20^th Sunday, Year B, 2006

Sometimes good things come out of the mouths of bad people, even though they don’t seem to realize it. In this Gospel, some wicked Jews made a sarcastic comment about what Jesus said: "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?"–a snide remark, bad in intention, but one that could also be taken in a good light. Our Lord never directly addressed their snippy question, most probably because of their bad faith. Taken from another point of view, however, it’s a legitimate question. Someone of honorable intention might also wonder about the how: how would the Lord turn His flesh into food that could be assimilated and His blood into drink that could be consumed? A wrong solution to that how would be repugnant to human nature. So then, if not in an abhorrent way, how would Jesus make this mysterious repast possible?

Now this was surely a great moment of testing for the apostles and the others listening to Jesus. Without telling them in advance how He would make His flesh their food, He first wanted to test whether or not they would trust that He could do this thing, no matter how. The reaction of the Jews and of the apostles will be read as next Sunday’s Gospel. But it’s clear that our Lord was first probing their faith in Him.

As I mentioned in my sermon last weekend, it was only at the Last Supper that the question of how would be made clear. Imagine the apostles at the first Holy Eucharist when, seemingly without further preparation, they witnessed Jesus take bread into His hands and, by the sheer power of His words, change it into His body! They must have said to themselves, ‘Now I see! This is how He had meant to give us His flesh and blood: by using ordinary comestibles of food and drink, and changing into His body and blood!’

We are well acquainted with the doctrine of the Church which instructs us that the Holy Eucharist is the Real Presence of Jesus Christ. This may seem ‘old hat,’ but there’s an aspect of this teaching that may not be so clear. The Holy Eucharist is indeed a great mystery–in fact, the mystery above all others–the mystery that Jesus Christ is really there in the Holy Eucharist: body, blood, soul and divinity under what looks, tastes and feels like bread and wine. The difficult comes when some people, in attempting to explain how Jesus is present in the Holy Sacrament, say (rightly) that He is present sacramentally. Recourse to that word ‘sacramentally’ is made so as to avoid a cannibalistic sense of eating the Holy Eucharist. However, in doing this, I fear that they are in danger of missing altogether the fundamental truth of the Real Presence. Rightly understood, to say that Jesus is present sacramentally means that His flesh and blood are present under the disguises of bread and wine. But this added word should not detract from the realness of the physical components of His real human body and blood which are contained in the Holy Sacrament.

Unless this is fully asserted, we would be speaking of the real presence only in some spiritualized or symbolical sense, in which case the body of Jesus in the Eucharist would not be identical to the body Jesus took from the Virgin Mary. The hiddenness of our Lord’s physicality in the Eucharist is something like the hiddenness of our souls in our bodies: we can’t see it.

When today so many people are handling the Eucharist, I’m afraid that the appearances of bread and wine (which mask the physical, spiritual and divine reality they contain) are so emphasized that people’s attention is diverted from the reality of what they are holding. This, I believe, is the root cause of the loss of faith for many in the Real Presence. The more the bread-ness or the wine-ness of the Eucharist is highlighted, the more obscure it’s metaphysical reality becomes. In liturgical practices nowadays there’s a great emphasis on enhancing the Eucharistic appearances (for example, in making the hosts larger, or using whole wheat flour, or making a tastier host or a more delectable wine, or on touching the Eucharistic elements): all these sensual things increasing in proportion to a loss of the perception of the reality that these things conceal. What needs emphasis is the truth that Jesus Christ is concealed in the host and the chalice, and not how much Holy Communion resembles the ordinary bread and wine we may have on our dinner tables.

Real Presence! A hackneyed expression perhaps, but one that needs a lot of stress and explanation in our time.

I would like to close here with a corroborating word on the reality of this true Presence in the words of today’s Holy Gospel: "I am," Jesus says, "the living bread that came down from heaven; the one who feeds on me will have life because of me." Living Bread! Bread that’s alive! There’s no mistaking that for a lifeless symbol!