WE’LL NEVER RUN OUT OF GOD
Author: Fr. Michael Byron
June 14, 2020
As many of us can attest, one of the most stark images of
the effects of these difficult months of COVID19 – at least during daily life –
has been the shelves inside the grocery store. Even though we’ve had repeated
assurances that there is no shortage of food or paper products, many of the
shelves are still obviously depleted. People have been afraid, and they panic. It
was only this week that I was permitted to buy more than one roll of toilet
paper at a time in the store, and the canned goods are still pretty sparse in
some sections.
I think part of what makes people so nervous about the food
supply is that for most of us, it’s fairly mysterious how the process works. We’ve
never before really been made to think just from where all these provisions
come, or how they arrive on the shelves. They’ve always just “been there.” We
trusted, until we got scared and realized what we didn’t know.
Not knowing things can be very disturbing, especially when
it touches upon the essentials of survival, like food and drink. We don’t know
whom to contact to assure us that supplies won’t run out, or that the delivery
trucks won’t stop coming.
So perhaps it’s a bit easier this year for us to resonate
with those ancient Israelites moving across the Sinai desert with Moses while
on Exodus from Egypt. At first they rejoiced and their liberation from
enslavement to Pharaoh. But as days turned into months and years it began to
dawn on them that there is no reliable food or water supply in a sand desert. And
they panicked. I would too. But that crisis forced an important shifting of the
question upon them, shifting from the question of “where” and “how” and “what” to
a question of “who”. The Lord provided those refugees with manna for food, a
substance which Moses reminds them twice today in the first reading, from
Deuteronomy, that neither they nor their ancestors had ever seen before. And they
were confused. And so they asked, “what is this stuff? And where did it come
from? And where and how can we possibly find water in a wasteland?” But they
had forgotten the “who” question: who was it who freed you in the first place,
who led you out from oppression and who promised to stay with you for as long
as it takes to reach the promised land?
The “who” was their God, and it still is. If they were
baffled by all those other questions, they should have been calmed and assured
by the “who”…
Which brings us to today’s gospel of John on this Feast of
the Body and Blood of Christ. This beautiful teaching of Jesus is not a lesson
in how or what, but in who:
“I am the living bread, this bread
is my flesh. This wine is my blood, and it will be – I will be – with you until
the end of time. Eat my flesh and drink my blood, so as to remain in me.”
And immediately the questions arose among some of his
audience – the how questions: “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?!”
Wrong question – and everything depends upon just exactly who “this man” really
is. It is God in the flesh, just as it is still God in the bread and God in the
wine today… and God in the Word and God in our gathering. The “who” is our
Creator and Redeemer and Holy Spirit that has pledged that we will live forever
if we remain in Him. God will never be in short supply.
I can’t tell you exactly where the ground beef at Kowalski’s
comes from, or precisely how it gets on the shelves – or the corn or the
lettuce or the toilet paper. And I don’t know who is responsible for getting it
there. That can be a little disquieting in a time of fear. But I know just
exactly from whom this Body and Blood of the Eucharist comes – and so do all of
us. It is a gift from the one who has promised ever to remain, the God who
shepherds us beyond our wants, beyond our fears, from death into life.
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