Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Welcome to the blessed Sacrament Homilies podcast where our mission is to help everyone recognize and experience the presence of God. We hope you are nourished and encouraged by the word. Thank you for joining us.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: The Lord be with you.
Reading from the holy gospel according to John, the Jews murmured about Jesus because he said, I am the bread that came down from heaven. And they said, is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph? Do we not know his father and mother? Then how can he say I have come down from heaven?
Jesus answered and said to them, stop murmuring among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him and I will raise him on the last day.
It is written in the prophets, they all shall be taught by God.
Everyone who listens to my father and learns from him comes to me.
Not that anyone has seen the father, except the one who is from God.
He has seen the father.
Amen. Amen I say to you, whoever believes has eternal life.
I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died.
This is the bread that comes down from heaven so that 1 may eat it and not die.
I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever, and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world. The gospel of the Lord praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ.
I am a firm believer that stereotyping is never helpful. To judge a group or class of people as if it was one homogeneous unit is always a mistake and tends to always be sinful.
But I allow myself one stereotype, one prejudice, because there's a group of people that seems to always be the group that murmurs, that complains, that criticizes. That group are priests.
Whenever we get together, the murmuring is virtually nonstop.
We murmur about the bishop, we murmur about the state of the church, we murmur about our staffs, we murmur about sometimes even our parishioners.
And what I think is at the root of it is something that is also in all of us, at least a little bit. And that is we can falsely convince ourselves that if everything was done my way, the world would be pretty close to perfect.
And that is never true.
We think we always have the right answer, and every once in a while we do. But rarely do we have all the answer.
And where all the answer can be the most true, the most rooted in God, is when we recognize that it is all of us called the church that have the collective wisdom of God.
Because each one of us, with our diversity, with our strengths, and even with our weaknesses, carry the presence of the Holy Spirit and carry Christ's presence within us. So when we come together with hearts that are open and loving and listening, that wisdom can shine forth.
Here in the scripture, we have the people murmuring for kind of the same reason. They think they have God figured out. They think they have all the answers. They think if things are their way, everything's going to be wonderful.
But they even speak a profound truth that they had no idea they were speaking.
And that is when they say to themselves, don't we know his father and mother?
Now, they would have been thinking Mary and Joseph right off the bat.
But the father, that was the truth of this is God the Father, and that they did know him because of Jesus presence in their midst, they could have an understanding of the father.
They couldn't see it at the time because they were too stuck in their ways.
We who call ourselves church have to work really hard to make sure we don't get stuck in those attitudes and those mistakes and simply be open to the presence of the spirit that dwells in each one of us.
