Keeping God In Our Picture

Homily for Sunday, August 18, 2024
The Thirteenth Sunday After Pentecost
John 6:51-58

To take a good photograph, it helps to follow a few guidelines.  For example, “pay attention to ‘leading lines’” such as the convergence of railroad tracks in the distance or maybe the masts and hull of a sailboat. Or, “notice repeated shapes,” such as the rectangles of bricks on a Parisian street or the triangles formed by mountains.  Observe “the rule of thirds,” placing (for example) the horizon two thirds of the way toward the top and, say, a person one third of the way from the left.  Or –to really up our game – we can learn about “Figure Ground Relationships,” which are, “Is there enough contrast that the ‘figure’ stands out from the background?”  And then there is framing,which is, “What do I want to appear within the four sides of my photograph?” Can I take this photo in such a way that the lamp does not appear to be growing out of her head?  Will this portrait include the feet, or will it be only from the knees up? Or if I want to focus on the joy the child is experiencing while swinging,do I include the swing set and jungle gym, or do I crop those out and take a close-up of his face, perhaps including his hands holding the swing’s chains just to help give the setting?  How we frame a photograph – what we choose to leave in or to crop out – determines what we see.  

The crowds following Jesus in John chapter 6 were, in a way, photographers “framing” their experience of Jesus.  We heard in the past weeks’ Gospel lessons the “frame” into which the crowd tried to put Jesus. For example:  

Three weeks ago –“When Jesus realized that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain by himself.” (6:15)
That week, the crowd saw Jesus as a king.

Two weeks ago – “Jesus answered… “Very truly, I tell you, you are looking for me not because you saw signs but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” (6:26-27)
That week, the crowd saw Jesus as a supplier of unlimited bread.

And last week – Then the Jews began to complain about him…. They were saying, “Is not this Jesus,the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know?  How can he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” (6:41-42)

In these past weeks’ readings, the crowds following Jesus in John chapter 6 try to “frame” him 1) as a king, 2) as one who can give them theirfill of bread, and 3) as someone whom they think they already know.

What the crowds choose to crop out of the picture is God.  The crowds cannot see – or they choose not to see – that (as Jesus said in today’s lesson) “I am the living bread that came down from heaven…. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”  

It is easy to crop God out of our “picture.”  The crowds in John chapter 6 who crop God out of their picture are not dissimilar to us, for on some level we all want tokeep God out of our “picture.”  As the former Pope, Benedict XVI, once wrote:

At the heart of all temptations… is the act of pushing God aside because we perceive God as secondary, if not superfluous and annoying, in comparison with all the apparently far more urgent matters that fill our lives.  Constructing a world by our own lights without reference to God –  refusing to acknowledge the reality of anything beyond the political and material – that is the temptation that threatens us in many varied forms.  (Jesus of Nazareth, Vol 1, p 28)

Because God knows our hearts and knows how inclined we are to crop him out of the picture, God sent Jesus to be irrevocably in our “picture.”  John writes, “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, the glory as of a father’s only son, full of grace and truth” (1:14).  God so wants to be in our “picture” that God came to live among us.

And because God knows that still – even after the Incarnation – we still often try to crop God out of the picture, God has given us a tangible sacrament, an “outward and visible sign of[the] inward and invisible grace” of God’s desire to be in our lives.  Or – more correctly – of the reality of God’s presence already in our lives, and of God’s desire that we see him in our lives, and that we do “believe”in God and the one whom he has sent (6:29).

And so in this sacrament we are about to receive, God communicates that he is in our “picture,” that he hopes we do see him in our lives and that we do not try to “crop him out.”  For Jesus is the living bread whom we need if we are to flourish and to be fully alive and to become the people God created us to be.  May God give us the grace to include Jesus in our lives and not to crop him out.  Indeed, may God give us the grace to see Jesus as the most important figure in our lives and to place him in the center of our“frame” and to order our lives around him accordingly.  For when we do, we will be available to receive the life abundant that God wishes to give us (John 10:10).

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