The Twentieth Sunday of the Year, B

            The sixth chapter of the Gospel according to St. John – from which today’s reading is taken – contains some of the strangest words, some of the most extravagant claims, in all of Scripture.  As we have already noted in our look at the Gospels, Jesus continuously offers Himself – not merely His teaching, His deeds, His demands – but rather Himself to those who are searching for life’s answer, for the truth, for meaning in life.  “I am” are the repeated words of Christ throughout this Gospel by John.  Are you thirsting for life, real life?  Well, I am the water of life.  Do you seem, sometimes, to be lost and wandering?  I am the good Shepherd who looks after His sheep.  Can you not find the way, the right way?  Well, I am the door and the way.  Do you have a heart-hunger for something more than the passing things of this world?  I am the bread of life.

            It is this last theme, of bread, that Jesus takes up in a new and startling way in today’s Gospel.  But first let us remember the setting.  Jesus has just finished, the day before, multiplying the few loaves of bread and some fish and fed thousands of people.  Naturally He is now very popular, and people are running around frantically trying to find Him.  He turns to them and says, “Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.”  They respond that, yes, then, that’s the bread they want:  “Sir, give us this bread always.”  And yet again Jesus does what He always does:  He offers them Himself – “I am the bread of life.”  So far so good.  But now our Lord begins to make some strange and radical claims.  He reiterates that He is the bread that came down from heaven, the bread that gives eternal life.  But then He adds, “and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.”  This statement engenders a quarrel among His listeners, and they ask the question the answer to which I want to consider with you today, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”  How indeed? 

Still our Lord drives the point home, and His language cannot be mistaken; He is being quite serious and quite literal:  “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… For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.  Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him.” 

            The Church has always, for 2000 years, taken these words literally.  There are those who belong to different groups formed out of the Protestant Reformation who claim otherwise, but they have a real problem with this the 6th chapter of John.  First of all, note that everyone in this chapter, in this scene, understands Jesus to be speaking now quite literally.  Thus their incredulity and offense.  If Jesus were speaking only symbolically or metaphorically, then certainly He would not have left them in their misunderstanding.  He would have “corrected” them, but He did not.  He only kept reiterating the realism of His words.  Secondly, all the earliest Christian teachers of the Faith, from the Apostles on through all the Church Fathers, taught the literal meaning of Jesus’ words.  In fact, the Catholic understanding of these words of Jesus was held by Christians, was the constant understanding of the Christian Church throughout the Church’s history and was undisputed, except for one lone scholar of the 11th century, for over a thousand years, up until the Reformation.  And finally, in the language that Jesus was speaking – Aramaic – to speak metaphorically the words “eat someone’s flesh” meant to slander or revile someone.  Our Lord could not have been saying, “Unless you slander and revile me, you do not have life within you.”  No, the words are literal and must be taken to be so.  Otherwise the whole passage descends into nonsense.

            We will see in last part of this chapter that our Lord was so serious about the literalness of His words that He willingly faced the loss of most of His followers, who just could not accept His words; and it is noted ominously that it was here, in the rejection of Jesus’ literal meaning about His Body and Blood that Judas Iscariot first turns against Christ.  But we still have the question, asked by Jesus’ quarrelsome disciples-turned-opponents, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”  How indeed?

            The Church’s perennial answer to that question, an answer repeated beautifully most recently in the documents of the Second Vatican Council, the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and our Holy Father’s latest encyclical is simply this – the Eucharist.  That’s how.  Christ Jesus truly and really gives us Himself – His Body and Blood – to us in the most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist.  We believe as Catholics (or we are not Catholic) and hold it to be the most wonderful of truths what the Church, from Christ’s words in today’s Gospel all the way through the history of the Church Catholic, has always taught:  that at the words of consecration said by Christ’s priest, the bread and wine truly, really, substantially become the Body and Blood of our Savior, the flesh He received from the Blessed Virgin and offered up on the Cross and the Blood He so willingly poured out for the forgiveness of our sins – that is, Himself, whole and entire – given to us under the signs of bread and wine so that we might truly receive, imbibe, Him. 

            “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”  The answer is first revealed to the disciples in the upper room on that first Holy Thursday, where Jesus all of sudden, in the quietness of that solemn occasion, took up some bread and said, “Take, eat; this is my body.”  He then took up the cup and said to them, “Drink of it, all of you; for this is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins.” 

            And He really meant it, literally.  Yet again, Christ Himself is, of course, the answer, the bread of life, given to us, really given to us in the Eucharist.  Symbols and metaphors just will not suffice; rather Christ is here, given to us in the way we can receive Him.  The Eucharist.  The living bread that came down from heaven…