Words of Eternal Life 
 

      With last Sunday’s Gospel reading, we began St. John’s “Bread of Life Discourse” (to be continued next Sunday, since this Sunday is the Feast of the Transfiguration).  Recounting the actual teaching of Christ, John’s discourse is a beautiful testimony to the mission of Christ:  to offer Himself up in sacrifice for the redemption of the world – a sacrifice that occurred once and for all, at a particular time and place in the early 30s of the first millennium AD just outside the walls of Jerusalem; and yet a sacrifice, Christ’s saving death, perpetuated through time by means of the Mass.  “The sacrifice of Christ,” the Catechism of the Catholic Church tells us, “and the sacrifice of the Eucharist are one single sacrifice” (1367).  The Catechism goes on to quote from the Council of Trent, “In this divine sacrifice which is celebrated in the Mass, the same Christ who offered himself once in a bloody manner on the altar of the cross is contained and offered in an unbloody manner” (2:1743).  Contrary to the sometime accusation made against the Mass – that Catholics believe Christ is being “re-crucified” in the offering of the Bread and Wine – Trent is restating the perennial teaching of the Church (based on chapter 6 of St. John’s Gospel) that the Mass and Eucharist are the extension in time of the saving death of Christ, the giving-again of Himself and all that He accomplished through His suffering, death and resurrection.  If this were not the case, then this sixth chapter of John’s Gospel makes no sense. 

      Let us remember that this passage begins with the astounding miracle of our Lord’s feeding of the five thousand with only a small amount of bread and fish, so as to prepare the people for His words about Himself – His sacrificial death and the eucharistic sharing in His sacrifice of Himself.  Note too that the amazed crowds actually did eat the fruits of Christ miracle – again pointing to the reality of the Eucharist, about which our Lord is soon to speak.  He admonishes the crowd – following Him because of a seemingly endless supply of food – to stop laboring for “food which perishes” but to begin to seek that “food which endures to eternal life,” that is that “bread of God … which comes down from heaven, and gives life to the world.”  The crowd eagerly responds, “Lord, give us this bread always”; and Christ, yet again, points to Himself as the answer, the means of fulfillment for all:  “I am the bread of life.” 

      Then Christ gets even more specific, using stark and explicit language:  “if any one eats of this bread, he will live forever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.”  Immediately there is continued amazement at His words… and much murmuring in the crowd – “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”  And our Lord does not disabuse them of a too literal interpretation of His words; rather, He gets even more specific:  “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.  For my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.  He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.”  At this point many of Christ’s would-be disciples took offense and left off following Him; only His closest disciples remained (even as Christ, at this point, mentions the coming betrayal of Judas Iscariot).  To those who departed from Him, Christ offered no further explanation, for He had already fully explained Himself:  that to be His follower meant something far more than just moving in His direction, but entailed so intimate an association, union and discipleship which somehow involves actually imbibing Him.  And that’s the Eucharist. 

      But the Twelve appointed Apostles remained with Christ, in spite of the fact that they too had little understanding of our Lord’s teaching. That would become very clear a while later in the Upper Room, the evening before His crucifixion, where during the Jewish Passover feast, Christ would all of sudden break with the usual ritual, take up a piece of bread and say, “Take, eat; this is my body”; and after taking up the cup, “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.”  Here is the institution of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and the priesthood to offer that Sacrifice, the fulfillment of our Lord’s words in John’s Gospel, chapter six.  And interestingly, it is right before this institution that Judas leaves the Upper Room to enact his treachery against the Son of Man.

      In the light of the above, it is difficult to understand the refusal of so many Christians to believe in the Catholic teaching concerning the Eucharist, teaching that has been constant for over two thousand years.  There are those, following certain Protestant Reformers, who insist on a “symbolic” interpretation of John 6:  that our Lord was only speaking metaphorically or symbolically.  Strange, then, that Christ did not “correct” the “misunderstanding” of so many who abandoned Him over their perception that He was speaking realistically.  Some push for a symbolic interpretation by pointing to Christ’s words in John 6:63 – “It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh is of no avail; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and life” – but such a read on things would have our Lord contradicting Himself:  at one moment speaking of His flesh giving life to the world and at another moment saying that His flesh is of “no avail.”  It is, rather, our flesh (unaided human nature) that is of no avail, for it has not the ability of itself to rightly understand this teaching (much less to live forever without the life of the Son of God!).  That’s why the loyal Apostles stayed with Christ, for as Peter, ever the spokesman for the whole group, proclaimed:  “You have the words of eternal life.”  And later, in the Upper Room, their refusal to part from Christ because of this very difficult teaching would be rewarded by the explanation Christ gave them by speaking those words heard at every Mass – “This is my body” and “This is my blood.”