In the daily liturgies of Ordinary Time, we look to the Sunday Cycle of readings to give us a braod prayer and application focus.  The daily readings sharpen and examen the focus each day.  Today, Tuesday of the 19th week in Ordinary time the Old Testament text from Ezekiel invited me to consider more deeply the Eucharist itself.  The Gospel invites a very specific application of claiming God’s life and Will as our way of life – the necessity for genuine humility.

The Sunday readings these weeks are called “The Bread Cycle” which is approximately six weeks of Readings on the Eucharist.  The texts come from John’s Gospel, Chapter 6, which is inserted into the middle of Ordinary Time in the year of Mark.  Mark’s Gospel being a bit short to really cover a whole liturgical year.

In John’s Gospel Jesus asserts that doing the Will of the Father is his Daily Bread.  He makes this visceral connection between “consuming”  God’s Presence made available in food (usually bread) throughout the Bible.  To eat the Bread of God is to eat of sweetness and compassion (consolation) to be nourished on the finest of tastes.  In today’s Ezekiel text God is challenging the Prophet to eat the Divine Will as eating the scroll of God’s directions and judgements.  Such a meal is sweet going down, but complains bitterly in the stomach when it encounters rejection and the hatefulness of evil.

The Eucharist is a sweet and delightful encounter with God, but when we attempt to put it into practice in the sinful human community we often meet bitterness and cruelty.

The Gospel Reading asks us to ponder the call to humility.  This is not modesty or self abnegation as such, but the truth that each of us is really a very vulnerable child in our human condition.  None of us is
“powerful” enough to compete with God and yet we all to foolishly try to, so Jesus points out a genuine child and shows us ourselves.  For many of us, being a child and not counting in the world, not being able to protect ourselves, and often not respected as persons is such a painful reality to remember or consider that we wear a cloak of falseness that says we are privileged or powerful because we have some sort of interhuman status.  We want to be perceived as willfully self-managing, able to do what we want and come and go as we please, we forget that we are dependent, always in need of each other and the larger body of community.

We can not come into God’s reign, and we falsely received the Eucharist when we fail to recognize that we are like all other humans, children of the Father of Mercy and dependent on the created order to provide us the place to live in this stage of our journey.

My invitation from this time of richness in the Church’s Wisdom is to accept that I am always vulnerable, depend gratefully on God for all I need, and receive the Sweetness of God’s Presence mediated by the ordinary – food and drink, human kindness, the Community of family, friends and above all the Church, and to rejoice that no child is other than “beloved” of God.