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.