Taste and see
People are kind in many ways. They watch the house while neighbors are gone on vacation. They make a loan to an adult child who never seems to have grown up. They volunteer to serve meals in a homeless shelter every month.
Do they get thanked and appreciated?
The helped neighbor threatens to call the city because lawn watering from the watcher next door seeps onto his patio. The child, near repayment date, rehearses a bad family memory, and as repayment for the loaner’s parenting, reneges on half of what’s owed. A homeless man being served in line insults the volunteer because he doesn’t like mushroom cream soup.
Hence the origin of the irony, “No good deed goes unpunished.”
Elijah and Jesus in today’s readings both embody the nobility of human beings who perform good deeds for the sake of helping others, not because they expect to receive appreciation or approval.
In the passage from I Kings before this Sunday’s reading, Elijah’s prayer to God brings rain to a parched land, breaking the famine. Further, he restores the people’s faith in the God of Israel when divine fire comes down and consumes his sacrifice of a bull on a water-drenched altar. By contrast, the priests of Baal can’t get their god to act; he is silent because he is non-existent. But Ahab and Queen Jezebel regard Elijah as an enemy. Instead of thanks, and with a price on his head, Elijah flees to the desert. In the passage for this Sunday, Elijah calls out to God for help. He is overcome with depression. From an emotional high where he triumphantly summoned God, he now finds himself in the pit of despair. He prays to God, burdened with a sense of hopelessness that his work is over. There is no extreme of life, as the Elijah story shows, where God’s ear is not turned to us. God sometimes answers in dramatic moments, as with fire coming down before a big crowd, “showing them.” Or, in this passage, God’s deliverance comes through a quiet, ordinary miracle which comes in the night, the hearth cake and water left by an angel, a miracle witnessed only by Elijah himself.
A colleague in biblical studies, Thomas Brodie, O.P., has noted in his writings many parallels between the Elijah tradition and the accounts of Jesus in the gospels. Here is one of them, in the theme of Jesus identifying himself as the “bread that came down from heaven.” There are also allusions in this passage to Moses who led the Israelites to the Promised Land. The Israelites survived on manna, the “bread that comes down from heaven.” When Jesus speaks of himself as the “bread that came down from heaven,” like the manna God gave the Israelites, and like the hearth cake God gave to Elijah, he speaks of himself as the personification of what beleaguered people pray for and need to survive when they, too, feel at the end of their rope. What God gives people is what they need to keep walking forward, out of their hopelessness. In the Eucharist, Jesus himself is bread and sustenance for the journey of life.
What is the immediate response to Jesus’ self-offering and assurance that he will always be with his followers? It is to doubt and dismiss him. “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph? … Then how can he say, ‘I have come down from heaven?’” The lesson is that not everyone understands when the best of gift of self is being offered. Nor can all receive it, even when offered with the noblest motives.
While it is not in our power to change the minds of others, or “make them see,” it is in our power to act according to the impulses of the Holy Spirit. The passage from Ephesians is like a mother imploring her children and relatives to be on their best behavior for the family reunion, begging them to let go of grudges and chips on their shoulders: “All bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling must be removed from you, along with all malice. And be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ.” The rule for best-behavior during a family celebration is also the rule for right relations in the household of the faith. The motive is not future reward, but the good in itself, right now, of embodying the love God has for us, and the love Christ has already shown us.
Does God really answer my prayer?
The Psalm offers words of reassurance from someone who knows from personal experience that God delivers us from fear and as our refuge, saves us from our present distress.
Sister Eloise Rosenblatt, R.S.M., Ph.D., is a theologian and attorney in private practice in San Jose.
By Sister Eloise Rosenblatt, RSM, PhD
From August 7, 2009 issue of Catholic San Francisco.
