A very intelligent and articulate friend of mine – a young mother who is raising a number of children in the Faith and growing in wisdom as a result – once responded in my presence to a critic of Christianity, who dismissed the Faith due to its complexity and then summed up his argument by comparing, paradoxically, the Christian story to fairy tales.  She listened patiently to the scripted diatribe, repeated parrot-like by one who took a course in something called “comparative religion”; and then said, “But the very youngest of my children who has learned to speak and understand English understands a fairy tale.  The propositions of the Faith, however, are of a whole other character.”  One gets the impression, if he reads the Gospels carefully, that he is not indulging himself with stories that are made-up to simply stir up wonder and supply the reader with “and the moral of the story is…”  Rather, the careful reader of the Gospels gets the impression that he is reading the first-hand accounts of eyewitnesses of something that really happened, something certainly complex, but also credible. 

      It is in that spirit of the careful reader that we have been exploring St. John’s Gospel, chapter six.  And there we see Jesus, not a character in some fantasy, but an historical figure enunciating a difficult teaching that is at one with who He is really is:  that unless His would-be followers share in His own being in some mysterious way, they will never share in His life.  His words are frank and stark and uncompromising.  His hearers most likely thought that He was speaking of a kind of cannibalism when He kept insisting that His Flesh is real food and His Blood real drink, and that only those who eat His flesh and drink His blood have life in them.  His closest disciples too, who refused to abandon Him, most likely could not decipher the true intent of His words, but they did know that here they were not dealing with mere allegory, symbolism or metaphor – that Christ meant His astounding words to be taken seriously and realistically.  Perhaps only at the Passover Feast where Jesus, the night before He was arrested and tried and condemned to death – where He took up the bread and the cup and spoke again of His Body and Blood to be eaten and drunk – perhaps only then did they begin to see the import of what St. John later recorded in this sixth chapter of his Gospel.

      In that chapter, Christ stated unequivocally that it would be through the means of His offering up of His flesh that the world would have life, and that the disciples would share in Christ’s sacrifice of Himself – in that life-giving self-offering – by what Jesus described as the eating of His Flesh and the drinking of His Blood.  That offering and self-sacrifice were accomplished at the altar of the cross.  But how could this man’s death accomplish so much – the life of the whole world – and how could it be that His followers would share in His victory by eating His Flesh and drinking His Blood?  The answer is given in what the Church proclaims as the Paschal Mystery, explained very ably by Fr. Jonathan Robinson in his book The Mass and Modernity:  
 

But, when all is said and done, why do we commemorate this particular death?  Why is this one, isolated tragedy so important that we are still remembering it two thousand years after it happened?  History and the world today are full of the most hideous cruelty and appalling wrongdoing.  Why are we not remembering all these victims of mankind’s infinite capacity for cruelty?  “Homo homini lupus,” said St. Augustine, man is a wolf to his fellowmen, and nothing in the distant past or in the twentieth century or today in the twenty-first has shown him to be wrong.  The reason, bluntly put, that we recall this one particular death is that on the first Good Friday they crucified Jesus Christ, who was God made into our flesh.  It is because the man on the Cross was also the Son of God that we recall his cruel scourging and unjust condemnation.  It is because Jesus Christ was from all eternity with the Father that we remember his betrayal by his friends and retrace his painful way to Golgotha.  It is because he took flesh, for our sake, of the Virgin Mary and then, as he was dying, gave her to St. John to be the Mother of the Church that we commemorate his agony and bitter death.  It is because from the dead body, pierced with a lance, flowed the waters of baptism and the blood of the Eucharist that we remember his being taken down from the Cross and all the sad human business of preparing the dead for burial (p. 249-50).   
 

      This brings us back to what we have been considering about the centrality of Jesus Christ’s true identity, so forthrightly proclaimed by St. Peter – “You are the Son of the living God” – and to the fact that Jesus, immediately after Peter’s confession, spoke of the founding of His Church on the rock who is Peter (Matthew 16):  the Church, Fr. Robinson describes, that is “at her deepest, truest level… the living presence of Christ working among us, and in us, through his sacraments.  Christ came to share in our humanity so that every one of us could become partakers of his divinity.  We are presented with this truth every time we go to Mass and the priest says at the offertory:  ‘By the mystery of this water and wine may come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity’.”

      Christ the Son of God has shared in our humanity (including the inevitable human experiences of suffering and death) by means of the Incarnation.  He rose again bodily from the dead so that His new and resurrected life might fill His Church, where and by means of which, we share in His divinity, particularly through the Sacraments and most particularly through the Eucharist.  This eating of His Flesh and drinking of His Blood is food that does not change into us but rather changes us – ever more deeply uniting us in the Church, Christ’s mystical Body, and ever more deeply giving us a share in His divine life.