TWENTIETH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME B

[cappie]

“ Wisdom has built herself a house, she has erected her seven pillars.”     The first few generations of Christians, attempted to describe Jesus theologically, leaned heavily on this Wisdom tradition and attributed to him many of her characteristics.

The connection between the reading from Proverbs and the continuing discourse in John’s Gospel, where we are now in about the third week of the “Bread of Life” speech from John 6, lies in the offer of God’s life-giving hospitality. The passage from Proverbs 9:1-6 shows Wisdom preparing a banquet: animals are slaughtered, the wine is mixed with spices to increase the flavour, and she sends out her servants to invite the “simple people” to her house for the festivities. The purpose of the banquet is to invite and encourage the “simple” to embrace the path of following wisdom and begin by learning insight.  

We understand, then, that Wisdom’s hospitality invites us to life, not death, and so we move into the “Bread of Life” discourse in John 6. Eating and drinking at Wisdom’s feast is to live and walk in the way of insight. Eating the bread that Jesus is offering is accepting to participate fully in his own flesh and blood. We have to understand both passages metaphorically, though it is always worth pausing to contemplate the horror of Jesus’ words if they are taken literally: eating flesh and drinking blood is the language of cannibalism. Wisdom’s banquet can be taken as a symbol of God’s invitation to enjoy the abundant richness and sustenance of his presence in our lives as we commit ourselves to seeking him by study, prayer, and action.

But when Jesus talks of eating his flesh and drinking his blood, he is saying that unless we come to live by his death, we shall not find that abundant richness and sustenance. We find our true and eternal life with God only as we take Jesus’ self-offering in dying as characteristic for our own living as his disciples. When he goes on to say in John 6 that “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives in me, and I live in him.” Jesus is indicating that both life in this world, and life in what we call “the world to come” are intimately bound up with our relationship to his sacrificial death.

The “Bread of Life” discourse is, from end to end, resonant with overtones of both Passover and Eucharist. But the significance of the whole thing lies not only in the promised abundance of abiding, eternal life that God, through Jesus’ life and death, gives for us and to us, but also in the way we appropriate the sacrificial nature of Jesus’ life and death into our own ways of being and thus make our own lives available to others. That deeply inviting hospitality is seen in Lady Wisdom preparing her feast and setting her table. She will make herself available to those who seek insight into her ways and paths.

The picture has memories of Abraham’s hospitality, the feast laid out for his anonymous and angelic visitors in the desert “by the terebinths of Mamre,” when he and Sarah are promised the inheritance of life in the world to come of a son, Isaac.

Like John 6, the inviting and deeply hospitable banquet of Wisdom haunts us with its allusions to God’s gift of manna in the wilderness. The long journey through such inhospitable places is where the People of God came to terms with their departure from Egypt, their deliverance and the invitation to freedom; the inhospitable desert is where they learned new things about God’s hospitality and looked forward to life in the world to come of the Promised Land.

May all our Eucharists show forth to ourselves and to others the hospitality of our God, and may our lives grow ever deeper into the self-offering of our Savior Jesus, so that we can offer ourselves and the fruits of our lives and labours to others in his name. Amen.