Peace be with you.
Friends, this weekend we come to the end of our
prayerful liturgical reflection upon John chapter 6,
this wonderful chapter in which we find John's reflection
upon the Eucharist.
Now, we had a little pause last week because
we had the Feast of the Assumption of Mary.
But we've been following the discourse of Jesus
in the Capernaum synagogue.
What I want to do is just pay a little attention first to
what we would've read last week.
And then, we'll get to this denouement,
this concluding section, which is our Gospel for today.
So we recall that Jesus had talked about himself
as the bread of life
—indeed, the bread come down from heaven.
"Unless you eat this bread, you will have no life within you."
Well, understandably, his audience balked at this.
How can this man give us his flesh to eat?
He's the bread come down from heaven?
I mean, It seemed so outrageous.
What we would've read last Sunday is Jesus' very intriguing rejoinder.
In the face of this protest, given every opportunity
to explain his words in a more metaphorical,
poetic way, Jesus instead turns up the heat.
"Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood,
you have no life within you."
"My flesh is real food."
"My blood is real drink."
I think I might've mentioned this to you before,
but the words in Greek are very interesting,
because Jesus does not say
"Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man"
using the word typically associated with the way human beings eat.
He says "trogein" in the Greek.
"Unless you gnaw on the flesh of the Son of Man"
—that's a word used to describe the way animals eat.
So they were balking at the realism of this.
And Jesus instead turned up the volume,
as he intensified his language.
For Jews of his time, even to speak of eating
an animal's flesh with blood was not only disgusting,
it was immoral.
It was explicitly forbidden
in several parts of the Old Testament,
because see, blood symbolized life,
and so you wouldn't eat the flesh of an animal with its blood.
To speak of eating his own Flesh and drinking his Blood?
I mean, it was objectionable at so many levels,
and that's why they balked.
But again, given the opportunity to soften the language, Jesus,
if you will, hardens and intensifies the language.
Now, this helps to explain our Gospel for today.
We come to the end of the discourse,
and we see what happens in the wake of it.
We hear, "Many of Jesus’ disciples who were listening said,
‘This saying is hard; who can accept it?’"
Notice, first, we're talking not about a neutral audience;
we're not talking about enemies of Jesus.
These are his disciples.
I don't mean his inner circle of Apostles,
but these were followers of his, who were obviously with him,
attending to his words.
And then, they took in this discourse,
and they heard him speaking in this indeed shocking way.
And so, even his friends say,
"This saying is hard; who can accept it?"
Again, Jesus, knowing their murmuring,
has an opportunity to say,
"Hey, look. I mean all of this symbolically."
Instead, he says, "Does this shock you?"
I sort of like that.
"Well, yeah, it does. It is shocking language."
In other words, he means it in just that way.
Here's something I've always found intriguing.
I've been involved in a number of dialogues with Protestants
over the years, and we'll come sometimes
to this very neuralgic point of how we understand the Eucharist,
because most Protestants understand the Eucharist
in a more or less symbolic way.
And again, this is a very old debate,
where Catholics hold to the Real Presence of Jesus.
And a point that I often make
(I've never really had a good answer to it)
is if Jesus meant all this in a merely symbolic way
—and he often speaks symbolically.
He refers to himself as a vine, as a good shepherd,
even comparing himself to a mother hen at one point.
Well, I mean, no one stalks away in anger when he says
those things because it's very clear he's speaking
in a metaphorical way.
Why, if he were speaking that way and the people knew it,
would they have been so shocked?
Why would they have threatened to leave?
My strong suspicion is
—and John's trying to communicate this to us—
is they knew darn well what he meant.
They knew he was speaking in a very sharply, even shockingly,
realistic way.
And that's why they were balking.
Again, he's got the opportunity to clarify things metaphorically.
But instead, he says,
"There are some of you who do not believe."
So he's not trying to make it easy for belief.
He's just observing:
there are some of you who don't believe.
This is a key standing or falling point, it seems to me.
Do you accept this teaching of Jesus or not?
It's why the Catholic Church has, from the beginning,
insisted upon the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist.
We didn't make this up.
It's not some medieval accretion.
Rather, it goes back precisely to this sixth chapter of John
and to this discourse, when Jesus insists upon
the reality of his presence.
Now, to understand how this is even possible,
can I suggest something else from our Gospel for today
is illuminating?
Jesus says, "What if you were to see the Son of Man
ascending to where he was before?
It is the spirit that gives life, while the flesh is of no avail."
Mysterious, isn't it?
Mysterious observation.
"What if you were to see the Son of Man ascending
to where he was before?"
Is he talking there about his fleshly humanity?
No.
His humanity, if you want, comes from the earth.
