First Reading, Exodus 16:2-4, 12-15

Our Liturgical Setting: We've interrupted our Liturgical Year B trek through Saint Mark's gospel for a five-week sojourn in the gospel of John, Chapter 6, the extended teaching about Jesus as the Bread of Life. In today's gospel passage, John 6:24-35, Jesus cites the people's history, an incident in which Moses gave their ancestors "bread from heaven to eat." As you would expect, Jesus will reinterpret that event and show (or hint) how God's gift to the world in Jesus himself excels what God gave through Moses.

The Whole Historical Situation [in 250 words]: In ancient Sumer (modern Iraq) lived a rich, wily fellow soon to be renamed Abraham. We'd call him, and everybody else at the time, a pagan. He followed the mysterious voice of God and moved to Palestine, around 1800 B.C.E., where he made a covenant with God. His grandson Jacob was renamed Israel, and Israel's twelve sons and their families wound up in Egypt seeking relief from famine. The Egyptians and others lumped these and other nomadic people under the name Hebrews. Eventually the Egyptians enslaved the Hebrew descendants of Israel. Around 1200 B.C.E. Moses revived their ancestral religion and led them out of Egypt back to the land Abraham had occupied. (The event is known as the Exodus.) On the way, at Mount Sinai, Moses renewed the covenant between God and the people, their side of the Covenant being expressed concretely in the Ten Commandments. (Today's first reading is set here.) Generations after Moses saw: the kingships of Saul, David, Solomon and lesser kings; the Temple on Mount Zion in Jerusalem; the division into northern and southern kingdoms (Israel and Judah, respectively); the prophets; the Exile in Babylon; more prophets; a dispirited return from exile (when the verses we read today were written); the diaspora (dispersion of many of the people now known as Jews (from "Judah") among Mediterranean pagan populations; occupation of their homeland by Greeks under Alexander, then occupation by the Romans; the coming of John the Baptist; the coming of Jesus of Nazareth; and more.

Second Reading, Ephesians 4:17, 20-24

The Historical Situation: On the Fifteenth Sunday and Sixteenth Sunday of this season, the second readings from Ephesians established the new unity of God's once separated peoples, the Jews and the Gentiles (the latter including the Ephesian addressees of this letter). In the reading on the Seventeenth Sunday, Paul encouraged them to live out the consequences of their unification, (we paraphrase liberally) "You have only one religion, so live like one family."

This week the Apostle sounds a more cautionary note: Don't continue to behave like you did before your conversion, "You must no longer live as the Gentiles [in a clearer, older translation, the pagans] do." And how might the unconverted pagans be living? Here are verses 18 and 19, absent from the Lectionary: "darkened in understanding, alienated from the life of God because of their ignorance, because of their hardness of heart, they have become callous and have handed themselves over to licentiousness for the practice of every kind of impurity to excess." No salacious details, but you get the idea.

Proclaiming It: If you must proclaim this from the lectionary most commonly used in Catholic churches in the United States, gird yourself; it's not going to be easy. The punctuation notwithstanding, phrase it and insert pauses according to this outline:

I.  Brothers and sisters: I declare and testify in the Lord

A.  that you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds;

i.  that is not how you learned Christ, assuming that you have heard of him and were taught in him, as truth is in Jesus,

B.   that you should

i.   put away the old self of your former way of life, corrupted through deceitful desires,

ii.  and be renewed in the spirit of your minds,

iii.  and put on the new self, created in God's way in righteousness and holiness of truth.