Friday of the Twenty-fifth Week in Ordinary Time
Prepare the meal, eat the meal, clean up from the meal. Make the beds, strip the beds, wash the linens, make the beds again. Saturday is laundry day, Sunday is church day. Monday, Hump Day, TGIF. The rhythms of ordinary life. That’s what Qoheleth (Ecclesiastes) is celebrating in the lovely poem that begins today’s readings. There is beauty and comfort in those rhythms. They’re familiar, even if they are a mix of positives and negatives. Familiarity means we feel we can enjoy the good times while we have them, and we can anticipate and deal with the bad times.
But there’s a danger in that familiarity, the danger that the familiarity and predictability of this rhythm can blind us to the new. We will instinctively try to fit the new into the familiar categories instead of recognizing that it is new, and that it may demand something new from us. Hence the need for discernment, that spiritual gift through which we learn to recognize God coming to us in unexpected ways and unfamiliar places. Qoheleth says we have what it takes to practice discernment: “[God] has put the timeless into our hearts.” In other words God, the Timeless One, dwells within us, so we have a touchstone by which to recognize God appearing in unexpected ways and places. But Qoheleth doesn’t seem very optimistic that we will!
Maybe that’s why God chose to come among us in Jesus—to give us an even clearer touchstone. Today’s Gospel, for example. First we need to look at the context to the portion we read today. The disciples have just returned from the mission Jesus sent them on, exhilarated by their experiences of teaching and healing, eager to report in detail and re-live those experiences with Jesus. But the hungry crowd (hungry both spiritually and physically) follows them, so Jesus tends to them first, preaching and healing. Then he challenges the Twelve to feed them. “What—here? Out in the wilderness?” So Jesus himself miraculously feeds the whole crowd with just five loaves and two fish.
It’s immediately after this that our Gospel for today begins with Jesus going apart to pray in solitude. What is he praying about? Maybe he noticed how excited his disciples were with the preaching and healing, but how hesitant they were in facing the challenge to feed the crowd themselves. Maybe that led Jesus deeper into prayer, wrestling with the question, “”What is all this popular adulation I’m getting going to cost me?” Maybe he finally names to himself what he has been avoiding recognizing for some time, that this can’t end well for him. It’s too threatening to the people in power, and there’s bound to be pushback, maybe even extreme pushback.
No wonder he needed to pray in solitude. That’s a lot to grapple with, and it would have taken all his attention and strength. I am reminded of Jacob wrestling all night with the angel (God).
I’m speculating that this might have been what Jesus was praying about because of what comes next in today’s Gospel, namely, Jesus’ first prediction of his passion, death, and resurrection. He has just admitted this to himself—that this is where all this public adulation is going to lead him—and he knows he has to prepare his closest followers for it as best he can.
This story is an example of what discernment looks like in practice. First, notice your own experience, and notice the feelings that come with it, often contradictory feelings present simultaneously. In this case, a natural exhilaration at the response of the crowds, plus a growing dread when looking at the larger context within which this is happening.
Next, sit with the feelings and ask the Holy Spirit to speak to you through them, to say whatever God wants you to hear through them. If and when a clearer sense of direction emerges from this prayer, ask God for what you need in light of what you now see. How do you know that what you think you perceive is of God? Well, does it look and sound and taste (St Ignatius Loyola liked to use the verb “taste” about this) like Jesus, as we come to know Jesus through the Gospels? Trust Qoheleth that God, the Timeless One, has placed the touchstone we need within us, and that Jesus is the even clearer touchstone.
Jesus knew, coming out of his solitary prayer, what his Messiahship would actually entail, and he knew that he needed to prepare those closest to him for what he now saw lay ahead. That would mean finding ways to teach them that being Messiah didn’t mean what they thought it did: being a triumphant military leader. Rather, it meant being one who is radically, even heroically, committed to trusting God no matter what and remaining faithful to the end.
This is the “something new” that disrupts the ordinary rhythms of first century Jewish life under Roman occupation. Yes, God will deliver God’s people, but in a way they never expected. Jesus sees that now, and from now on, even up to today, his work will be to help us see it too.
—Margot LeBreton Merz