Ordinary Time

Jan 15 2025

“Come and Get It!”

A TV series featured an English chef going into an elementary school in Huntington, West Virginia, trying to change the children’s eating habits. The resistance he first encounters is fierce. The children choose pizza over fresh chicken, throwing the beans and salad into the trash. Even sadder was the resistance of the adults: the women who prepare lunch, the school principal, and even the food supervisor of the school system.

We see Jesus feeding people in many ways throughout the Gospels: by his words and deeds, by his preaching, teaching, and healing. In today’s account, he literally feeds a crowd of over five thousand with five loaves and two fish. This event is a sign of God’s ongoing desire to meet our hungers with generosity and life-giving nourishment.

This feeding reveals Jesus as his Father’s Son, the God who calls people to come, eat and drink without paying, without cost. God wants to feed us so we have and share life with others. We can refuse both the food of God’s word and the food of the Eucharist, even when we receive it with our ears and mouths, by not taking it into our lives.

The word “heed” comes twice in the first reading: “Heed me and you shall eat well . . . Come to me heedfully, listen, that you may have life.” God cries for us to hear, to listen “that you may have life,” to receive the love of God revealed in Jesus, and let it nourish us into eternal life.

Consider/Discuss

Do you take and digest the food that God feeds you at the table of the word and the table of the Eucharist?
Are you willing to distribute the food of God’s word and God’s love to others, as the disciples were asked to do?

Responding to the Word

We pray that we fully take in the food Jesus gives to us. We ask that the bread of the word and the bread of the Eucharist be nourishment that strengthens us in this life and enables us to walk in the way of the Lord. We pray that we may give this food to others.

Jan 15 2025

Scripture Study for

God is cast in the role of a street vendor, who offers food and drink at no cost both to those who are able to pay and to those who are not. All are invited to come to the Lord in order to be nourished. What God has to offer is satisfying and will be long-lasting, compared with all else for which people seem to spend their money. The real object of the invitation is God’s announcement of the reestablishment of a covenant bond. This prophecy suggests that the covenant had been violated, and now God is eager to restore the severed bond. Paul insists that nothing that can separate believers from the love of Christ. He is probably challenging the long-standing notion that a person’s misfortune is the consequence of some misdeed. Paul turns this understanding upside down by insisting that the opposite can be true—that the righteous, precisely because they are righteous, enter into the sufferings of Christ. In other words, misfortune does not separate them from Christ; it can actually unite them with him. Paul makes four significant points: 1) God’s love for us is basic to everything, 2) this love comes to us through Jesus, 3) Jesus is God’s “anointed one,” and 4) Jesus is the Lord to whom we give our allegiance.

The death of John the Baptist prompted Jesus to seek a place where he might be by himself. However, his departure did not deter the crowds, who seemed to know where he was going and arrived there before he did. Jesus’ actions over the food were brief but significant. He took the bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it as food. The eucharistic overtones are obvious. The role played here by the apostles cannot be overlooked. They were the ones through whom the crowds experienced the munificence of Jesus. The author of the Gospel shows by this that Jesus provides for his people through the agency of the church.

Jan 15 2025

In Search Of: A Wise Heart

If God were to offer you your heart’s desire, what would you ask for? Solomon did not request health or wealth. Nor did he ask God to remove his enemies— either those inherited from his father or those acquired when he was given the crown at a very young age. Solomon asked for wisdom, for a heart that understands or listens. Such wisdom included the ability to judge justly and to distinguish right from wrong. God was pleased.

The gift of wisdom allows the heart to see; the letter to the Ephesians refers to “seeing with the eyes of the heart.” And wisdom brings the ability to hear the word of the Lord even when spoken in the sound of silence, as Elijah did. Such seeing and hearing lie at the heart of the first two parables. Seeing God’s reign is likened to finding a treasure in a field or seeking a most valuable pearl—when one sees where it is hidden or hears where it can be found, one gives all one has to make it one’s own.

