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.
We have physical life because we were conceived by our mothers at a particular moment in the history of creation. But although this depended on our parents it also depended on God. And our existence continues to depend on God in an ongoing way that is not competitive with creation. Not just because without providence any number of catastrophes might occur but because we even need him to sustain existence and prevent creation from falling back into nonbeing. We celebrate the creation of this good world by God and our own being born into the world with thanksgiving. But when we remember the degree to which we depend on him in an ongoing way we recognize how much we depend on him and also how close he must be to all of us as he sustains all things.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood
has eternal life,
and I will raise him on the last day.
We have physical life when we are conceived in this world. We begin to live a supernatural and spiritual life when we are born from above by water and Spirit in our baptism. Physical food is required to sustain us in this life day to day. When we remember that without God nothing would continue to exist we can remember that this food is always a sign of God's presence and love. Remembering that he is the source even of natural gifts is how we begin to partake of the feast being prepared by divine wisdom. But just as we need to depend on God and be receptive of his continued blessings in the natural order, so too the spiritual. Just as we need physical bread to continue to survive in the world so too do we need the spiritual nourishment he wishes to give us in the Eucharist. Just as the world would fall back into nothing without God, just as we would eventually collapse without food, so too is the gift of the flesh and blood of Jesus meant to be the source of our spiritual life.
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.
By sustaining the world in being God is present, active, and powerful in every part of creation. Because he does it he may be said to be closer to us than we are to ourselves. But in the Eucharist he reveals the desire to be still closer to us and more essential in our lives. What we begin to intuit about him from his ongoing nourishing of the world becomes truly apparent only when we see that the whole work is really only a backdrop for this unsurpassable gift of himself to us. He grounded us in existence with his power and love. But it is literally by the gift of God himself and not merely a creative act that he fills us with the life of the Spirit.
Creation is a very good thing, as God himself said. But we are made for more than just enjoying his creation. We are made for a union with him that is so profound that analogy beside food and drink would suffice. Only this conveys some sense of the greatness of the gift and its ongoing necessity in our lives. In his condescension to be our food we see the lengths to which love will go to be the foundation of our lives.
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.
Creation depends on God in an ongoing way. But this is only the vaguest shadow of the way the Son receives everything that he is from the Father. Because he is eternally begotten of the Father, merely to do the Father's will constitutes for Jesus "food of which you do not know" (see John 4:32). So we may say that Jesus wants to be for us what the Father is for him, sharing with us all that he himself has first received from him.
The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying,
"How can this man give us his flesh to eat?"
It is true that a mere man could never do this and would be crazy to make such a claim. But since Jesus was the one that came down from heaven, both God and man, he was able to do just this. The possibility of a human to become a gift to others is a real and wonderful thing. But the way in which Jesus himself chose to become his Father's gift to us is incomparable. We can respond to this gift by not losing ourselves in pursuing natural goods in the wrong way but instead remembering and celebrating the new feast of divine wisdom offered to us by Jesus himself.
And do not get drunk on wine, in which lies debauchery,
but be filled with the Spirit
No comments:
Post a Comment