Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 4, 2024 - Exodus 16:2-4, 12-15; Ephesians 4:17, 20-24; John 6:24-35
“Boy, the way Glenn Miller played
Songs that made the hit parade.
Guys like us, we had it made.
Those were the days.
Didn’t need no welfare state.
Everybody pulled his weight.
Gee, our Lasalle ran great.
Those were the days.
People seemed to be content.
Fifty dollars paid the rent.
Hair was short and skirts were long.
Kate Smith really sold a song.
I don’t know just what went wrong.
Those were the days.”
I am sure many of you recognize that as the theme song from All in the Family. And it captures the attitude of Archie Bunker. Most of the time the plot of each half hour show was that Archie had to let go of something from the good old days in order to get something or learn something good about the here and now. Every now and then there was a changeup. Meatball had to learn something about the value of tradition or the meaning of holding on to treasures from the past.
We’re going to use that to try to understand what’s going on in today’s Gospel. But first, we have to talk a little bit about the question I asked before the first reading. Pay close attention to the attitude of the people in the first reading. There’s a little question right in the middle of the story. And that question is a weasel question. It says, in the first line of the story, “The people grumbled against Moses and Aaron.” The people grumbled. They were angry. They said, “We might as well have just stayed in Egypt as slaves. At least we had three squares a day. Now we’re out here in the desert starving. It’s all your fault." So, Moses tells the people that God told him God will take care of it. So, quail and manna.
Now, quail, I imagine, wasn’t a bad evening meal. If you barbecue it, it’ll be a little like chicken. But this manna stuff. The scientists tell us that most likely it was a secretion of some sort of desert insect. Blech! And that’s where the question comes in, “What is this?” You know, you can read that line lots of different ways. It could be an expression of delight and surprise – “Oh! What is this?” It could also be read as an expression of disgust – “What is this!?!” And that’s the key to the name. In Hebrew, the word for bread is lachem. Lachem. And lachem isn’t what they call this stuff. They call it manna. From an ancient word in the same language family, man hu. And man hu is a question. Man hu is a question of disgust or disappointed that's translated to English as “what is this?” So, the people were actually disappointed with what God had given them to eat. Later on, in Exodus, you’ll find that out because they’ll grumble again and say, “We‘re sick and tired of this crummy food. We don’t want this anymore.” That’s why I asked you to contrast the attitude of the people in the first story with the attitude of the people in the Gospel.
Between the Exodus and the coming of Christ there are 1500 years. A millennium and a half. That’s a lot of time. And, in that time, the story of the Exodus has gone from being an adventure story, where you never know what is going to be around the next turn, to being the, THE story that proves God’s care for his people. And so, in the 1500 years, manna has gone from being a disgusting sort of thing we don’t want to eat, to being the proof, the absolute proof of God’s love for his people. It’s taken on a meaning it did not have at the beginning. And so, when Jesus says to them, “You’re not looking for me because you saw signs, but because you ate your fill,” he's presenting them with a challenge. And they answer him back by saying, “You know, Moses gave us bread from the heavens to eat. So, what sign can you perform?” That doesn’t make any sense. He’s just fed 5,000 people with five loaves and two fish. How can they ask him what sign he can do when Jesus just performed a spectacular sign?
The problem is that the people cannot see the astonishing new thing that God is doing in their midst because they are so fixated on the story of the manna. They can’t get past this signal meaning for their ancient history. And so, they cannot hear what Jesus is saying about something new happening in their midst.
And the Church leaves us, this morning, in the middle of the story. The controversy will continue next Sunday and get worse before it gets better. But Jesus is saying to them, “You have to let go, sometimes, of something treasured that is old in order to embrace something that will be a new treasure.”
And that’s why I started my homily by talking about the opening song from All in the Family. That’s the lesson Archie had to learn over and over again. But it’s also a lesson that all of us have to learn in our lives. Sometimes, we hold on so tightly to some version of ourselves from the past. We hold on so tightly to some event from the past, either good or bad, that we define our whole lives by that thing and cannot see what’s right in front of us.
The same thing is true in the life of faith. Sometimes we hold on to one version of our relationship with God, that we cannot see what God is doing in our lives right now. We always need to be open to answering the question, “What is this?” What is happening right now? How much of what I treasure or what I fear do I have to surrender to embrace what is happening now.