Homily for Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B 9 August 2009
Today’s Gospel is part of a whole series of readings on the theme of the Eucharist that in Year B the Church asks us to reflect upon week by week in the summer. Two weeks ago we have seen how Our Lord is there to nourish us in the story of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, how Our Lord has compassion on the hunger of the people and feeds them- he sees their hunger for what it really is, a hunger for spiritual things, for something, someone, that will nourish the soul and bring us to our true stature as children of God. We saw in that Gospel too that Our Lord is generous in his love, that his care of us exceeds all that we could imagine or expect, because not only is everyone fed in that story, there are the twelve baskets still left over, there is more, always more to come for us from the love of God. Last week we heard Jesus say “I am the bread of life, he who comes to me will never be hungry”. He spoke to the crowd and encouraged them to search for the “food that endures to eternal life, the kind of food the Son of Man is offering” – not to limit their horizons simply to satisfying their hunger for the things of this world,, their appetites for material things, things that come and go, that pass away, but to aim higher, to address that other appetite that is within each one of us, that hunger for a connexion with the divine, that yearning for our life to have meaning, meaning in the sight of God, real meaning and not just the labels of fantasy that we may imagine we have. And we heard last week how at the end of Our Lord’s discourse, even though they hardly knew what they said, the crowd cried out “Sir, give us that bread always!” - a little phrase that it is good to repeat sometimes as we approach the moment of Communion- “Lord, give us that bread always!”
But what is the Bread? What does Jesus mean when he tells the crowd “I am the bread of life”? In today’s Gospel he expounds this further- “the bread that I shall give is my flesh” and he tells them that “anyone who eats this bread will live for ever”. Not only is Jesus providing the nourishment we need but he actually in some way is the nourishment. No wonder, in the very next verse that follows this Gospel, we read that many of the disciples didn’t like the sound of it-“This is a hard saying, who can listen to it?” and at the end of this chapter 6 the evangelist tells us that “after this many of his disciples drew back and no longer went with him”. The idea that somehow Jesus would give his body to be eaten by his followers is still quite a shocking, bizarre idea today. To his Jewish hearers it was appalling, because they had a long tradition of this being the ultimate degradation for an enemy who had been killed, the ultimate horror for a sinner who died in his sins. The prophet Ezekiel (39:17-20) in one of his oracles has God telling man to get ready for the day when the enemies of God will be slain, to tell all the birds and all the animals to come to this great feast- “gather from all sides” says God “to the sacrificial feast which I am preparing for you, a great sacrificial feast…and you shall eat flesh and drink blood, you shall eat the flesh of the mighty and drink the blood of the princes of the earth”.
And so when Our Lord is saying that the bread that he will give is his flesh, he is referring to his coming death on the Cross. He will be slain, he will die not as a sinner dying in his sins, but as the all-innocent one dying in our sins. And just as the body of the hated enemy will be exposed to be eaten, so too the body of the One whom mankind rejected and to whom such hostility was shown in the Passion and Crucifixion will be offered to be eaten. In a sense, for Our Lord, the constant giving of himself to us in Holy Communion is an ongoing part of the Passion, an ongoing vulnerability, an ongoing putting of himself in our hands to see what we will do with him. And Ezekiel’s prophecy comes true for us at every Mass- the Mass is “the sacrificial feast” that God says he is preparing for us. “You shall be filled at my table” he says, “you shall eat the flesh of the mighty”- we know that Jesus is the mighty, he is God the Son of the Father- “you shall drink the blood of the princes of the earth”- well, we consume the body and blood, soul and divinity of not a prince of this world, but the Prince of Peace, the Ruler of the Universe. And God says again via Ezekiel “You shall eat till you are filled”.
We cannot easily comprehend how this happens, how it is that the bread offered on our altars by our priests is changed in its essence by the words of consecration into the Body of Christ, the bread that I shall give which is my flesh for the life of the world. We can use technical terms like transubstantiation if that helps us, we can learn the definitions in the catechisms old and new, but in the end, however clever we are, however blessed with insight we are, we have to go on faith alone. This is what we believe, what the Church has always believed, and we take it on trust, the trust that we call the Faith that comes to us from the apostles. And that is what Our Lord was looking for in his discourse in today’s Gospel, that is the reaction he wanted from his audience- he was hoping for the response of Faith- “I tell you most solemnly, everybody who believes has eternal life” Our Lord knows that faith is not always easy, that it is a grace, a gift from God- he speaks here of those who do believe as being “drawn by the Father” and “taught by God”- to have this kind of faith, this trusting confidence in God’s words, is “to hear the teaching of the Father and learn from it”, Jesus tells us- and that means inevitably “to come to me”.
These Gospel passages contain “hard sayings” indeed, but let us not be among those who draw back because we do not understand and cannot accept these awe-inspiring words and their still shocking meaning. Let us instead accept the invitation of God that he gives in Ezekiel and “gather from all sides to the great sacrificial feast” that he is preparing for us, let us come to Communion to have our hunger for God’s love satisfied and to absorb into our human lives the divine life, “the flesh of the mighty”. Lord, give us this bread always! Amen.
