Homily for 9 august 2009

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.