Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time - Dom Brendan

My grandmother had an all purpose aphorism which she used liberally when I was growing up: “sharper than a serpent’s tooth is an ungrateful child”. I did not discover until years later that she was quoting a passage from that most complex of all Shakespeare’s play’s King Lear: a play about parents, children and gratitude among other things,.

It’s unlikely my grandmother knew she was quoting Shakespeare. She was not a highly educated woman: she had to leave grade school to help raise her 11 brothers and sisters when her father died. Nor was she a great lover of books: her reading material was generally limited to the “Readers Digest”, “St. Anthony Messenger” and the occasional Ellery Queen mystery story.

She grew up in great poverty and knew the hardship of the depression and the war years. And perhaps, because of this, knew a thing or two about being grateful.

And while she was not educated, one of the things she did know was that children are not naturally grateful. They have to be taught. Of course children are quick learners because they are such good observers though they are not necessarily good interpreters of what they see. They imitate the behaviors they observe around them often without knowing what they mean.

For example: One of the stories trotted out on those occasions when my family gets together has to do with the fact that as a little child I swore like a sailor. Apparently at a certain point it became so bad that my mother finally went to the parish priest, Msgr. Scheringer, to get some help on how to break me of the habit. As the story goes Msgr. Scheringer patiently listened to my mother describe the problem and then asked her one simple question: “Where did he learn it?”

A child learns to be grateful by observing the adults around them performing the important little rites of daily life that often begin with “thank you” or “I’m sorry”. These are simple phrases that are the basis of any real communal life because they are acts of recognition that we are not self-sufficient, self-reliant and self-contained. Someone whose focus is exclusively on him or her self are all to willing to abandon others.

Already at the beginning Genesis we hear the divine judgment on this kind of self-idolatry: “It is not good for man to be alone”. In this context, sin is a form of impersonalism: the failure to be attentive, responsible, compassionate, faithful and grateful.

The opposite of gratitude is resentfulness. Resentfulness, as St. Benedict recognized, is a powerful agent in destroying community because it too needs to be shared. And if the vehicle for sharing gratitude is saying “thank you” the vehicle for sharing resentment is murmuring.

Resentment and murmuring provide the background for this Sunday’s reading from the Gospel of John. Actually, we should be hearing Mark today because Year B in the Lectionary cycle is the Year of Mark. But because his Gospel is so short the Church inserts portions of chapter 6 of John, the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and the fishes, over a span of 5 weeks in late summer.

Today’s passage gives a good example of John’s theology at work.
The Jewish people, having come into the desert, are hungry and thirsty. They cry out for food and are given “bread from heaven” but no sooner do they eat their fill than, in a complete lack of gratitude for what they have received, begin to murmur against God.

I’m speaking about the Gospel of course but I could also be describing the events of Exodus 16 the famous story of the manna from heaven. John’s Gospel follows Exodus closely here because the evangelist is deliberately and insistently inviting the Christian community to think of their journey in faith in a way similar way to the one described in Exodus: the life of a Christian is a Passover from slavery into freedom, from Egypt to the Promised Land and from death into life. If Moses was the means through which Israel of old is saved, then Jesus is the means through which the new Israel finds salvation: and more, he himself is the true heavenly bread, the true paschal lamb, the true and long awaited messiah.

This is fully revealed in the multiplication of the loaves. But like the Israelites of old this sign, however wondrous, is not enough. And the people begin to murmur against Jesus just as they did against Moses. The words of Psalm 78 which we sing at Vigils on Wednesday simultaneously describes both events:
They tested God in their hearts
By demanding the food they craved
They spoke against God saying,
Can he provide a table in the wilderness?
Can he give us bread or provide meat for his people?
Behind these texts lies that most toxic of human inclinations, ingratitude. The lack of which is but a symptom of those quintessential American qualities of self-fulfillment and self-reliance that tempt us to do everything out of our own resources. Why? because neither God nor others can be trusted to provide for us.

But in the end Self-reliance and Self-fulfillment, like all forms of idolatry, are merely an illusion: no human can do what God does just as no human and fulfill what God alone fulfills. And this is precisely what Jesus is pointing out to his listeners in John 6. We cannot engineer our own salvation: only He can give life because he himself is the author of life. Human life is, from start to finish, a gift and we are responsible to the Giver of the gift for what we make of it. But we will make nothing of this Gift if we do not recognize the fundamental truth that “sharper than a serpents tooth is an ungrateful child”.

When all is said and done the Gospel is posing a simple question: who is God? I, myself or someone to whom I must surrender myself without conditions, qualifications or reservations at every level of my being?