Seeds:

First Reading: Joshua 24:1-2,15-18

• This passage brings to a close, the great narrative of the Exodus sojourn of the people of Israel, as Joshua gathered them at Shechem (an ancient and revered site, a place of sacrifice to God even in Abraham’s time, according to Genesis).
• Joshua demanded that the people make a choice, deciding there and then whom to give their allegiance and their service to: God, or the gods of the nations. The biblical narrative, and Jesus in particular, calls on us to make a choice. There isn’t really room to sit on the fence. Do we find that challenging today? Are we willing to make the choice for God?

Psalm: Psalm 33(34):2-3,16-23

• We continue our reading of the same psalm that has accompanied us for the last 3 weeks. Each week the psalm began with verses 2 and 3: “I will bless the Lord at all times, his praise always on my lips” – as this has been repeated so frequently this month, what significance does it have for us?
• The psalm couples for us the terrifying words “The Lord turns his face against the wicked to destroy their remembrance from the earth” with sentiments such as “the Lord is close to the broken-hearted; those whose spirit is crushed he will save.” The psalm needs us to hold these two facets of God’s character together, are we able to do that?

Second Reading: Ephesians 5:21-32

• There is an option today for a longer or shorter reading from Ephesians 5. It deals with a difficult topic: family life and the roles people play within it.
• We may find this overly prescriptive, or we may not; Paul’s key point, though, is to draw quite firm links between the everyday of family life and how love is manifest between persons within a family, to how Christ relates to the Church. The keynotes are supposed to be intimacy, trust, love, and companionship.
• What aspects of this reading do we find difficult, perhaps? How can seeing it in relation to Christ and the Church help?

Gospel: John 6:60-69

• We have the shockingly abrupt line in this passage: “many of his disciples left him and stopped going with him.” For a travelling Rabbi in the 1^st century, this would have been an unmitigated disaster. Jesus, though, takes it in his stride and refuses to water down or change his teaching to keep people on side. How does that help us to interpret his teaching in this passage, in terms of its gravity and the way to read his words?
• The prophet Isaiah’s favourite title for God is the “Holy One of Israel” – it’s possible that here we have another hint of Jesus’ divine identity, as Peter confesses Jesus to be the “Holy One of God.”
• Throughout John 6 we’ve had a theme of eternal life, connected quite explicitly to the living bread, or bread from heaven, which is Jesus’ flesh. Here, though, Jesus is the one to hold the “message” or the words of eternal life. You might like to reflect, then, on the unity of the table of the word and the table of the Eucharist in the celebration of Mass.

Sapling:

As we’ve moved through this chapter in John, we’ve picked up a few threads and seen them woven throughout the dense tapestry John’s placed before us. Today, we pick up once again the thread of being drawn to Jesus by the Father.

Jesus brings it up again here, towards the end of this passage. He says: “there are some of you who do not believe… this is why I told you that no one could come to me unless the Father allows him.”

We’ve seen how being drawn to Jesus is about being taught in our hearts by the Father, rather like Peter confessing Jesus as the Messiah was given to him by the Father. Today, we see its connection to belief.

Belief and faith… what do we mean by those words? What does Jesus mean, what does the Bible or the Church mean when it calls us to believe in God?

The Catechism of the Catholic Church approaches this area from different angles, but one of the clearest and simplest definitions appears tucked away early on in paragraph 154, there the Catechism defines belief as two things:
– Trusting in God
– Cleaving to the truths he has revealed

Belief, then, is more than acknowledging that God is there. It’s more, even, than being specific about what that God is like, although that’s clearly an important part of it.

Someone can be very well taught in the faith: they can know and accept that there is one God in three Persons, that Jesus is the Son and became incarnate of the Virgin, that he died and rose again, and practically everything else that the Church professes.

But if that person doesn’t trust in the God they acknowledge to be real… do they believe? Do they have faith?

It’s interesting, isn’t it, that the Catechism chooses a word like “cleaving” for holding to the truths that God reveals. It reminds us of Genesis, where in describing marriage we’re told a man cleaves to his wife and becomes one flesh with her. There’s an intensity and an intimacy implied by that word: just knowing the faith isn’t enough, we have to fuse it into ourselves, absorb it into our marrow, let it become part of us and shape us very deeply.

Belief is not an easy concept, not a casual head nod or recitation of a set of facts. It’s personal, relational, and transformational.

When Jesus said, then, that some of his disciples didn’t believe, we can understand that as they didn’t have the kind of faith described by the Catechism.

But here’s the key, in the second part of that verse, picking up the thread we’ve been tracking with: being drawn by the Father. In fact, in the same paragraph of the Catechism, just a few words before, it affirms: “Believing is possible only by grace”.

This can sound so daunting. We might come to Mass with a fleeting faith, struggling perhaps to even notionally nod through the creed, and maybe we wouldn’t feel up to radically trusting God. What, is Jesus condemning me then? Am I one of the ones who walks away?

I hope not. We don’t do any of this in our own strength alone. The Father draws us, grace drives us and supplies what we can’t. Because you’re right if you feel daunted, it’s overwhelming! But as Gabriel said to the Virgin Mary, nothing is impossible for God. Nothing at all.

If you read through this and feel you don’t resonate with that description of belief, if it sounds alien to you, I’d encourage you now to ask the Father to draw you to Jesus anew. Just ask, what is there to lose? There could be an awful lot to gain.

Fruit:

• See Sunday 19 in Ordinary Time for references to the Eucharist in the Catechism of the Catholic Church
• Catechism of the Catholic Church #154, belief and faith
• Lumen Fidei, Pope Francis

Related