The Tenth Sunday after Pentecost: Readings 2 Samuel 11:26-12:13a
Psalm 51:1-13; Ephesians 4:1-16; John 6:24-35
In the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius, retreatants spend four weeks journeying through Jesus’s life. In this journey, they are asked to not merely observe – or even to accompany – Jesus on his journey (although they do both) – but to become his life- to become the Christ in themselves.
This is no small aspiration, even in thirty days, the traditional time period for the retreat…
So to do this, retreatants spend each week on a piece of this journey, with each week leading him or her closer to total self-identification with Jesus.
Our readings today travel a parallel arc to the weeks of the spiritual exercises. So I’ll say a bit about each reading in light of the themes of each week of the spiritual exercises.
In our first reading, David takes Uriah’s widow as his wife after she completes the expected time of mourning. Not long after, David receives a visit from Nathan – though indirectly a visit from God, as God has sent Nathan to deliver a message to David.
Nathan tells David a parable about a rich man who took the one only, beloved lamb of another man. The rich man had many other animals of his own, but he chose to take the poor man’s one lamb. David is outraged, proclaiming that the man who did this deserves to die- and he should restore fourfold what he took. Nathan then says “You are the man!” and David responds “I have sinned against the Lord.”
Imagine, then, that David begins to sing our psalm right after he responds to Nathan—here David journeys inward, reflecting on his actions – but equally as much on God’s mercy. “Give me the joy of your saving help again/and sustain me with your bountiful spirit” he concludes.
David has just guided us through the first week of the spiritual exercises. In the first week, the retreatant reflections on his or her own actions –some of which may be failings and shortcomings—and at the same time, recognizes God’s mercy.
Anthony DeMello, a Jesuit who wrote of his experience leading people through the spiritual exercises, calls this a “strange paradox.” He says: “If we take the extreme of our sinfulness, we fall into depression. Or we might say: ‘No, man, everything is grand!’ That reflects superficiality … life is all roses. Since we have never tasted what life is all about, we are superficial. If we put both extremes together, then we sense life in its depth and the exhilaration of being loved and redeemed. We reach the point of repentance” (p. 27 in Seek God Everywhere).
But we do not stop there (with repentance). Experiencing this strange paradox, the point of repentance, there is only one direction to go: towards the experience. So the retreatant ends the first week that way, asking ‘what shall I do for Christ?’
And this question- ‘what shall I do for Christ?’ begins the journey of the second week- and it is also Paul’s question in our second reading.
We hear Paul begging the Ephesians “to lead a life worthy of the calling to which you have been called”—“each of us” he says “was given grace according to the measure of Christ’s gift” and “we must grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ.”
In the second week, retreatants begin meditating upon the life of Christ with a disposition toward exactly what Paul is asking of the Ephesians. This is not an intellectual sort of meditation, but an affective one in which retreatants are asked to place themselves in scenes from Jesus’s life, and to pay attention to their feelings and senses as they do so. And so we might begin imagining ourselves in tonight’s readings … who would we each be … how would you feel … what would you see, and touch and smell …
Like Paul’s hope for the Ephesians, it was Ignatius’s hope that retreatants would begin to recognize themselves in Jesus’s life through the use of their imagination, so as to “grow up in Christ.”
This growing into the life of Christ is the path of the third and fourth weeks of the spiritual exercises- and also our gospel. And that path leads from growing into, to becoming – and finally to being.
The people ask Jesus to show them a sign. They cite the sign they know: the manna Moses fed the people in the wilderness. But Jesus is not interested in signs. To him, the manna in the wilderness was not a “sign” the people could witness and therefore believe—but that bread came from the Father- and not just the Father, but his Father. And so he says “I am the bread of life.”
In the third and fourth weeks of the spiritual exercises, the retreatants are asked to totally self-identify with the life of Christ: to become, themselves, the bread of life. At a prior parish I attended, the words we heard just before the people went up for communion were: behold who you are; become what you receive.
The spiritual exercises are traditionally done in thirty days, but they can be done in everyday life … and they can be done out of order. They are a way of life and an ongoing journey that many a past retreatant will say is never finished. I wonder … where do find yourself on this journey … with one of the weeks I have spoken of … or in a scene within one of the readings?
I invite your reflections.
