18th Sunday in Ordinary Time

In my early years as a Jesuit, I had occasion to live in a rural mission in Zimbabwe. Being a rural mission, we were not a very wealthy community and had to live quite a simple lifestyle, there were not many luxuries in our diet and our fare was quite basic. There would often be religious nuns who would come and make their annual retreats at our mission and would join us for our meals. One day the superior of the community who was directing a particular nun in her retreat came to me with a request to go and do some shopping for her. He told me that Sr. Tariro was having a hard time in her retreat and had hit a rough spot, she was in desolation and needed something to console her. So he told me to go and buy some Coke, biscuits, corn-flakes and some ice-cream for this sister in order to lift her out of her depression. Now before you go and judge this nun and think that she was a very carnal animal who was not taking her prayer seriously, I think that we need to understand how the spiritual life works and how it links with our material existence.

I have a theory that we all have a minimum amount of joy that we need in our lives in order for us to be able to continue getting up in the morning and continue believing that life is worth living. Most of us do not even realize that we have this minimum threshold of joy because the joy that we get is so baked into our daily schedules, it’s that morning cup of coffee, or the smile we get from our daughter when she shows us her art drawing from school, or the kick we get out of succeeding at a task we set ourselves, or the humourous whatsapp that we receive from a friend. If you have any doubt about whether you have a minimum-joy threshold, just notice what happens to your mood when the power goes during load-shedding and there is suddenly no internet, no TV and no way to have a hot cup of coffee. As religious, we are rendered particularly sensitive to the fact that we have a “minimum-joy threshold” by the practice of making an annual eight-day retreat in silence, where we cut ourselves off from so many of our sources of joy that form a part of the fabric of our lives. During these 8 days, we cut ourselves off from conversation and interaction with friends, family and the world in general, as we turn our devices off and focus on having conversation with God alone. In a retreat setting, your joy must come from your prayer, or the food, and perhaps from a walk in nature. So if the Lord has decided for some reason to go into hiding, you are left high and dry. Often when this happens, it helps to have some good food to find comfort in, to tide you over until the Lord returns to give you consolation in prayer. Notice the function that the good food is serving – it is not your main source of joy – it is simply there to ensure that you don’t fall into a rut of desolation where you become bitter and begin to doubt the goodness of God. It is so easy to fall into such a mood and begin to wonder if there is really any point in carrying on with prayer or being generous in serving God if this is the way that God is going to treat you. The good food serves as a reminder of God’s ultimate goodness and hopefully keeps you in a disposition to continue being open to receiving what the Lord wishes to give you in the retreat.

Now back to Sr. Tariro, as I said, it was not that she was a carnal unspiritual person, it was simply that she needed a “pick-me up” to get here back to the stage where she could see God as good, loving and generous and dispose her once again to receive God’s grace in prayer. However, we must be cautious when we have recourse to food as our source of consolation that it does not become an end itself. This is why Jesus urges us in today’s gospel not to work for “food that cannot last, but work for food that endures to eternal life.” The “food that cannot last” is to be used as a means for us to appreciate God’s goodness and enter more deeply into relationship with this good and loving God. The “food that endures to eternal life” is precisely this enjoyment of union with God.

In today’s gospel, we see the crowds looking for Jesus because, having given them a free lunch the day prior at the feeding of the 5,000, they are hoping for another freebie from Jesus. Accordingly, Jesus admonishes the crowds: “you are not looking for me because you have seen the signs but because you had all the bread you wanted to eat.” I think Jesus intended the feeding of the 5000 to function in precisely the same way the coke, ice-cream and biscuits functioned for Sr. Tariro, namely as a “pick-me up.” Having given the crowds a demonstration of the bounty that God was offering them, Jesus was hoping that they would now develop a hunger for the “food that endures to eternal life.” But the crowds fail miserably to graduate beyond the dependence on carnal pleasures for their joy and seek Jesus only as the means to another full belly.

When we find ourselves dropping below our minimum-joy threshold, there can be a temptation to return to our old addictions where we will certainly find pleasure, but at great cost to our souls. This is what we see happening in our first reading today. The people of Israel are finding life in the desert hard, so they complain to Moses saying it would have been better if they would have just died in Egypt. It is clear that they have sunk below their minimum-joy threshold. They are no longer getting enough joy from life in the desert so they reminisce about their time in Egypt where “we were able to sit down to pans of meat and could eat bread to our heart’s content.” The journey of Israel out of the slavery of Egypt into the freedom of the Promised land is an archetype that symbolizes our own journeys out of addiction into a sobriety sustained by grace. If you have ever tried to overcome an addiction, you will know that the path towards sobriety is never linear. It proceeds in fits and starts, interspersed with short of long periods of addiction. Our reading today is symbolic of the Israelite’s longing for a return to the pleasure assured by addiction, even if it means a return to slavery and a loss of freedom.

It is interesting to note what God does in response to the Israelite’s predicament. Notice that God does not say to Moses, “I’m glad that the Israelites are experiencing withdrawal symptoms from the pleasures of their former addictions, I will now reward them with some spiritual joy because so that they learn the lesson that pleasures of the flesh are of no value.” This is not at all what God does. What God does is to supply them with some carnal pleasure, in the form of manna. But there is an important catch. In order that this manna that God provides does not become for them a new addiction, God gives strict instructions to the people of Israel that they were not to collect more manna than what they needed for the day. If they try to hoard the manna and collect more than they needed for the day, it would decay and go bad by the next morning. What is most spiritually destructive about any addiction (whether substance addiction or any other form of addiction) is that it gives us the illusion that we can engineer our own happiness. What is particularly damaging about addictive behaviour is that it inculcates an attitude that we can gain our happiness independently of God’s daily providence. Addictive behaviour perpetuates the illusion that we control the levers of our own joy. If you think about it, the best most unalloyed joy is the joy that comes as a surprise. The surprise factor to unalloyed joy points to its transcendent origins in God.

The more we come to experience joy serendipitously, the more we become children of our Father in heaven. The food that endures for eternal life is the food of trust, is the food of living off the joy that God serendipitously provides for us day by day. This is why God deliberately inscribes within the very gift of the manna a condition of dependence on God’s daily bounty. The main point behind the manna is to get the Israelites to depend on God for their daily nourishment, for their daily joy. The reason that it is important to entrust our happiness into God’s hands instead of engineering it for ourselves is that, when we engineer it, and it does not go according to our plan, we become easily frustrated and angry. Entrusting our joy into God’s hands makes us far more resilient to the knocks and disappointments that life will bring our way.

I think that this is the fundamental sense of the prayer in the Our Father where we pray that God will “give us this day our daily bread,” we do not pray saying give us this week our weekly bread or our monthly bread. This may have also had something to do with the fact that at the time of Jesus many Israelites would have lived from hand to mouth, getting only a daily wage, a denarius, enough to buy staples at the market for one day. This kind of existence would certainly have promoted a deep sense of dependence on God as daily Provider. But where does this leave us, who basically have our daily bread assured and do not need to necessarily trust that God will put bread on our tables on a daily basis? I think that the sense of this prayer for us needs to be a more spiritual sense. I would suggest that this prayer on our lips should come to mean “give me the grace to trust that if I simply surrender my day into your hands, my day will have enough joy for me.” May this be our prayer today as we seek to live by the food that endures to eternal life.

Questions for reflection

1. Have you ever noticed the existence of a minimum-joy threshold in your life?
2. What happens to your mood and approach to life when you slip below your minimum-joy threshold?
3. How open are you to depend on God for your daily joy?