.jpg)
The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying,
“How can this man give us his Flesh to eat?”
The Judean crowds were relatively content when the conversation was about bread and seemed to be purely metaphorical and spiritual language. The shift to talk of consuming Flesh and Blood came as a shock. How could someone give them his Flesh to eat? Moreover, even if he somehow could do so, why would he? It seemed too graphic and grotesque without any benefit they could imagine.
“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.
Jesus did not correct the crowds as though they misunderstood him. Rather, he leaned further into the challenging aspect of his message. Yet although he did not explain the how, for his identity itself provided that explanation, he did explain the why.
Whoever eats my Flesh and drinks my Blood
has eternal life,
and I will raise him on the last day.
Jesus desired to bestow upon the human race the fruit of the Tree of Life that was meant to be ours in the Garden of Eden but that was forfeited by our first parents. He now intended to be himself the source of that life for us. He alone was so entirely available to his Father's will, so entirely at one with the life he received from the Father, that he was able to give it away in the form of his own Flesh and Blood. This was what he offered the Father on the cross. And it is the fruit of that same eternal offering that we are able to receive in Holy Communion.
Just as the living Father sent me
and I have life because of the Father,
so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me.
There is an analogy between the way Jesus was himself fed by doing the will of his Father and the way in which we are called to feed on his own Flesh and Blood. It is, on the part of the giver, a relationship of complete generosity, of total outpouring. And on the recipient it is meant to be a relationship of absolute dependence, which, in human lives, manifests as obedience. There was no physical aspect to the Father. But we may still imagine the way in which he was bread for Jesus was no less real than the way that Jesus is bread for us. And if that is true it must also mean that we have only scratched the surface of the power that Jesus gift of himself can have in our lives.
For my Flesh is true food,
and my Blood is true drink.
It was a difficult teaching. But the difficulty arose more from a matter of why it should be so than that it could. We may experience distaste with the physicality involved, just as we probably also do when some of the cures of Jesus involved dirt and spit and other earthly elements. There is something of the incarnation itself that seems to our frail and fragile human egos to be inappropriate to God. We seem to wish that we ourselves were entirely angelic and spiritual and are disappointed to see God stoop into the realm of the material and the physical, as though he is tainted thereby. But God said at the beginning that this world that he made was good, very good. And now, in the gift of the Eucharist, he demonstrated the degree to which he meant that initial declaration. Even if we have given up on this project of creation and are waiting for something different and something better God himself has not abandoned it, but has begun the process of renewing it, and has set the day when, along with those firstfruits who are in Christ Jesus, the whole universe will be renewed.
He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him,
"Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?"
He said, "Who are you, sir?"
The reply came, "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.
Like Saul our own ability to perceive the hidden presence of Jesus starts at zero and grows only by the gift of the Holy Spirit. We begin in blindness but he sends us his messengers to draw us into an awareness of his presence. This is what we need to receive, the gift to which we want to open ourselves as much as we are able. We see in the life of Saul that recognizing Jesus is not a matter of the Eucharist alone, but that it must include all the modes of his presence, including his presence in those whom Saul was persecuting. So then, if we ourselves have reached a plateau with our own experience of Jesus in the Eucharist, we might ask ourselves, where else is Jesus present that we are failing to notice? Is he lying sick and begging at our door? Or if we see him readily in that form what about in the Scriptures? Does his word have a special place in our daily lives? All of these other modes of presence are meant to culminate in the Eucharist gift so we do well to pay attention to all of them.
"Saul, my brother, the Lord has sent me,
Jesus who appeared to you on the way by which you came,
that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit."
Immediately things like scales fell from his eyes
and he regained his sight.
He got up and was baptized,
and when he had eaten, he recovered his strength.
No comments:
Post a Comment