Fr. Eduardo Emilio Aguero, SCJ
Jn 6: 51-58
20th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year B
Gospel Reflection
In our religious Dehonian community in Macau, we have a friend called Aileen, who shows us her love for us when she bursts into our house every Chinese New Year to decorate it in red with garlands, balloons, and ribbons with Chinese characters praying for peace and happiness. She and other good friends also share typical Chinese foods for each Chinese festival: Spring Festival, Mid-Autumn Festival, Dragon Boat Festival, Winter Solstice Festival…
Something similar happens during Advent when Aileen spends days preparing the Nativity scene in our living room and putting together beautiful flower arrangements for our chapel.
In today’s first reading of the book of Proverbs 9:1-6, Wisdom is personified and presented as a woman, as caring as Aileen, who builds a house with seven columns, prepares a dinner, and sends her servants to invite those who lack experience. In the Bible, Wisdom is a gift of God cultivated in the day-to-day discernment of His will. The Word of God needs to be actualized in the here and now of every person and community that is called to experience the goodness of the Lord, and His wonders, and to accept God’s corrections and chastisements as a path to maturity and purification.
The virtue that accompanies Wisdom is prudence, which is opposed to foolishness. Young people and adolescents “lack” wisdom because they do not yet have experience. That experience is achieved with the accompaniment –a kind of spiritual guidance— and the example of those “wise men” who have been “fed” on this gift of God. The sages of the Old Testament had their feet on the ground to face the challenges of family and community life, in the socio-political circumstances of their time. St. Paul VI would say, “reading the signs of the times”. We can interpret the 7 pillars of the house built by that Lady as the 7 gifts of the Holy Spirit: Wisdom, Understanding, Counsel, Fortitude, Knowledge, Piety and Fear of the Lord (cf. Is 11:2).
This woman, Wisdom, is a biblical figure who anticipates the presentation of “the Word of God” who “was God and was with God” in the prologue of John’s Gospel (cf. Jn 1:1). Although the evangelist does not present the institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper, it is experienced as the source of life for the Johannine community.
Like the Lady Wisdom in the Book of Proverbs, Jesus, the Lamb of God, invites us to eat his body and drink his blood, the source of eternal life. He is the Word of God, the true bread come down from heaven, the One sent by the Father, who manifested God’s Glory in His “hour”, the hour of his “Passover”. It was then, having fulfilled all that the Scriptures had announced, he handed over his spirit (Jn 19:30). Pierced by the soldier’s lance, blood and water flowed from his opened side, symbols of the new and eternal covenant and the Holy Spirit who renews the whole creation.
The Eucharist is a banquet. However, we need to remember that it is a banquet that the Lord Jesus prepared by offering Himself on the cross, the altar where He gave us his body, and on which He shed his precious blood.
This Sacrament of the body and blood of Christ is not food exclusively for us Catholics. No, not at all! The Eucharist is God’s gift for the life of the world; it must permeate our whole life: Jesus in the Eucharist transforms us into a gift for the world, for our colleagues at work, for the tourists who walk our streets, for the children and young people in our Catholic schools, for our scouts, for the many elderly and sick people who are in homes served by nuns unknown to most people, for prisoners who receive visits of concerned brothers and sisters from our communities… Yes, the Eucharist is a source of life for the world, and in Macau, the city of the Holy Name of God, the mother of so many missionaries, we are called to make it present and at work in our here and now, starting from the small churches of our families and our parish communities, in the socio-political situation in which we live, with courage, with the strength that this food gives us.
(Image: Ronsa06@pixabay.com)
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