Sunday Sermon for August 4, 2024, The Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
Readings: Ex 16:2-4, 12-25; Eph 4:17, 20-24; Jn 6:24-35
In the second reading today, St. Paul tells the Ephesians they must no longer live as the Gentiles live. He then juxtaposes the old way of life in paganism with the new way of life in Christianity. The old way was marked by the futility of the mind and the corruption that comes through deceitful desires. The new way, on the other hand, is marked by the truth that is in Jesus and the way of God that is righteousness and holiness of truth.
We must take note of two things here. First, the people to whom St. Paul is writing had already been Christian for a number of years. So, we have people who had rejected paganism and were baptized into Jesus, but being surrounded by paganism in their culture, they were either compromising their way of life as Christians or simply giving lip service to our Lord while embracing the pagan way of life.
The second point we must note is that St. Paul says the way to get out of the pagan way of life and live in the new way if Christ is through a renewal of the mind. We must recall that the way the human person functions is that the mind presents a perceived good to the will and with the will we either accept or reject what is being presented. If the “good” being presented is actually something sinful, only those who are formed in the truth will be able to reject it. But if the mind has decided that evil is actually good, then it will eventually be accepted by the will and the person will act upon this.
We all know our weaknesses all too well and every time we sin we choose something that is not good, but we somehow saw it as good and chose it as a greater good than what was truly good. This is why St. Paul speaks of the renewal of the mind: we need to see what is true, good, and right as being the greater good. In choosing this greater good, we will be conforming ourselves to the truth and, thereby, living in the way of righteousness and holiness of truth.
This can only happen with the help of God’s grace and a real desire for the truth. Changing our dispositions and our actions is not very easy. The first reading gives us insight into this. The Israelites had been living in Egypt for 430 years. They had been influenced in many ways by the paganism of the culture in which they lived. In order to strip them of these tendencies, God brought them into the desert where they would need to draw near to Him and learn to depend on Him.
They rebelled and wanted to go back to Egypt where they had fleshpots and bread. In order to help them reject their former way of life and believe in God, the Lord fed them in a miraculous way with manna and quail. Remember, there were 600,000 soldiers when the Israelites left Egypt; this number did not include women, boys, or elderly men. So, there were more than a million and a half people who were fed daily in this wonderful way.
As much as the generation who left Egypt struggled to live according to God’s way, we know that later generations rejected God and His truth and chose false gods and paganism. Knowing the background of the plagues in Egypt, the crossing of the Red Sea, the events at Sinai, and the bread and water for forty years in the desert, one might marvel at the fickleness of humanity as we turn our backs on what should define us and reach out to embrace a series of lies that enslave us in our selfishness.
As difficult as it is to hear the history of the Jewish people and their frequent turning away from God Who worked so many miracles for their ancestors, it is even more heartbreaking to see what is happening in the Church right now. We do not have manna, we have Jesus, God Himself, truly present in the Holy Eucharist. Jesus told us in the Gospel that He is the true Bread from Heaven, the Bread of Life sent by the Father.
So many are walking away from the Bread of Life and reaching out to the fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. The people asked Jesus what they could do to accomplish the works of God. He responded that the work of God is to believe in the One He sent. This is the only way to reject the paganism that surrounds us. This is the true renewal of the mind that will lead us to righteousness and holiness of truth!
Fr. Altier’s column appears regularly in The Wanderer, a national Catholic weekly published in St. Paul, Minn. For information about subscribing to The Wanderer, please visit www.thewandererpress.com.
