17th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
First Reading: 2 Kg 4:42-44
Second Reading: Eph 4:1-6
Gospel Reading: Jn 6:1-15
No one can miss the connection between the First Reading and the Gospel Reading this Sunday: both relate how a crowd is fed with a little food. Bible scholars would say that the first account is a type of the second.
A “type” is a person, thing, action, or event—usually in the Old Testament—that “prefigures” or “foreshadows” a new and greater truth, action, or event—usually in the New Testament.
For example, the event in the First Reading is a “type” of the event in the Gospel Reading, and both are “types” of what happens at Mass, when Christ feeds the whole world with his body and blood under the appearances of bread and wine (as we will see in coming weeks).
By “typology,” the Church learns “the full significance of what the writers are saying,” apparent only when she looks back at it in the light of Christ.
Now we all know how unreliable hindsight can be. Speaking as an author with experience, C.S. Lewis said that “almost anything can be read into any book if you are determined enough.”
However, the Bible prompts us to see types. The apostles and evangelists often cited Old Testament events as types of what they were reporting. Matthew and John repeatedly pointed out that events of Christ’s life “fulfilled” Old Testament prophecies.
Moreover, Jesus himself appealed to typology when he called his miracles his Father’s works.
We are so accustomed to the wholesale activity of God displayed always and everywhere throughout creation that we often fail to recognize it, Lewis explains, quoting St. Athanasius. For example, God heals us by creating human bodies able to heal themselves; he changes water into wine by creating vines that draw up water and, with sap, eventually produce wine; he creates plants and animals that can reproduce their kind, thus continuously multiplying grain and fish.
The miracles performed by Jesus, “God incarnate, living as a man in Palestine, take place at a different speed and on a smaller scale,” Lewis notes, but otherwise they reproduce God’s wholesale activity, thus proving to the people that Jesus is one with God the Creator.
“I solemnly assure you: the Son cannot do anything by himself—he can do only what he sees the Father doing,” Jesus said. “Whatever the Father does, the Son does likewise. For the Father loves the Son, and everything the Father does he shows him.”
St. Thomas Aquinas defines a “miracle” (from the Latin mirus, “inspiring wonder”) as something “wrought by divine power,” but “apart from the order usually observed in nature.”
Everything, whether normal or miraculous, is “wrought by divine power.” However, Christ’s miracles—healing the sick, raising the dead, changing water into wine, and multiplying the loaves and fish—open our eyes to that power, for they retell “in small letters” the story “that is written across the whole world in letters too large for some of us to see,” says Lewis.
A man whose young grandson had contracted cancer used to say, whenever the doctors tried new treatments and the child’s health improved, “it’s a miracle! Thank God!”
Each time, I replied: “thank God whether it is miraculous or natural; it is all God’s work.”
That is why we say (or should say!) before every meal, “Bless us, O Lord, and these, thy gifts, which we are about to receive from thy bounty.” In fact, that bounty includes not only the food, but also the farmers, butchers, fishermen, retailers, bakers, cooks, waiters, etc., whom God has not only created, but also invited to collaborate with him in his bounty to us.
“God is the Lord of the universe, whose order he established and which remains wholly subject to him and at his disposal,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church. As St. Paul says, he is “above all and through all and in all.”
Father Hawkswell has now finished teaching The Catholic Faith in Plain English, however the course remains available in both print and YouTube form at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course. Starting Sept. 22, he will again teach the course in person on Sundays from 2 to 4 p.m. at the John Paul II Pastoral Centre, 4885 Saint John Paul II Way, 33rd Avenue and Willow Street, Vancouver, and Mondays from 10 a.m. to noon in St. Anthony’s Church Hall, 2347 Inglewood Avenue, West Vancouver. The course is entirely free of charge and no pre-registration is necessary.
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