But in his divinity, Jesus comes from this higher realm.
Why is he able to effect what we call the Real Presence
—that is to say, the transformation of the Eucharistic elements
into his Body and Blood.
The reason, everybody, is that he's not simply a human figure.
I mean, we human figures, we can trade in metaphorical
language all the time.
I could call you together, and we'll call ourselves
the Abraham Lincoln Society.
And we can bring out a stovepipe hat and say,
"This symbolizes Lincoln."
I could read the words of the Gettysburg Address,
and we could symbolically evoke the presence of Lincoln.
Fine.
We're all capable of that.
Any human being with a little bit of cleverness can do that.
But "what if you were to see the Son of Man ascending
to where he was before?"
In other words, what if we put the stress now not
on his humanity but his divinity?
Well, then we see something, everybody.
We see that what God says, is.
Go right back to the beginning of the Bible.
God speaks, "Let there be light,"
and there was light.
"Let the dry land appear," and so it happened.
"Let animals teem upon the earth," and so it happened.
The point there is that God makes things through
his intelligible speech.
God speaks, and things happen.
His speech is not descriptive the way ours is,
but rather creative.
"As the rain and the snow come down from heaven,
and do not return without watering the earth,
so my word does not go forth from me in vain,
but rather accomplishes what it set out to do."
That's Isaiah speaking of the divine word.
Jesus, not one prophet among many, but the Incarnation of the Word.
"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God,
and the Word was God."
And that Word became flesh in Jesus,
which is why what Jesus says, is.
"My son, your sins are forgiven you."
I mean, I can say that all day to someone;
it wouldn't mean anything.
I have no power to forgive anyone's sins.
"Who does this man think he is? Only God can forgive sins."
Quite right. What Jesus says, is.
"Talitha cumi." "Little girl, get up."
And she got up, because what God says, is.
"Lazarus, come out," and he came out,
because what God says, is.
And so the night before he died, Jesus took the Passover bread.
"This is my body."
Taking the Passover cup,
"This indeed is the chalice of my blood."
I mean, I could say those words and mean them
in a purely metaphorical way.
But when Jesus says them
—because if you were to ascend where he was before,
if you knew where he came from, who he is,
not just one human figure among many,
but God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
then you'd know that what he says, is.
That's what's at stake here, everybody.
That's what's at stake here.
That's the center of this argument, this presentation.
And the people listening to him, they got what was at stake,
which is why they say, "Look, this is a hard saying."
Then we come to this.
Having taken all of this in, we hear that they all left him.
Now, I don't know about you, but it's one of the saddest lines,
I think, in the whole New Testament.
We know about Jesus' enemies opposing him,
but here his disciples, his followers,
they left in great numbers.
They couldn't abide this teaching.
Raises a question for us.
Are you with the Eucharistic Christ or not?
Do you accept this teaching or not?
It's always been a standing or falling point
in the history of the Church.
Then —and I submit to you everybody,
one of the most dramatic moments in the New Testament—
Jesus turns to the Twelve.
So a lot of the crowd, they've left him.
Now he turns to his most intimate band,
the twelve Apostles, and he says to them,
"Are you going to leave me too?"
As I say, one of the most poignant, moving,
even a little frightening lines in the New Testament.
"Are you going to leave me too over this?"
And then Peter speaks,
as he often does, for the Twelve.
Remember, in Caesarea Philippi:
"Who do people say the Son of Man is?"
"Oh, some say Moses, some say Elijah,
some say one of the prophets."
"Yeah, but who do you say I am?"
And then Peter speaks.
"You're the Messiah. You're the Son of the living God."
This is John's version of that moment, it seems to me.
We don't have that Caesarea Philippi scene in John,
but we’ve got this scene.
"Are you going to leave me too?" to the Apostles.
And it's Peter who speaks:
"Lord, to whom shall we go?
You have the words of everlasting life."
This is not just an accident.
"You have the words of everlasting life."
By those words, those eternal words,
the Eucharistic change is effected.
Peter's confessing the messiahship of Jesus, the divinity of Jesus,
and his power to effect the Eucharistic change.
Can you see, at this moment, that the Church,
it would've faded away if the Twelve and if Peter had said,
"No, Lord, that saying of yours about the Eucharist,
your body and blood, it's just too much"?
But Peter speaks. And thank God.
Now, up and down the centuries, to this day,
those who stand with Peter say the same thing,
"Lord, to whom shall we go?
You have the words of everlasting life."
Those words that transform the Eucharistic elements
into his very Body and his very Blood.
It's still, everybody, a standing and falling point.
It's still a matter of decision.
May our answer always be that of Peter:
"Lord, to whom shall we go?"
And God bless you.
Thanks so much for watching.
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