Every now and again there appears a feel-good human interest story at the end of the nightly news or within the local newspaper that stays with you long after you hear it. The Good Samaritan who pulled-over to deliver a baby alongside the interstate; the inner-city teacher who volunteers to rock babies at the local hospital after the school day is finished; the kids who started a lemonade stand to support a classmate with leukemia.
The most powerful for me, though, has been the love story of a Massachusetts father and his son.
Some of the details have faded from memory these many years later, but here’s what I do remember: back in the late 1970s, long before Americans as a whole became more conscious of including people with disabilities into the events of every day society, a teen boy with cerebral palsy asked his father to help him compete in a local charity race to raise money for a recently-paralyzed classmate. The son wanted to run the 5-miles but couldn’t do so; his dad – who had never taken up the discipline – agreed to push him in a wheelchair along the route to support a good cause.
When the race was finished, the then-teen son looked up at his father and said: “When you run with me, Dad, it feels like I am not handicapped. I’m set free.”
That’s all Dad needed to hear.
For the next 30-plus years, the father-and-son team were seen running both marathons and triathlons throughout New York and New England, even competing in the Boston Marathon 32 times. When the son was at school, his father would run the neighborhood pushing a wheelchair that held a bag of cement, preparing himself for the next race that would require physical exertion -- a complete outpouring.
For Dad, running each race was both sacrifice and joy, an embrace of freedom that also took an incredible toll.
As we continue this week with the Bread of Life Discourse as found in the Gospel of John, I couldn’t help but be struck by the emphasis that Jesus places on his Father as he prepares hearts to receive the living bread – the manna that never dies.
The Lord again is appealing to the very ones who knew of a God who fed the lost and wandering; the God who told a weary Elijah not to give-up on his journey. “Get up and eat” or you won’t make it back.
A God who cares as a loving Father does; a God who feeds by giving everything.
But in order to receive in such a way, Jesus reminds us of three things: listen, learn, and be led.
First: Listen. “Stop murmuring among yourselves,” as Jesus advises. It’s easy to complain -- to tell God we don’t like His ways, His plans, His everything. And while God certainly gets the human condition of our sinful and broken hearts, there comes a time in each follower’s journey when he or she has to willingly choose to trust that God really does know best; that He is working out our salvation in order to sanctify us. We can’t box God in to the answers we expect from Him.
When we don’t listen in prayer and adoration … when we don’t listen to His Heart beating within our own, then we miss the grace that He wants to pour-out upon us. We miss the ways in which He longs to feed our souls.
How many of those disciples missed the Bread of Life’s offer of sacrificial love that day because they weren’t listening with purity of heart? How many refused to see him as anything more than the carpenter’s son? Their self-centeredness and lack of trust were the only murmurs of heart they could hear, or better yet – chose to hear.
With listening, of course, comes learning: the second command of Christ in this part of the discourse. Are we learning from the Father?
It seems almost preposterous, doesn’t it, saying that we are learning from God? But we must – and Christ is the way we learn:
He entered the pain and suffering of others. He healed by listening and loving. He washed feet. He called out injustice. He lived and worked among the ones that no one else cared to see. He wept at hardness of heart. He fed. He gave all.
As the Son, so the Father. As the Father, so the Son -- and to anyone the Father wishes to reveal Himself through Christ.
When we learn, we become. And let’s be honest: what father doesn’t long for his son or daughter to become like him in all his best virtues? What father – like the Dad who ran marathons with his disabled boy – doesn’t long for his child to be set free because of his own gift of self-sacrifice?
God hungers for that: that we learn from Him in order to become His Heart in the world. We learn from Him in order to be led by Him.
This, then, in the end, takes us to the final piece of the journey: the one who listens and learns is ultimately led by God: led to conversion; to the Cross; to the Banquet of the Eucharist and to eternity with Him. We were made for this … and how blessed we are when we are willing to be taken there.
Be sure of this: when we are here at Mass, we are led to those very things. At every Liturgy, we are present to that great Paschal Mystery where once for all time, our Savior Jesus Christ gave his life for us – becoming the Paschal Lamb; the Eternal Sacrifice; the Bread of Life for the world. For you and for me. He gave all so that we could receive all … and then because of that self-gift of sacrifice and grace, we are sent (led) to be that Love for the world.
What an incredible moment it is when the priest lifts up the eternal Sacrifice to the Father at every altar throughout the world – in every time and place -- and cries out with both joy and self-emptying love to God our Father: “Through Him, with Him and in Him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honor is yours, Almighty Father, for ever and ever.” The Son is exclaiming from that place where love conquers fear, hate, sin and death: “Dad, we did it. We saved them.”
Or as one young man with cerebral palsy once said to his father from his wheelchair at a Boston-area high school charity race: “I’m set free.”
In Eucharistic love offered, lifted up and received at every Mass, we are set free in God. Come, then: listen, learn, and be led by Him … be set eternally free!