19th Sunday of Year B: 2015 ....DOCTRINE AND FAITH

(1Kings 19,4-8; Ephesians 4,30-5:2; John 6,41-51: 19th Sunday of Year B:

2015)

          

  In Catholic Theology, divine grace has enormous significance and plays dominant role in God-human relationship.  The Catechism of the Catholic Church has this classic definition of Grace as favour, the free and underserved help that God gives us to respond to his call. (cf. CCC 1996)  This definition underlines the fact that man cannot do it unaided as far as responding to God’s call is concerned.  Salvation is not possible without God’s Grace. Saying yes to God and following where He leads are indeed unrealizable without the light of His Grace.  In His paternal solicitude for man’s salvation, God has always been generous with His grace.  He always holds out his generous gift of grace to man everywhere and constantly reminds us that our human efforts come to nothing without His assistance.

            “Get up and eat, or the journey will be too long for you”.  This was what God told the prophet Elijah in the first reading today.  For a prophet threatened by frustration and beaten down by the challenges of his vocation, nothing could be more revealing of God’s solicitude.  When he was on the verge of hopelessness; when the next step looked unsure and the motivation to push on eluded him, then the light of God’s loving care came.  God fed and gave him the strength to continue his journey.  Without God’s intervention, Elijah’s journey to Horeb could not have been completed.

            In today’s gospel, Jesus was quick to remind the Jews that salvation, and therefore, faith that leads to salvation, is not a fruit of mere human effort and determination but God’s own doing.  He told them, “No one can come to me unless he is drawn by the Father who sent me”.  It is God’s loving choice of us, in spite of what we are, that qualifies us to be His children and co-heirs with Christ. What role does a person, then, play in the issue of salvation/ faith? We play the role of leaving ourselves to be drawn by God; allow ourselves to be lorded over by God; being open to the grace of God and not imprisoning ourselves in the false idea of auto-sufficiency or presumption or in one’s mental scheme or prejudice. We thank God that we believe in Jesus Christ, His Son, the Bread of eternal life sent by God the Father into this world. This is because whoever believes in the Divinity of Jesus Christ, the living bread, and feeds from his Word and the Eucharist, has eternal life as St. John the Evangelist states in today’s gospel. By using the verb in the indicative mood and present tense (has) John means that the person already is participating in Divine life of God inchoately, that is to say, at its beginning, in its rudiments. It is this rudimentary participation that will, in the next life, develop into perfection and fullness. Feeding from Christ, the bread of life and nourishing oneself from his Word and Eucharist mean being united with him in his thoughts, sentiments and desires; it means putting on Christ like a dressas Paul so expresses in Romans 13,14 and Galatians 3,27. When we feed from Christ, the bread of life and from His Word and Eucharist it becomes possible for us to establish new rapports among men, based on sacrificial love and not on selfishness; nor motivated by sheer will for power and dominion. It is then possible to put into practice Paul’s exhortation to the Ephesians: “Try then to imitate God as children of his that he loves and follow Christ by loving as he loved you giving himself up in our place as fragrant offering and sacrifice to God”.

            In our vocation as Christians, our aspiration to respond to the challenges of this call and our journey towards God, we cannot do without the solicitude of God’s grace. This truth has even more practical implication for us in our daily struggle. The limitedness of our human strength should not discourage us but should rather draw us to a better appreciation of the grace of God that supplies where and when our human capability stops. May we, therefore, in today’s Eucharistic celebration pray for the very important gifts of both faith and grace for ourselves and for others. Happy Sunday! +John I. Okoye