17th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B, 2024

Published: July 28, 2024

Bishop Anthony B. Taylor preached the following homily at Blessed Stanley Rother Church in Decatur on Saturday, July 27, 2024, and St. Joseph Church in Tontitown on Sunday, July 28, 2024.

Bishop Taylor

When you and I were babies, we were totally dependent and yet our needs were met. The reason is divine providence. God gave us parents, and especially a mother, to provide for us. And they provided for us out of love.

We learned to trust our mother to provide milk and warmth and relief from a dirty diaper. We experienced divine providence without even thinking about it: God was providing for us through her. It was the world we knew and naturally we took it for granted.

Part of the process of maturing involves separation from direct parental protection, which if handled well tends to draw us closer to God, but which if handled poorly can lead us to distance ourselves not only from our parents, but also from God too. Have you noticed that rebelling against parents and rebelling against God often go hand in hand?

When we mature ungrateful for all God’s blessings, and forgetful of all he has done for us, we can easily begin to imagine that everything is now on us — that our successes and failures are all our own doing; that we have to provide for ourselves at all times. We end up forgetting about our ongoing dependence on God and others for meaning and purpose and all the other important things in life.

In today's readings we have stories of divine providence. In our first reading, Elisha — through God's providence — feeds 100 people with just 20 barley loaves, and when they had eaten, some was left over. That miracle prefigured the even greater miracle of divine providence that we have in today's Gospel: Jesus feeds 5,000 with five barley loaves and two fish, and when they had eaten, 12 wicker baskets of fragments were left over.

God not only provided, he provided far more than was needed; 50 times more than in the case of Elisha. In this case, Jesus did so by using the contribution of a young boy who with seeming recklessness gave up the certainty of having a good dinner for himself, in order to try to help meet the needs of others. He trusted in Jesus, that if he did what Jesus asked, God would see to it that his needs would be provided for.

Today we are gathered around this eucharistic table in which Jesus will once again work a miracle in our presence far greater than the multiplication of loaves we read about in today’s Gospel.

On that day 2,000 years ago, Jesus made more bread, but it remained just bread. Today Jesus converts bread into his very body and blood, soul and divinity, which he then gives to us and invites us to take it into ourselves, uniting us to himself in the most intimate way imaginable.

That is in today’s Gospel, which then sets the scene for the Bread of Life discourse in which Jesus will unpack this central truth of our faith over the next four Sundays, culminating in his great declaration: “Amen, amen I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life in you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood and remains in me and I in him.”

When we were babies, all our needs were met, and in God’s eyes, you and I are still babies. We thank the Lord for all his care up to now and trust in his providence through all the ups and downs of life, for all the years to come.