Nineteenth Sunday In Ordinary Time, Year B: Food For The Journey

Elijah went a day's journey into the desert, until he came to a broom tree and sat beneath it. He was the last remaining Prophet of the true religion left. He had just stood his ground against four-hundred pagan prophets of the fertility god Baal.

Today’s pagan fertility god is In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF), the process of taking eggs from the mother’s body and placing them in a petri dish with the sperm of the father. Many eggs are fertilized with only one fertilized egg placed within the womb; the rest are aborted, frozen, or later have their stem cells stripped from the human person.

Elijah was on the run from the murderous pagan queen, Jezebel, a worshipper of Baal, who wants revenge on Elijah, so he prayed for death as he sat under that broom tree in its shade in the hot desert.

There’s an old legend that tells how God sent one of his angels to Satan with the message that all the methods the devil uses to defeat Christians would be taken from him. The devil pleaded to be allowed to keep only one. The angel, thinking it an unusual, modest request from the greedy devil, agreed Satan could keep that one. “Which one would you want to keep?” the angel inquired. “Let me keep discouragement,” was Lucifer’s reply. The angel agreed. Satan could keep discouragement. And the devil rejoiced for, said he, “In this one I have secured all I shall ever need to accomplish my dastardly work.”

When feeling pity or sadness, zoning-out on the couch, or on the internet won’t get you far. Don’t stay under the broom tree.

Elijah was fed by the angel, who orders him to "Get up and eat, else the journey will be too long for you!" He got up, ate, and drank; then strengthened by that food, he walked forty days and forty nights to the mountain of God, Horeb.

The Eucharist is the food in our journey of faith. In the Eucharist, we are on a “profound human journey into the mystery of God which is at the same time the mystery of God made human and the mystery of human life transformed into the divine” by the Eucharist.1

Catholics come to the altar from our need, our brokenness. As Holy Communion is received, the communicant receives healing to calm, and we begin to listen deep within. Jesus becomes part of our bodies. Like Elijah, it gets our fight back.

Jesus said, “Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died.” The Eucharist is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die. The Eucharist gives us divine strength to continuously transition from doing what we want to, to seeking God’s will for us.

E.g., Father Nnamdi Moneme, OMV, shared, “I was still basking in the joy of having received my First Holy Communion when my mother brought me to reality about the Eucharist by saying something like this, “Congratulations on your First Holy Communion. Now I want to see a change in you.” I didn’t understand then what she meant but now I do.”2

Romans 12:1 says, “present your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, which is your spiritual worship.” “Sacrifice, in this sense, is not a matter of pain or suffering”: it’s about gratitude for what Christ has done. This happens at Mass, the offering of our bodies, our whole selves.

The Eucharist is the sacrifice of Christ, and the sacrifice of the faithful. You are not a spectator at Mass, you are offering yourself with Christ to the father. Pope Benedict XVI describes the eucharistic celebration as the source (origin) and summit (fulfillment) of the Church's life and definitive worship of God (logiké latreía).3

The second-century Catholics used the word sacramentum for baptism and Eucharist. (cf. Tertullian). The Eucharist originally meant an “oath” such as when Roman soldiers were sworn-in by an oath. E.g. Pliny said that the Christians told them they met regularly before dawn on a fixed day to chant verses in honor of Christ as if to a god, and also to bind themselves by oath, which is the sacrament of the Eucharist.

The false spirituality of the culture today is that religion is no longer defined by its positive content or by any institutional or sacred features. It is now found entirely at the level of subjective interior experience. To de-materialize and dis-embody the Eucharist. A similar dynamic unfolds in the Gospel, they say, "Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph? Do we not know his father and mother?”

Irenaeus, Tertullian, Cyprian, and other early Christians turned that teaching on its head, saying that Christ himself asked his followers to celebrate the breaking of the bread in his memory which makes Him present in the Eucharist.