The readings are available online here.
Proverbs 9:1-6
This is one of the passages that personify ‘Wisdom’ as a woman. (The Hebrew and Greek words for wisdom are in the feminine gender, which makes this choice easy.) Here she is a hostess ready to offer her bread and wine – which symbolize her teachings and the results of living by God’s gift of wisdom. They do, however, as placed in our liturgy fit into Jesus’ offer of the bread and wine of his body and blood in the Gospel. Throughout this section of Proverbs, there is the contrast of folly with Wisdom as mentioned in the last verse we hear.
Psalm 33/34:2-3, 10-15
After repeating the first verse we had last week, we have the promise of lacking nothing which fits with Jesus’ offer of life. Wisdom may be the one who is speaking to ‘her children’, offering them the teaching that will lead to a good life.
Ephesians 5:15-20
Advice for good living is continued in Ephesians, not unlike the wisdom ideas of the leaving of folly and living wisely. The last verse we hear has the words familiar from our mass prayer: ‘always and everywhere, we do well to give you thanks.’
John 6:51-58
This week is the conclusion of Jesus’ bread of life discourse we have been hearing for several weeks. It begins with the words that ended last week’s selection, and then we have the reaction of ‘the Jews’, who cannot understand how Jesus could give them his flesh to eat. Jesus does not exactly explain the ‘how’; instead he stresses his statement in several ways. He relates the Eucharist to the Father who sends Jesus, and as Jesus lives by the Father, his disciples will draw life from him. The last words return to the bread which comes down from heaven, and now this is equated with the Eucharist.
In John’s Gospel there is not an account of the Eucharist given at the Last Supper, but here in this discourse we have the strongest statement in the gospels of its reality: more than a ‘symbol’, it is the flesh and blood of Jesus and its effects are life-giving and eternal.
Joan Griffith
Suggestions for prayer or reflection
Lectio Divina: read the passage several times, perhaps aloud as well as in silence, to let it sink in. Does one particular verse leap out for you?
If not, perhaps try this one:
(Jesus says:) “The one who eats my flesh and drinks my blood resides in me, and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so the one who consumes me will live because of me.”
Gwen Griffith-Dickson