Seeing your life through the lens of the gospels
John 6:24-35
1 Jesus distinguishes between food that gives quick satisfaction and food that gives lasting nourishment. It is a mark of wisdom to be able to say ‘no’ to enticing but delusory attractions in order to choose things of lasting value. From your life experience what advice would you give to another about where things of lasting value are to be found?
2 Jesus reminds his listeners that God is the source of all good things. What difference does it make in your life when you are aware that life, the world, everything you have is gift, and you live in a spirit of gratitude?
3 The work of God is that we believe in the one whom God has sent. In what ways has your faith in Jesus enriched and changed your life? How has Jesus satisfied your hungers or quenched your thirsts?
4 As Jesus came down from heaven to give life to the world, so each one of us is here to be a source of life to others. Think of people who have been a source of life to you, and give thanks for them. For whom have you also been a source of life?
John Byrne OSA
Email john@orlagh.ie
Questions people ask
Q. What was the manna from heaven?
A. It was the food provided by God for the Israelites during the Exodus. The name means ‘What is this?’ It was described as white, powdery stuff, like hoarfrost. There were three important points about it. It was a gift from God: it demanded trusting God’s promise because people were instructed to gather only sufficient for each day: and it satisfied every taste as ‘it transformed itself into whatever each eater wished’ (Wis 16:21). The Gospel of John regards the manna as foreshadowing the Bread of Life offered by Jesus – a wonderful gift of God, taken on trust in Jesus’ words, and responding to every need.
Fr Silvester O’Flynn OFM Cap
Email silvesteroflynn@gmail.com
The Deep End
The New Self
Thomas Merton wrote in Contemplation in a World of Action: ‘The new man is not just the old man in possession of a legal certificate entitling him to a reward.’ That’s not the ‘new self’ Paul refers to in today’s Second Reading (Eph 4:17, 20-24). So, what is it?
First, what it isn’t. It isn’t living as the Gentiles live ‘in the futility of their minds’. In other words, it’s not living as if you only had your own mind to depend on. Using only that to comprehend life is futile. It’s a dead end trip. Removed from the light of God’s word the human mind becomes dark, the human heart becomes hard, and human behaviour degenerates into debauchery. Paul wasn’t warning about what might happen, he was describing what already had happened.
Were we to think that reason reigns supreme – pristine and pure – and confine ourselves to its limits deprived of the light of God’s word, and the power of his Spirit, would our understanding and behaviour not deteriorate too? Could we even speak of deterioration of behaviour at all? For if nothing greater than a mind exists, who’s to say that yours is any better than mine? My mind, not yours, sets my standards. As Hamlet says, ‘There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes is so’ – my thinking, that is.
The new self, however, recognises that God sets the standards and it lives by them ‘in true righteousness and holiness’. The new man, the new self, is the one who is righteous and holy before God.
Fr Tom Cahill SVD, Divine Word Missionaries, Donamon, Co Roscommon
Email tomcee@svdireland.com
