Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time
August 18, 2024

Today’s Reading:

https://bible.usccb.org/bible/readings/081824.cfm

Wisdom has built her house,
she has set up her seven columns;
she has dressed her meat, mixed her wine,
yes, she has spread her table.
She has sent out her maidens; she calls
from the heights out over the city:
“Let whoever is simple turn in here;
To the one who lacks understanding, she says,
Come, eat of my food,
and drink of the wine I have mixed!
Forsake foolishness that you may live;
advance in the way of understanding.”
Proverbs 9:1-6

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Proverbs offers us the beautiful image of Divine Wisdom setting a table of grace for our nourishment.

In our Gospel, Jesus tells us that he is the divine nourishment foretold in Proverbs. Some resist Jesus’s invitation. Their faith languishes even while there is sacred food before them.

Today, in God’s Lavish Mercy:
We give thanks for the Bread of Life given to us in Eucharist, Gospel, Creation, community, and merciful action. We ask for the grace to see God’s nourishing Presence right before us in our daily lives.

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Poetry: I Am the Bread of Life – Malcolm Guite

Where to get bread? An ever-pressing question
That trembles on the lips of anxious mothers,
Bread for their families, bread for all these others;
A whole world on the margin of exhaustion.
And where that hunger has been satisfied
Where to get bread? The question still returns
In our abundance something starves and yearns
We crave fulfillment, crave and are denied.

And then comes One who speaks into our needs
Who opens out the secret hopes we cherish
Whose presence calls our hidden hearts to flourish
Whose words unfold in us like living seeds
Come to me, broken, hungry, incomplete,
I Am the Bread of Life, break Me and eat.

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Music: Bread of Life – Bernadette Farrell