Welcome to our parish

 1 August 2021              18^th Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B

MIXED MOTIVES

Have you ever wondered why people practise the religion they do? Take Christianity, for example. The essence of Christianity is love of God through love of neighbour. In other words to be a Christian is to put others always before yourself. It means being at the service of whomever is in need.

It’s not rocket science to see that this approach to life is going to cause Christians a good deal of inconvenience, not to mention suffering and hardship at times. That’s why one of Christianity’s mottoes is about carrying your cross.

A more natural way of life would be to feather your own nest, to make sure that you are well provided for and comfortable and then, if it took your fancy, to think about helping others, provided that they weren’t too much of a nuisance.

So why do we do what we do? Some people think that religion is a sort of insurance policy that they take out to give themselves a soft landing in the afterlife. At best we can say that they see this way of living as qualifying them for eternal life. Their motivation is the reward of heaven.

Other individuals have ulterior motives for practising their religion. Sometimes these are harmless, like enjoying the company of other people or feeling good after a good Church sing-along. Not so helpful ulterior motives could be the desire to be seen as part of the religious community for social reasons, to get votes in an election or to increase the sales of your ironmongery business. This is to use religion for other purposes.

Of course, there are folk who espouse Christianity because they are absolutely convinced by the teaching of Jesus; it makes sense of life here and now and it offers the best chance of living life to the full. They can see the wisdom of it all and can appreciate what God is promising on both sides of the grave.

In today’s gospel Jesus looks at the crowd and sees all the above types of people: those who believe because they have seen the signs and those who believe because they have had all the bread they wanted to eat.

Which are you?

I tell you solemnly,  you are not looking for me  because you have seen the signs  but because you had all the bread you wanted to eat.                                          (John 6:26)