Sunday 23 August 2009
Homily for 23 August 2009
Homily for the Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time Year B 23 August 2009
Today’s Gospel passage is the last in a series of excerpts from St John’s Gospel that the Church asks us to look at this summer, passages that are all concerned with the Eucharist. We began with the Feeding of the 5000, when Jesus saw the crowds, saw humanity and saw the hunger, not just in their stomachs, but in their hearts, and had compassion on them and satisfied their deepest needs, their hunger for the things that really matter, the things of the spirit that alone can give us a grasp on reality and give meaning to our lives. Then we heard Jesus urging the crowd to search for “the food that endures to eternal life, the kind of food the Son of Man is offering”- in other words not to concentrate on satisfying their hunger for the things of this world to the extent that they have no energy left to satisfy that other and more important hunger, the hunger for God and for friendship with him. Jesus went on to say “I am the bread of life”- not only do I give you the nourishment you need for your soul, for your wholeness and your holiness, I am in fact the nourishment too. And then in case people still hadn’t got the message, he explained that “the bread that I shall give is my flesh” and this bread, this flesh, is something we have to eat- “anyone who eats this bread will live for ever”. Eat his flesh? This is a shocking idea even today in our blasé old world, and it shocked those who first heard him say it, as we see in today’s reading: “many of the followers of Jesus said ’This is intolerable language. How could anyone accept it?’” Notice that it is not the casual passers-by, the ordinary members of the crowd who say this, who draw back, but it is the disciples, and John tells us that it wasn’t just a few either- “after this, many of his disciples left him and stopped going with him”.
You see how vital the Eucharist is! We too, I am sure, feel a bit like those disciples who cry out (in the better translation of the RSV) “This is a hard saying!” If someone, maybe a non-Catholic friend, asks us to explain what happens at Mass, what we believe is going on when the priest says the words of Jesus at the Last Supper over the bread and wine on our altar, what we believe is happening to us when we receive communion, I am sure everyone here, even those of us who have degrees in theology, have a moment’s pause- how can we put this across so that it makes sense? I think we usually fail dismally when we do try, because in the end words are inadequate and language falters, however clever we are. We end up, as I have said before, having to take it on trust, in faith- this is what we believe, what the Church has always believed. And people who are only using their heads and who prefer their own opinion to the two thousand year tradition of the Church, will never believe it- what do you mean, a piece of bread is now the flesh of Our Lord, each one of the two thousand hosts we distribute in this church every Sunday is a bit of Jesus’s body? Well, no- we have to say in the face of their mounting incredulity, each host is the whole body of Jesus- body, blood, soul and divinity. And they laugh at us and leave us to our superstitious nonsense.
From the very beginning these sayings of Our Lord about his Body being the Bread of Life, his Flesh which we must eat to be nourished by him and to remain in communion with him, have been unpalatable to many people, even to many Christians. Already in the very early years of the second century St Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch whose seven letters to local churches we still possess, refers to this. In his letter to the Christians in Smyrna (modern Turkey) he speaks of people who “abstain from the Eucharist because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the Flesh of Our Saviour Jesus Christ, who suffered for our sins and which, in his goodness, the Father raised” – and interestingly he says that these people, because they refuse in the pride of their intellect to come to communion, because they can’t bring themselves to believe that the bread has really become the Body of Christ, inevitably begin to lose their understanding about what the Body of Christ also means, in its fullest sense- that is, what St Paul today calls “the whole body” of Christian people: they find that their sense of communion, not just with God but also with his people, with their fellow human beings, is gradually diminished, their sensitivity to others is lost, because they reject the Body of Christ in the Eucharist. He says of them “see how they are opposed to the mind of God. Charity is of no concern to them, not are widows and orphans or the oppressed, either those in prison or at liberty, or the hungry or the thirsty.”
Yes, these sayings are hard. It is still a shocking thing when Our Lord says “I tell you most solemnly, if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you will not have life in you”. But these sayings are at the very heart of our Catholic Faith and always have been. We cannot water them down, we cannot say “Ah, yes, but the bread and wine are only symbols!” as people have been tempted to say since at least the eleventh century, and as the Reformers insisted. At the Last Supper, when Our Lord took the bread into his sacred hands, he “broke it and gave it to them saying ‘This is my body’”. He did not say “I want you to think of this bread as a symbol of my body….” We must thank God for the gift of Faith which enables us to take these hard sayings at their face value, in their literal sense, that our intellectual gifts do not prevent us from having the faith that enables us to believe that the bread on our altar at this Mass will shortly, as Fr Richard in the person of Christ repeats those words from the Last Supper, become for us the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ. And my prayer for us this morning is, that just as we have been given the grace to discern clearly the Body of Christ on our altars, may we also be able always to discern the Body of Christ in our streets, in those among whom we live and work. And let us say with Peter “we believe, we know that you are the Holy One of God”. Amen.