The heart can spend many years and look in many places for happiness. We can bypass the kingdom again and again, going off into various dead ends, cul de sacs, and blind alleys. Paul reminds the Romans that all things work for good for those who look to God. God, who has predestined us to share the image of the Son, wishes to give us the wisdom needed to discover where the kingdom is hidden.

Consider/Discuss

What is your heart’s desire?
Have you asked for that wisdom that is a gift of the Holy Spirit?
Of the different parables you have heard these last three weeks, which one speaks most to your heart?

Responding to the Word

Remembering that “the revelation of [God’s] words sheds light” (Psalm 119), ask God to give you the wisdom needed in your life to seek out the divine presence and to respond wholeheartedly to that presence, so that God rules in your heart, mind, and spirit as you grow into the image of Jesus Christ.

Jan 15 2025

Scripture Study for

Solomon asks for an understanding heart so that he can rule his people wisely. This request shows his concern for God’s people, not merely for himself. It is no wonder that God is pleased with him. The very last verse of the passage reinforces the tradition of Solomon’s wisdom, claiming that no one before him or anyone after him could compare with him. The wisdom referred to here is not experiential wisdom, the kind that stems from reflection on experience; it is really a gift from God. God chose Solomon to be king, and gave him the wisdom he needed to rule wisely.

Paul’s insistence that all things work for good should not be misunderstood as meaning that everything will work out in the end. Rather, it implies a profound trust that God can bring good even out of misfortune. Paul’s teaching on predestination has often been misunderstood. He states that God foreknew from the beginning of time and with divine power predetermined who would be called, justified, and glorified. And who are the ones called? Nowhere does Paul suggest that some are predestined to salvation and others to perdition. Rather, the entire Christian tradition provides the answer to the question. All are called to be justified and glorified.

The parables of the treasure in the field and the pearl of great price both suggest that the kingdom of God is present though unperceived. However, only the very shrewd discover it and sacrifice everything in order to possess it. The parable of the net is quite different. Like the parable of the wheat and the weeds (see Matthew 13:40b–42, Sixteenth Sunday), it describes a community consisting of both good and bad. Only at the end of the catch will the fish be separated. Jesus asks if the disciples understand his teaching, because they must see that, like the old and new treasures of the householder, the teaching of Jesus, though radically different, is grounded in the original tradition.

Jan 15 2025

The Patience and Power of God

Our experience of the world is often an experience of opposites: truth and lies, goodness and evil, beauty and ugliness. They are found in intimate proximity, often on the same page of the newspaper or in the same half-hour news report, and intertwined in the same human heart. Their existence is connected to human freedom as well as to the power of sin and evil in our world.

Jesus tells a parable that makes the same point as the author of Wisdom: God’s exercise of power is tempered by leniency and mercy; God’s justice is balanced by loving-kindness. Our desire to pull up and destroy the weeds prematurely could destroy the good wheat. While the interpretation in the Gospel applies this image to different groups in a community, we can also hear this parable as referring to the weeds and wheat, the evil and goodness residing in the heart.

Jesus says God’s active presence in the world is something as small as a mus tard seed and as fragile as a pinch of yeast, yet each contains a power that, when released, will bring about growth and expansion.

In the meantime, the challenge is being as patient with others as God is, while working with God to purify our own hearts. Last week Jesus warned about the sluggish heart; today he pictures a contaminated heart, good interpenetrated by evil. But the power of God is stronger than the power of evil and death. Be patient, and remain open to the workings of God’s grace.

Consider/Discuss

What do you see as “weeds” in your life, in the community, in the world?
Where have you seen the power of God at work in small and hidden ways?
How can the patience and kindness of God work through you?

Responding to the Word

We respond by praying: “O God, you have given us the gift of life; continue to keep us alive in Christ Jesus. Bring us from death to grow in faith, hope, and love. We remain patient in prayer and faithful to your word, until your glory is revealed.”