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Eighteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B, August 2, 2009 (Lectionary index # 113B) |
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Twenty-second digests for the congregation: Arrange with your liturgy committee to have these brief historical introductions read to the assembly before you do each reading.
Who should announce these before the first and second readings, and before the gospel acclamation? They're not Scripture, nor homiletic, so they shouldn't be delivered from the ambo. They're a modest teaching. So let the presider say them from the chair. Let the lector turn toward the presider and listen.
Print this page, cut it at the blue lines, and give the introduction paragraphs to the person who will speak them. | ||
| Eighteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B, August 2, 2009 | ||
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Before the first reading:
This passage reminded exiled Jews of how their God had provided for their ancestors in an earlier difficult time, and how God had demanded of them strict obedience.
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After the psalm, before the second reading:
In prior verses, the writer has told the Gentile Christians at Ephesus how Christ has now reconciled them with God's historically favored people, the Jews. Today's verses demand some changes from their pre-Christian way of life.
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Before the gospel acclamation:
In prior verses of the gospel, Jesus has miraculously fed thousands of people. Now Jesus challenges them to find new meaning in miracles, in their history, in bread itself, and in their desire to do God's will.
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To pay for use of the words above, please subtract an equal number of optional words from other places in the liturgy (click here for some suggestions). | ||
Our Liturgical Setting: We've interrupted our Liturgical Year B trek through Saint Mark's gospel for a five-week sojourn in the gospel of John, Chapter 6, the extended teaching about Jesus as the Bread of Life. In today's gospel passage, John 6:24-35, Jesus cites the people's history, an incident in which Moses gave their ancestors "bread from heaven to eat." As you would expect, Jesus will reinterpret that event and show (or hint) how God's gift to the world in Jesus himself excels what God gave through Moses.
The Whole Historical Situation [in 250 words]: In ancient Sumer (modern Iraq) lived a rich, wily fellow soon to be renamed Abraham. We'd call him, and everybody else at the time, a pagan. He followed the mysterious voice of God and moved to Palestine, around 1800 B.C.E., where he made a covenant with God. His grandson Jacob was renamed Israel, and Israel's twelve sons and their families wound up in Egypt seeking relief from famine. The Egyptians and others lumped these and other nomadic people under the name Hebrews. Eventually the Egyptians enslaved the Hebrew descendants of Israel. Around 1200 B.C.E. Moses revived their ancestral religion and led them out of Egypt back to the land Abraham had occupied. (The event is known as the Exodus.) On the way, at Mount Sinai, Moses renewed the covenant between God and the people, their side of the Covenant being expressed concretely in the Ten Commandments. (Today's first reading is set here.) Generations after Moses saw: the kingships of Saul, David, Solomon and lesser kings; the Temple on Mount Zion in Jerusalem; the division into northern and southern kingdoms (Israel and Judah, respectively); the prophets; the Exile in Babylon; more prophets; a dispirited return from exile (when the verses we read today were written); the diaspora (dispersion of many of the people now known as Jews (from "Judah") among Mediterranean pagan populations; occupation of their homeland by Greeks under Alexander, then occupation by the Romans; the coming of John the Baptist; the coming of Jesus of Nazareth; and more.
Background of today's text: In the latter parts of that long history, the prophets and the more faithful priests often appealed to the Exodus memory in order to rekindle faith in the one true God, and keep the people on course. In their writings they retell the history with their own concerns giving certain biases to the tale. Thus the 5th verse of chapter 16 (absent from the Lectionary selection) says "On the sixth day, however, when they prepare what they bring in, let it be twice as much as they gather on the other days." That and the notion that God's goal is "to see whether they follow my instructions or not" (verse 4) show that this text is the work of priests. They wanted the people to observe the seventh day of the week as a Sabbath, and believed that the way to maintain healthy nationhood was to promote strict religious observance.
Proclaiming It: Make the Israelites in the first paragraph sound really irritated with Moses. Their complaints are exaggerated and should sound so. (Has the whole community died of famine yet? Evidently not.)
Make the Lord sound a bit weary and patronizing until his last clause, which should sound resolute, "so that you may know that I, the LORD, am your God."
Moses' only sentence in this selection has the quality of "I told you so." Make him sound triumphant.
This week the Apostle sounds a more cautionary note: Don't continue to behave like you did before your conversion, "You must no longer live as the Gentiles [in a clearer, older translation, the pagans] do." And how might the unconverted pagans be living? Here are verses 18 and 19, absent from the Lectionary: "darkened in understanding, alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance, because of their hardness of heart, they have become callous and have handed themselves over to licentiousness for the practice of every kind of impurity to excess." No salacious details, but you get the idea.
Proclaiming It: If you must proclaim this from the N.A.B. translation in the 1998 Lectionary for Mass for Use in the Dioceses of the United States, second edition, gird yourself; it's not going to be easy. The punctuation notwithstanding, phrase it and insert pauses according to this outline:
I. Brothers and sisters: I declare and testify in the Lord
A. that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds;
i. that is not how you learned Christ, assuming that you have heard of him and were taught in him, as truth is in Jesus,
B. that you should
i. put away the old self of your former way of life, corrupted through deceitful desires,
ii. and be renewed in the spirit of your minds,
iii. and put on the new self, created in God's way in righteousness and holiness of truth.
| Several other commentaries on these passages. All are thoughtful, all quite readable, from the scholarly to the popular.
Links may be incomplete more than a few weeks before the "due date." | |
| Lutheran pastor and college teacher Dan Nelson's notes for a study group cover our first reading and gospel, plus the second reading that Catholics will consider next week. | Father Roger Karban's columns on these readings, courtesy of The Evangelist, newspaper of the Catholic Diocese of Albany, New York, USA. from 1997, from 2003. And, courtesy of the Fellowship of Southern Illinois Laity, a page with all his recent columns. |
| The Text This Week; links to homilies, art works, movies and other resources on the week's scripture themes | Saint Louis University's excellent site for Sunday liturgy Most welcome here are Reginald Fuller's commentaries. (Caveat lector as of June 26, 2009. Lector's Notes' author is speculating about the exact future URL of SLU's offering, since it's not yet posted. If you get a 404 Not Found, try here). |
The Lectionary selections in the frame at the left, if any, are there for your convenience. The publishers of the page in that frame have no connection, except for membership in the one Body of Christ, with the publisher of this page. Likewise the publishers of the pages on the links above.
Last modified: June 26, 2009