Today’s Gospel passage is the last in a series of excerpts from St John’s Gospel that the Church asks us to look at this summer, passages that are all concerned with the Eucharist. We began with the Feeding of the 5000, when Jesus saw the crowds, saw humanity and saw the hunger, not just in their stomachs, but in their hearts, and had compassion on them and satisfied their deepest needs, their hunger for the things that really matter, the things of the spirit that alone can give us a grasp on reality and give meaning to our lives. Then we heard Jesus urging the crowd to search for “the food that endures to eternal life, the kind of food the Son of Man is offering”- in other words not to concentrate on satisfying their hunger for the things of this world to the extent that they have no energy left to satisfy that other and more important hunger, the hunger for God and for friendship with him. Jesus went on to say “I am the bread of life”- not only do I give you the nourishment you need for your soul, for your wholeness and your holiness, I am in fact the nourishment too. And then in case people still hadn’t got the message, he explained that “the bread that I shall give is my flesh” and this bread, this flesh, is something we have to eat- “anyone who eats this bread will live for ever”. Eat his flesh? This is a shocking idea even today in our blasé old world, and it shocked those who first heard him say it, as we see in today’s reading: “many of the followers of Jesus said ’This is intolerable language. How could anyone accept it?’” Notice that it is not the casual passers-by, the ordinary members of the crowd who say this, who draw back, but it is the disciples, and John tells us that it wasn’t just a few either- “after this, many of his disciples left him and stopped going with him”.
You see how vital the Eucharist is! We too, I am sure, feel a bit like those disciples who cry out (in the better translation of the RSV) “This is a hard saying!” If someone, maybe a non-Catholic friend, asks us to explain what happens at Mass, what we believe is going on when the priest says the words of Jesus at the Last Supper over the bread and wine on our altar, what we believe is happening to us when we receive communion, I am sure everyone here, even those of us who have degrees in theology, have a moment’s pause- how can we put this across so that it makes sense? I think we usually fail dismally when we do try, because in the end words are inadequate and language falters, however clever we are. We end up, as I have said before, having to take it on trust, in faith- this is what we believe, what the Church has always believed. And people who are only using their heads and who prefer their own opinion to the two thousand year tradition of the Church, will never believe it- what do you mean, a piece of bread is now the flesh of Our Lord, each one of the two thousand hosts we distribute in this church every Sunday is a bit of Jesus’s body? Well, no- we have to say in the face of their mounting incredulity, each host is the whole body of Jesus- body, blood, soul and divinity. And they laugh at us and leave us to our superstitious nonsense.
From the very beginning these sayings of Our Lord about his Body being the Bread of Life, his Flesh which we must eat to be nourished by him and to remain in communion with him, have been unpalatable to many people, even to many Christians. Already in the very early years of the second century St Ignatius, the bishop of Antioch whose seven letters to local churches we still possess, refers to this. In his letter to the Christians in Smyrna (modern Turkey) he speaks of people who “abstain from the Eucharist because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the Flesh of Our Saviour Jesus Christ, who suffered for our sins and which, in his goodness, the Father raised” – and interestingly he says that these people, because they refuse in the pride of their intellect to come to communion, because they can’t bring themselves to believe that the bread has really become the Body of Christ, inevitably begin to lose their understanding about what the Body of Christ also means, in its fullest sense- that is, what St Paul today calls “the whole body” of Christian people: they find that their sense of communion, not just with God but also with his people, with their fellow human beings, is gradually diminished, their sensitivity to others is lost, because they reject the Body of Christ in the Eucharist. He says of them “see how they are opposed to the mind of God. Charity is of no concern to them, not are widows and orphans or the oppressed, either those in prison or at liberty, or the hungry or the thirsty.”
Yes, these sayings are hard. It is still a shocking thing when Our Lord says “I tell you most solemnly, if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you will not have life in you”. But these sayings are at the very heart of our Catholic Faith and always have been. We cannot water them down, we cannot say “Ah, yes, but the bread and wine are only symbols!” as people have been tempted to say since at least the eleventh century, and as the Reformers insisted. At the Last Supper, when Our Lord took the bread into his sacred hands, he “broke it and gave it to them saying ‘This is my body’”. He did not say “I want you to think of this bread as a symbol of my body….” We must thank God for the gift of Faith which enables us to take these hard sayings at their face value, in their literal sense, that our intellectual gifts do not prevent us from having the faith that enables us to believe that the bread on our altar at this Mass will shortly, as Fr Richard in the person of Christ repeats those words from the Last Supper, become for us the Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ. And my prayer for us this morning is, that just as we have been given the grace to discern clearly the Body of Christ on our altars, may we also be able always to discern the Body of Christ in our streets, in those among whom we live and work. And let us say with Peter “we believe, we know that you are the Holy One of God”. Amen.
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