20th Sunday in rodinary time A

A pious woman had a dream one night in which one of the town's best-known scoundrels died and was on his way to heaven. But, because of many misdeeds, the way to heaven wasn't easy for him. He had to climb a ladder so tall that it reached up far above the clouds. As he climbed the ladder, the man was required to make a chalk mark on each rung for each sin he had committed. As the woman's dream ended, she saw the man coming back down the ladder. "What are you doing?" the woman asked. "I'm coming down for more chalk," the man replied.

We sin, all of us. And if we think of our life's goal in terms of a step-by-step process drawing ever closer to God by acknowledging our sinfulness and our need to change, like that man on the ladder, we are likely to run out of chalk from time-to-time.

"I am the Bread of Life," Jesus said again and again. And, in today's Gospel , He says, "Anyone who eats this Bread will live forever" (Jn. 6:58). "Anyone who does eat My flesh and drink My blood has eternal life" (Jn. 6:54).

We tend to think of eternal life in terms of the immortality of the soul: life after death. But, in so doing, we overlook the fact that Jesus speaks of eternal life in terms of its present meaning. Eternal life is to be with God, Jesus says. Not in the sweet "By and By," as the familiar Gospel song puts it, but now. The opposite of being with God is, of course, being estranged from God. And that is the supreme definition of sin.

To experience eternal life now -- to be with God, to be in union with God, to be in love with God now -- is what the meaning and purpose of our life is all about. This we know on the authority of Jesus. Moreover, love of God and love of neighbor are inseparable. This too we know on the authority of Jesus. The Apostle John spells this out in clear and unmistakable language:

Anyone who says 'I love God' and hates his brother is a liar since a man who does not love the brother that he can see cannot love God, whom he has never seen. So this is the commandment that He (Jesus Christ) has given us, that anyone who loves God must also love his brother (I Jn. 4:20-21).In other words...

LOVE OF GOD AND LOVE OF NEIGHBOR ARE INSEPARABLE

During the period of the Great Depression, a group of immigrants were put to work building roads. For a time, the men worked well, sang their songs, and were glad to have jobs. But, little by little, they discovered the roads they were building led nowhere, ran out into dreary, desolate places and stopped. As the truth dawned on them that they had been put to work solely to provide employment and an excuse for paying them survival money, the workers grew listless and stopped singing. Commenting on this, one astute observer said, "The roads to nowhere are difficult to make. For a person to work and sing, there must be an end in view."

The end in view for your life, the most important thing in your life -- more important than your health, more important than your marriage, more important than your family, more important than your job, more important than anything that is on your mind today -- is the direct communion with God made possible by the Lord Jesus Christ. If you don't have this, and you aren't growing in it, you have nothing in terms of your fulfillment as a human person. If you don't have this, you are on the road to nowhere.

This communion with God, this right relationship with God, also is the key to the discovery of right relationships with others. Do you make it possible for others to enter into direct communion with God, where they will find the true meaning of life? That is the key question on which all other questions about our human relationships must be built. Has the love of God that is in you become so real to you that it spills out into your relationships with others? If the answer is "No," then your claim to love God is a lie. If the answer is "no," then you have nothing in terms of your fulfillment as a human person -- for love of God and love of neighbor are inseparable. You can't have one without the other!

To love is the most important thing in life. But what do we mean by love? True love is that extraordinary act of self-giving without asking anything in return. You may be very clever, you may be very rich, you may be very powerful, you may be very entertaining, you may be very knowledgeable, but if your end-view of life is focused on self-service, your heart will be empty and you will be miserable. Albert Schweitzer, the medical missionary who spent fifty years of his life serving his fellow human beings in the oppressive heat of the African jungle said this to a group of admiring students:

I don't know what your final destiny will be, but one thing I do know: The only ones among you who will be happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.

In a book called "The Grand Essentials," the author says...

I believe that when life has whittled us down, when joints have failed and skin has wrinkled, and capillaries have clogged and hardened, what is left of us will be what we were all along -- in our essence, in our inner-spirit.

Exhibit "A" is a distant uncle. All his life he did nothing but find new ways to make himself richer. He spent his twilight years drooling and babbling constantly about the money he had made. When life whittled him down to his essence all that was left was raw greed. This is what he had cultivated in a thousand ways over a lifetime of self-service.

Exhibit "B" is my wife's grandmother. What did she talk about in her twilight years? The best examples I can think of are those occasions when she was in her mid-eighties and we asked her to pray the blessing before dinner. Although she had lost some of her mental powers and was fast declining physically, nevertheless she would reach out and hold the hands of those sitting beside her, a broad smile would spread across her face, her eyes would fill with tears as she looked up to heaven, and her chin would quiver as she poured out her love -- for God and for all of us around the table and all people everywhere. That was Edna in a nutshell. She loved God and she loved people. Even though she was at a point where she couldn't remember our names, she couldn't keep her hands from patting us lovingly whenever we got near her.

When life whittled her down to her essence, all there was left was love: love for God; love for people.2

If we should try right now to whittle our lives down to our essence and, in so doing, if all there is left is not love, we need to acknowledge whatever it is in our lives that is causing our estrangement from God and resolve to change all that. We need to get off the road to nowhere and get on the road to somewhere. We need to refocus our end-view of life until we can plainly see that most importantly and above all else, is our need for eternal life now -- our need to be in the direct communion with God made possible by Jesus Christ.