To see the way God sees: Homily for Sunday, August 18, 2024

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To see the way God sees

To see as God sees. That’s probably the best definition of wisdom that I’ve heard. To see as God sees. And, if we’re going to really see as God sees, then the Book of Wisdom tells us this, that true wisdom is found in the fear of the Lord.

Now, fear not in the sense of being frightened or afraid, but rather fear in the sense of recognizing the awesome, infinite power of love that is God. That until we can acknowledge the role, the place, and the person of God, until we can say to ourselves that God is God and we are not, then it is not possible for us to attain the wisdom of God. To see the way that God sees.

And I think because sometimes we don’t start with recognizing that God is God and we are not, it can be difficult to see God active in the world. We can become confused. Because in order to recognize the fear of the Lord, then what we really need to begin with is humility. Recognizing who we are and who we are not.

Both the first reading and the second reading recognize the importance of that attitude in discovering what God expects of us. We certainly know, and it’s particularly important for Dominicans, that everything that God creates is good. I’ve said before, it is good that you exist. The hard part, I think, is when we start looking at other people. Can we easily say that it is good that they exist, too? Or do we find ourselves wishing we didn’t have to deal with this person or that person?

God tells us in the book of Genesis that looking at creation, he saw that it was good. But to see as God sees means we can’t be selective. We can’t say, “Well, yes, this person is good, but not so much that person, because I disagree with them on everything.” Or we can’t say in our lives, when something difficult happens, “Well, I don’t like this, that it exists, and so I don’t live or see the way that God sees.” Moreover, St. Paul tells us a very fundamentally important thing when it comes to being able to see God in the world, and that is gratitude.

Can we be thankful for everyone who comes into our lives? Can we be thankful for the events of our lives, both good and bad? Can we be thankful for those difficult lessons that maybe took us some time to learn, even though they were difficult or hard? Or maybe we’re still trying to learn them at this point in our lives.

But Jesus reminds us in the gospel that we do have a fundamental help, and that is the very gift of Jesus himself. Now, we can talk about the body of Christ in two ways. St. Paul talks about the body of Christ in his letter to the Corinthians, but he uses the word “soma” in Greek, which is really an understanding of body, where we would talk about it being a group of people, a body of Congress, for example. It’s a different way of understanding the body of Christ.

When Jesus speaks about himself being the living bread, he also uses a word that could be confused with “body,” but it’s not. It’s “sarx” in Greek, and the word is rightly translated in the gospel as “flesh.” Sarcasm, for example, comes from that root of the Greek word “sarx.” “Sarx” means “flesh,” “chasm” means “to cut.” So sarcasm is actually to cut the flesh.

And that’s why the Jews have such difficulty here. They’re pretty reasonable here. Jesus is saying that unless you eat his flesh and drink his blood, you have no life. Well, for us, we can look and say the body and blood of Jesus we consume at Mass, and we can understand that. It’s been so widely accepted.

But the Jews who heard this, rightly, I think, were scratching their heads saying, “How can he do this? Is he suggesting that we need to become cannibals in order to enter the kingdom of God? Or is it something else?” I would suggest that what Jesus is getting at by using this very stark and earthy language, language that John in his gospel is known for, what Jesus is really trying to get at is that he is going to give us rather the gift of his very self, a gift that is going to be qualitatively different than anything else we receive.

In philosophy, there is a way to help us to better understand, I think, the notion of bread and wine becoming the body and blood of Jesus, while at the same time preserving the notion that we’re not cannibals. St. Thomas Aquinas uses the work of Aristotle to say that when we look at a thing, there are things that are critically important for its very existence, that without this thing it wouldn’t exist, and that’s called substance.

So if I own a car, the fact that it’s a car is because it has the substance of a car. But there are other things that I can use to describe substance that even if they change, the substance itself does not. So, for example, I buy a car, and I really like the color. I don’t know. They say you should avoid red cars because that apparently attracts attention. So I’ll use the color red. But if a car was blue, it wouldn’t cease having the substance of a car. The color of the car is accidental to the substance.

And there are any number of–Aristotle had ten categories of accidents. But for our purposes here, what’s important is that St. Thomas Aquinas says when you look at the Eucharist, it too has substance and accidents. Before the consecration, the substance is bread and wine. And the accidents are the type of wine or the type of bread, etc. But after the consecration, the substance itself changes. It becomes the body and blood of Jesus.

That was what was meant in the Middle Ages when we talked about the idea of transubstantiation, that the substance itself changed significantly. And because of that change, even though it remains–the accidents of bread and wine remain– the substance is the very body and blood of Jesus.

We’re coming up, I think, to a very important time in our country’s history where we’re going to forget the importance of seeing as God sees. When the early followers of Jesus were able to see the Eucharist, the very gift of himself, they saw as God saw. Things were not always as they seemed. We too need to see as God sees, that whether we like it or not, it is good that every person God has created exists. Let us ask the Lord to make wisdom come into our hearts, that we indeed might see caring for others, loving God, loving neighbor, that we may see those things as the very ways in which we learned to see as God sees.

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