Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time – July 26, 2009 – Blessed Sacrament
Each summer we interrupt the successive reading of one of the Synoptic Gospels (St. Mark’s this year) and devote ourselves for five weeks to a reading of the whole of the sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, which is entirely concerned with the theme of bread. We begin this exercise today with the account of Jesus’ feeding the crowd with the loaves and fishes, a deed that at the beginning and at the end of our passage is presented as a “sign,” the sign whose significance Jesus will unfold in a long discourse on the bread of life in which what true bread is and what true life is will be explored. John’s Gospel has many similar signs: the turning of water into wine at the wedding feast in Cana; the cleansing of the temple; the woman at the well; the healing of the sick man by the pool of Bethsaida; the healing of the blind man; the raising of Lazarus from the grave. In almost every case, the Evangelist first presents the sign and then invites the reader to explore that to which it points either by means of a discourse of Jesus or in the course of a dialogue in which he responds to interpretations of the event that remain on the mere surface of the event.
St. Augustine was alert to this method of the Evangelist. (more…)