18th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
First Reading: Ex 16:2-4, 12-15, 31a
Second Reading: Eph 4:17, 20-24
Gospel Reading: Jn 6:24-35

“I came that they might have life, and have it to the full,” Jesus promised. We say we want this life, and yet, as Jesus noted, we are unwilling to go to him to possess it.

Jesus’ own words scare us: “If a man wishes to come after me, he must deny his very self.” We do not really believe him when he adds, “Whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

Like the crowds in this Sunday’s Gospel Reading, we are willing to go to Jesus for natural food, but not supernatural. Like the Israelites in the First Reading, we reject freedom, if it means going hungry, and choose slavery, provided we have plenty of food.

When Jesus offers us eternal life, therefore, we reply, “Thanks, but no thanks. Forgive me, but I know God loves me just as I am, and I prefer to stay that way.”

“No,” God answers; “I cannot forgive the sin of choosing evil, of refusing deliverance. Because I love you, I cannot leave you as you are.”

Love wants “the absolute loveliness” of the beloved, explained 19th-century clergyman George MacDonald. “Where loveliness is incomplete, and love cannot love its fill of loving, it spends itself to make [the beloved] more lovely, that it may love more.”

“All that is not beautiful in the beloved...must be destroyed; and our God is a consuming fire.”

“The judgment of condemnation is this,” Jesus said: “the light came into the world, but men loved darkness rather than light.” We are condemned, then, not for doing wrong, but for resolving to do wrong: for staying in the darkness.

This is the sin against the Holy Spirit, which Jesus said “will not be forgiven, either in this age or in the age to come.” St. John Paul said that its “non-forgiveness” is linked to “non-repentance,” or a “radical refusal to be converted.” It is “the sin committed by the person who claims to have a ‘right’ to persist in evil, or in any sin at all, and who thus rejects Redemption.” This is a state of “spiritual ruin.”

Our society has lost even the sense of sin. For example, New Age proponents claim that “there is no distinction between good and evil,” said the Vatican document on the subject. They think that “nobody needs forgiveness” and that “believing in the existence of evil can create only negativity and fear.”

The truth is that unless we recognize and admit our sins and faults, God cannot pardon us or give us supernatural life.

At every Mass, we say we are waiting for “the coming of our Saviour, Jesus Christ.” Are we? Suppose we heard that after Mass, Jesus would meet us in the vestibule to take us to himself. What would we say?

It should be, “Come, Lord Jesus!” But it might be, “I’m not ready; give me another 10 years.” “What will happen to all my things?” “Not now, when everything is going so well here on earth!”

Natural life is good; but supernatural life is better. Do we really want it?

“Man finds it hard to get what he wants, because he does not want the best,” MacDonald said. “God finds it hard to give, because he would give the best, and man will not take it.”

We need the reminder St. Paul gives in the Second Reading: “Now this I affirm and insist on in the Lord: you must no longer live as the Gentiles live, in the futility of their minds ... You were taught to put away your former way of life, your old self, corrupt and deluded by its lusts, and to be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and to clothe yourselves with the new man, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.”