|
Joshua
24:1-2.15-18: Gathering at Shechem, the renewal
of the Covenant Joshua
organizes a great gathering in Shechem, sort of a founding
meeting of all the tribes. It is the point of departure of a new
movement that starts with the Exodus.
The people must accept a new theological, social
and cultural identity.
The God of the Exodus must be identified:
it is he who sees the people’s oppression, he who
hears their sorrowful shouts and recognizes their sufferings,
he who is determined to come down to free them from the
power of the oppressors. (Ex 3,7-8). The God of their
Ancestors, the God of History. The
tribes come from different cultural, religious and ethnic
origins, but now, thanks to faith in this God of the Exodus,
they unite as one people: Israel.
It is theology and faith in Yahweh, and not blood,
that fuses them in a tribal covenant. The
core of this tribal covenant is their common faith in
this God of the poor.
But the covenant also presupposes identifying “strange”
gods with the Canaanite and Egyptian gods, corrupt images
of God, which engender slavery and death: a system of
taxes, a life of slavery, an oppressive religion. To exchange those gods for the God of
the Exodus, founding a society with laws that foster life,
the distribution of land, and a new worship based on the
Passover, is the central theme of this great gathering
that Joshua organizes in Shechem. The
tribes of Israel make a covenant of love with this God
of the poor. Rather
like marriage vows, so indicates the letter to the Ephesians. “A church subject to Christ...to present
it in splendor, without a spot or wrinkle or anything
of the kind...” This
project shows itself in a surprising way in Jesus, the
Bread of Life, in this long discourse which follows the
miracle most repeated in the Gospels: the multiplication
of the loaves. There is another Bread: Jesus is the Bread. Just as at the gathering
at Shechem, Jesus asks this question: “Will you also go away?” Two significant
miracles of Jesus had been the healing and the table sharing
with the marginalized.
He sits at table with sinners and tax collectors.
He lets others invite him, but at the great meal
shared in the desert and at the Last Supper, he himself
is the host. It
is like sitting at table with God-with-us.
It is to be the guests of God.
It is love’s folly, “a
sin” according to the religion of that time.
“He eats with sinners and sits at table with publicans.” (Mt 9,11) This
is the beginning of the Kingdom. But with this discourse of Jesus, the
Bread of Life, the symbolism of shared tables becomes
profound. He is the Bread. It’s not just in eating at the table that
God shares with sinners and marginalized people, it is
God himself that is the food, the Bread that is his own
life, which he surrenders, which is broken and then shared.
To eat of him, to drink of him, is the most radical
expression of the joining of lives, of the common project
between Him and us.
It is the very eating, drinking, and assimilating
of the God who gives life.
To share this Bread demands that we give our lives,
that we be “broken” for others. To
eat this Bread is to eat, to assimilate, the code of the
Beatitudes and the law of love, it is to drink the life,
the practices, the words of Jesus.
By eating of him, we are nourished by the very
life of God and by the work of the kingdom. He
is the Bread “come down” from heaven, the true food of
an intimate God, seated at the table with his younger
brothers and sisters.
This is not a meal taken in solitude.
It is not a bread for individualist intimacy, it
is to be shared in fellowship. Thus
the rejection provoked by this “scandal of the complete
intimacy of the God of Jesus,” thus the anxiety of Jesus that his disciples
would abandon him. How
valuable it would be to examine our Eucharistic celebrations.
Do they engender a movement toward the kingdom
like Jesus does? Does our way of thinking and acting change
at all? Do
we become more capable of recognizing the other presences
of the Lord Jesus among those who are dispossessed of
life? The
presence of the same Jesus who says, “I am the Bread of
Life,” who says “I was hungry and you fed me.” (Mt 25,35).
For
personal consideration: Ours
is a faith incarnate, which means we discover a God who
is not in heaven but on earth, in history, in the lives
of persons; in the very form of our cultic rituals, even
at the risk of identifying the faith with those rituals.
And I, do I live according to the Spirit who gives
life, or according to the letter which obeys, but also
kills. Have
I found meaning in my life in the friendship of Jesus
or in the exercise of those practices which tranquilize
my conscience? For
the group’s consideration: -
Today’s gospel, taken literally, is understood as if it
were the direct narration of a witness who tells what
he saw. It
has numerous details or elements which today we know are
not historically certain. Name them. -
Those elements belong to a “theological” language, metaphorical
therefore, not literal, nor directly historical. Discuss this as especially peculiar to
the gospel of John, as opposed to what occurs in the “synoptic”
gospels. (Mt, Mk, Lk). -
If this gospel is taken literally to mean that Jesus was
completely conscious of his Divinity, that Jesus knew
from the beginning all that was happening and who was
going to betray him, it is equal to saying that he is
not truly a normal human being...the result is an image
of Jesus which is not what today’s Christology presents. What problems about Jesus’s understanding
can be presented to those who interpret this gospel literally?
How will simple people without special theological
formation understand this gospel? -
The text of the second reading is one of the Pauline texts
that nowadays is extremely problematic from the viewpoint
of feminism and of just social relationships based on
gender. Paul naively assumes the whole patriarchal vision
of gender proper to the culture of his time, in which
the woman is inferior and thus must be taken care of,
looked after, and protected by a man, who is her head,
and whom she must respect...Pose first, and then try to
resolve the questions raised by the fact that the very
“Word of God” steers us to a patriarchal vision of the
female sex. For
the Prayer of the Faithful -
For the whole church, that it may faithfully preserve
the message received from Jesus and communicate it with
courage. Let
us pray. -
For all Christians, that we may learn to find God incarnate
in history, in life, and in different human situations. Let us pray. -
For all of us, that our reflection on the gospel may be
accompanied by a desire to change our lives. Let us pray. -
For all the followers of Jesus, that we may choose to
follow him sincerely with our lives and with an awareness
of the commitment this implies.
Let us pray. -
For all people, that they may find on their journey the
true word of life and liberty found only in Jesus. Let us pray. -
For this our community, that we may find the words of
life in the gospel and put them into practice in our every
day situations.
Let us pray. Community
Prayer
|
|||
|
Claretian Communications,
Inc. • 8 Mayumi St. UP Village, Diliman 1101, Quezon City, Philippines
|
|||