Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time – July 28, 2024

by Deacon Steven D. Greydanus  |  07/28/2024  |  Weekly Reflection

“This is truly the Prophet, the one who is to come into the world.” For a moment the crowd in today’s reading from the Gospel of John seem to have experienced an epiphany of faith: an insight into Jesus’ identity like Andrew and Philip in John chapter 1 (John 1:41, 45) or the Samaritan woman at the well in chapter 4 (John 4:29). But then Jesus is obliged to withdraw from them — to not entrust himself to them, just like he has before with shallow followers who believed in him only because “they saw the signs which he did” (John 2:23). Jesus “knew what was in” people like that; he knew their faith was in signs, not in Jesus himself.

To be clear, Jesus will work with that! Belief in signs is a place to start! “Believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me,” Jesus tells his disciples, “or at least believe me for the sake of the works themselves” (John 14:11). And yet the crowd in today’s Gospel isn’t even quite at that level. Next Sunday, in the continuation of this Gospel reading, Jesus will tell this crowd, “You are looking for me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate the loaves and were filled” (John 6:26). Not belief in Jesus himself, not even belief in signs, but sheer appetite drives them to seek Jesus. They just want more food! When Jesus urges them to believe in him, they ask for another sign — and they say in so many words that they’d like him to do the bread thing again! (John 6:29-31)

And Jesus will work with this too! Let’s not be too hard on these people. This is the same crowd we heard about last Sunday: Jesus “had compassion on them, because they were like sheep without a shepherd” (Mark 6:34). Jesus spent hours healing them, but also teaching them — shepherding them. When they got hungry, he saw to their needs, as a shepherd does. At that point, though, it turns out that this flock wants to be shepherded on their own terms. They want to “carry him off to make him king” — and clearly they’ve got their own ideas about what kind of king Jesus should be. Much later, of course, Jesus will tell Pontius Pilate, “My kingdom is not of this world” (John 18:36), but this crowd isn’t ready to hear that.

Well, are Catholics today necessarily so different? Are we never preoccupied by signs — caught up, for example, in reports of Marian apparitions and visionary messages, even treating oracles from visionaries as effectively equal to Church teaching, or even to the Word of God? Are we immune to turning to God chiefly with our wants and needs? What about having our own ideas about what Christ’s kingship should mean in our lives and our world? Particularly in an election year, might it be that we come to Jesus with our own ideas about what the kingdom of God means in our world today?

To be clear, turning to God with our needs, and even our wants, is a good thing, not a bad thing. God knows what we need before we ask, Jesus tells us, but he also teaches us to pray for our daily bread; to persevere in prayer and not lose heart (Luke 18:1ff). Every good gift comes from God; “the hand of the Lord feeds us; he answers all our needs,” as we sang in the responsorial psalm. Need can and should prod us to prayer to ask God for his gifts — but the one gift of God we need above all is prayer itself! Our greatest need is not the gifts, but the Giver!

Turning to God only for what he can give us, trying to use prayer only to meet our needs, is like trying to “use the stairs of heaven as a short cut to the nearest [pharmacy],” as C.S. Lewis wrote in The Screwtape Letters. “Seek first God’s kingdom and his righteousness,” Jesus tells us, and all the other things will be given to us as well (Matthew 6:33). But the kingdom must be first! God must be first. Anything that is not God himself — even holy things like miracles and visions, or good things like responsible political commitments, or things we need — can become an idol. Only the Lord himself truly answers our deepest needs.