Dear Brothers and Sisters,
Today we celebrate the Churches greatest gift, the Eucharist. Last week we celebrated the feast of who God is in himself, a Trinity of Persons, a knowable mystery. Today we celebrate this wondrous solemnity which honors the true presence of Jesus in the Sacrament of the Altar. In essence, it is the feast of how our God chooses to come to us and make his presence known.
Our gospel passage for this solemn feast comes from the section of John we call the Bread of Life Discourse. In John’s gospel the Last Supper is quite different from what we have in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke. John is very profound in his explanation of the Eucharist in this discourse in ways that the other gospels are not.
The discourse takes place earlier in Jesus’ ministry before his final days in Jerusalem where he will suffer and die. Prior to this section Jesus had been speaking metaphorically about his teaching being the bread that sustains, but where our passage picks up, he now doubles down and becomes more explicit. We know this by the changes in the Greek text that it was originally written in. The shift from metaphor to fact is made quite clear by the words and grammar he uses. The shift occurs from Jesus’ proclamation, “I am the living bread that came down from heaven, whoever eats this bread will live forever”. He continues, “and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the word.” In Greek the word for ‘flesh’ is Sarx. This is significant in both image and meaning. The image it gives is of soft tissues filled with blood that wrap around bones. On one hand this should remind us of Jesus as he sacrifices himself on the cross, with the nails that pierce his flesh, the crown of thorns that dig into his skin, the lance that pierces his side. However, in the next lines he will expound on this image further by again ‘doubling down’.
We are told the Jews gathered with Jesus begin to ‘quarrel’ – more literally, they begin to fight among themselves. This is not just a heated argument. It begins to get physical and no wonder. Jewish law was absolute about consuming the flesh of animals that contained blood and as in regards to cannibalism – well it was one of the worst sins you could perpetrate. Jesus here is not just speaking about animal flesh, but his own! Unthinkable! He doesn’t stop there, however, he goes on to say, “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you.” It is unmistakable that Jesus is speaking literally here of his own flesh and blood. It is Jesus in the Eucharistic meal who comes to us, body and blood offered on the altar of the cross that he gives to his disciples, and to us through them as the eternal sacrifice so that we might share in that gift. What was horrific to those who heard him, is for us a source of life-giving nourishment. Jesus is clear that he is not speaking in metaphors, but truly of the Eucharistic sacrifice he would leave for the Church.
My friends as we celebrate this solemn feast let us recommit ourselves to the precious gift he left the Church. Not just ordinary bread and wine, but as he intended truly his body and his blood, understood only with eyes of faith. Truly to be worshipped and adored, Jesus our Lord, made present by the power of the Holy Spirit to give us life and to feed our hungry souls.
Blessed Feast of Corpus Christi,
Fr. Steve
