18th Sunday in Ordinary Time

To view the readings for this Sunday, click here: http://www.usccb.org/nab/080308.shtml

What can separate us from the love of Christ? That is a question we should ask ourselves often, a question that many asked in the gospel text for today's Mass regarding the death of John the Baptist.

Many in Jesus' day mistakingly believed that John the Baptist was the Messiah, and even those who did not regard John as the Messiah followed him as the forerunner to the Messiah. John's role was misunderstood by the people of that time just as much as Jesus' identity was misunderstood by them. They figured that if John was the forerunner to the Messiah, and the Messiah was going to be a great political ruler who would liberate Israel from Roman occupation, restore the kingdom of Israel and restore the priesthood of the Temple - then how does John's death fit into this equation? Their misreading of the true nature and mission of the Messiah extends to the fate of John the Baptist as well. They failed to see John's death as a precursor to Jesus' own death. Thus, the crowd's were wandering around like sheep without a shepherd.

In the first reading we see the great Messianic expectation given by Isaiah: the Messiah will bring a time of great abundance where people will come to eat and drink without having to pay. This expectation finds a prayer form in our responsorial Psalm 147, where we exalt God for providing a bounty for us at all times. This expectation finds its fulfillment in the action of Jesus in the Gospel reading. With a few meager offerings Jesus is able to feed a crowd of 5,000 men - not counting women and children. Jesus's actions point the crowd to the notion of the Messiah as a suffering servant found throughout Isaiah and in the Psalms. He was attempting to correct their mistaken notion of the Messiah through this action that is set within the context of John's death.

What does all of this have to do with our original question? The mistaken notion of the people then was that the Messiah was a temporal ruler only, and that the death of his precursor somehow separated them from God's love, i.e. the promise of the Messiah. But Jesus is not a temporal Messiah. He is God who defeats death and sin, our only real enemies. We should not fear death if we are free from sin, for then death is union with God in the perfection of heaven.

Let our motto for life be the words from St. Paul in the second reading: "For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord."