on food that lasts for today
and not food that claims to bestow eternity—
this idea has been around a long time.

Indeed, it is precisely this idea 
that Jesus speaks to in the Bread of Life discourse
with which we have been occupying ourselves
these past few weeks.
We heard Jesus say two weeks ago: 
“Do not work for food that perishes
but for the food that endures for eternal life.”
And last week we heard, “Your ancestors 
ate the manna in the desert, but they died;
this is the bread that comes down from heaven
so that one may eat it and not die.”
In a funny way,
Jesus agrees with Feuerbach.
You are what you eat.
Nourishment is the beginning of wisdom.
The difference is in what you eat
and at whose banquet you are nourished.

“My flesh is true food,
and my blood is true drink.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood
remains in me and I in him.”
To eat Christ’s flesh and drink his blood
is to be joined to him,
to share in his divine eternity,
to become by grace what he is by nature:
beloved sons and daughter of the Father.
You are what you eat.
Likewise, we hear in our first reading,
that Wisdom “has spread her table….
she calls from the heights out over the city:
Let whoever is simple turn in here….
Come, eat of my food,
and drink of the wine I have mixed!”
We are invited to be nourished at Wisdom’s banquet,
a nourishment that gives us not growth in body,
but growth in understanding,
nourishment that enables us to live, as Paul puts it, 
“not as foolish persons but as wise.” 
Nourishment is the beginning of wisdom.

But I don’t think that Jesus 
simply agrees with Feuerbach
that you are what you eat
and that nourishment is the beginning of wisdom.
I also think he agrees with him
that you ought not live so much for the next life
that you ignore people’s material needs in this life.
Recall how the Bread of Life Discourse 
began, lo those many weeks ago: 
it began with Jesus feeding people,
and not in some spiritual or metaphorical sense,
but with real, material loaves and fish. 
As John tells the story,
even before he begins teaching them,
Jesus asks Philip: “Where can we buy 
enough food for them to eat?”
And those five barley loaves and two fish, 
blessed and broken in the hands of Jesus,
become a real, material feast
that filled the stomachs of the hungry crowd.

Feuerbach was not wrong to think
that people need real, material nourishment;
but he was wrong to think that that is all they need.
Likewise, we Christian are not wrong to think
that people need wisdom’s spiritual nourishment;
but we’re wrong if we think that is all they need.
Jesus shows us that you do not have
to choose between the two.

Indeed, he shows us that you cannot choose,

for the God whom we worship 

is the maker of both body and soul

and has destined for salvation both body and soul,

and we anticipate this salvation

not only when we receive the Eucharist,

but also when we offer food to the hungry

and justice to the oppressed.

The spiritual nourishment we receive at Christ’s altar
should not be a narcotic that dulls our senses
to the call to address humanity’s material needs;
the Eucharist should be a feast
that makes us hunger and thirst 
not just for spiritual righteousness
and the peace of life eternal,
but for justice and peace in this life. 
If we are what we eat,
and if what we eat at this altar 
is Christ himself,
so that he lives in us and we in him,
then we should find Christ also living
in the least of our brothers and sisters:
in the hungry and the thirsty,
the sick and the homeless,
the stranger and the imprisoned.

Let us, who eat the food of immortality,
feed the hungers of this mortal life
so that people might taste 
and see that the Lord is good,
and that God, who is merciful,
might have mercy on us all.

17th Week in Ordinary Time (Saturday)

Readings: Jeremiah 6:11-16, 24; Matthew 14:1-12

Does any child think:
I’d like to be like John the Baptist
when I grow up?
Does anyone think:
I’d like to live in the desert and eat bugs
and then, after achieving a measure of notoriety, 
subordinate my entire existence
to that of my hitherto unknown cousin?
Does anyone think:
I’d like ultimately to end up being killed,
because a pretty girl whose mother I had offended
dances a deadly dance of seduction
and gets a powerful but foolish man 
to grant her one wish, which is my head on a platter?
Not exactly every child’s dream.

And yet, at our baptism,
each of us was anointed 
priest, king, and also prophet.
For those of us baptized as infants,
we, like Jeremiah, did not get much say
in our prophetic vocation:
we were more or less called
from our mothers’ wombs.
Yet prophets we are.

Some of us, but probably not many of us, 
end up being the dramatic sort of prophet
that John the Baptist and Jeremiah were—
those who are provocative and persecuted 
and perhaps even killed.
But most of us who seek to live the prophetic vocation
end up being what I would call “ordinary prophets”:
those whose ears have been opened sacramentally
to hear God’s words
and whose tongues have been 
loosed to speak them.
We ordinary prophets are called 
to bear witness to glad tidings
by living our lives as if the Gospel is true
and by giving to any who ask
an account of the hope that is in us.

And some of us, the lucky ones, 
get paid for doing this;
we get to be professors of theology,
though I would not suggest 
listing “ordinary prophet” on your CV
among your academic positions held,
even if you teach at a Catholic university.

We academic ordinary prophets 
generally don’t face any external persecution 
apart from the tenure process
(again, if we’re lucky).
We’re more likely to face a kind of 
internal persecution of self-doubt,
of endlessly comparing our achievements
to those of others,
of playing games of power,
of thinking of our work not as the pursuit of wisdom
but as a kind of joyless “knowledge production.”
We academic ordinary prophets often discover
that our most severe persecution comes from ourselves.
We dance our own dance of deadly seduction;
we put our own head on the platter.

And the remedy for this internal self-persecution
is the same as that for external persecution:
the fearlessness that flows 
from the truth of the Gospel.
The remedy is to live, as John the Baptist lived, 
in order to bear witness to Jesus,
to let ourselves decrease 
so that he might increase,
to always bear in mind 
that there is a divine teacher
whose sandals we are not worthy to untie
but who has called us nonetheless 
to speak his word.
We pray that this teacher 
would teach us to be prophets
and that God, in his mercy,
would have mercy on us all.