IC
“No one can come to me
unless the Father...draw him...”
So often we think of religion
as a movement of our wills to the will of God–of our going out to meet God. And
surely this is right. God is there, the object of our longing, the
satisfaction of our desire. Bot our Lord, in the
words I just quoted, speaks of the meeting of God and humanity from the ‘other
side’, of God’s movement towards us. From His perspective, faith is a
gift He gives–or does not give. The Father draws some people to Christ, but not
all. That means that in those who have been given the gift of faith, there is an attractiveness about Jesus, a magnetism
that pulls us, making us want to possess Him. Christianity then is not
something only for the mind. Christ is indeed Truth, as He has said, but He is
also our Bread. Speaking of Himself as food, is a way of making us understand
that just as we have a hunger that food alone can satisfy, so we have also a
spiritual hunger, a desire that only Christ can satisfy.
Now, taken at this level
alone, it might seem that Christ is–like His Father–pure spirit only. The Jews
of this Gospel did believe in God. What they could not believe / was
that God is the Jesus speaking to them, fulfilling the prophecy: “They shall
all be taught by God”. He is the one who ‘came down from heaven.’ But,
as if that were not enough of a problem for them, He challenges the Jews even
more, as if to say: not only am I God come down from
heaven, but also I am a bread to be eaten. Now, that might have been taken as
merely a manner of speaking, and not a reality–in other words they might have
understood that Jesus is like bread, meaning only that He gives life, or
that He is like the food He keeps us alive. But–notice–He adds the qualifying
word: I am “living bread”–not like the ordinary food you eat that is a
thing, a neuter; but that He is a bread that is alive!
Here it is no longer possible to mistake the fact that He means to say that He
can be consumed as bread, that is, by eating, and that, as a consequence, the
one eating would ‘live’–and obviously ‘live’ in a certain sense, a higher
sense, than the way they had been alive already. Now, if it took a movement
from God the Father to draw a believer to accept that this man Jesus is God,
then it certainly takes a movement from God to cause one to believe that Jesus
is Bread. In the Gospel reading for the next two Sundays, we will hear of the
reaction of the Jews to this very thing–and we will comment on this at that
time.
But, for the moment, our
focus is on the attraction of Jesus as the Living Bread that comes down
from heaven. On this subject, the Imitation of Christ has much to say.
The whole heart of a devout Christian should “burn and melt for joy” in
Christ’s presence. And this presence of Christ is not something remote, but is
here in the Holy Sacrament, in the Eucharist where He hides the otherwise
unbearable splendor of His glory and majesty. It is only by being accommodated
to our size, to our fear of Him, that He assumes the form of Communion. When we
will see Him face to face in heaven, we will no longer need the Sacrament: we
will behold Him without the covering of the appearance of bread. The Holy
Eucharist always points towards heaven because every experience we have on
earth of what is good, delightful or consoling is limited in scope and
duration. We can’t ever be at rest here, never content in any created thing–but
in God alone. This possession of God is not fully possible in this mortal life.
And so, we have to cultivate patience, and submit all our desires to God. The
saints have already arrived at this destination. But until that moment will
come for us, we are given two gifts: the Sacred Scriptures and the Blessed
Sacrament. The one thing guides our steps, because God’s word is truth. The
other, the Sacrament, is the refreshment of soul and body, giving strength to
us in our weakness. Without these two we can’t live well. The Imitation calls
them two “tables”: with the table of Jesus’ teaching we know God and what we
must do; with the table of the Eucharist we feast upon the most holy body and
blood of Jesus Christ which is to say, the anticipation of heaven.
The final part of this 11th
chapter of Book Four concerns priests and how holy honorable an office it is since
the Holy Eucharist is a priest’s very occupation. But what is said of priests
there, applies in a measure to all who can receive Holy Communion. How pure
should be the lips, how holy the body, how spotless the hearts of those into
which the Author of all purity enters! Holy Communion is for the holy,
and Holy Communion produces the holiness that alone is worthy of God.
The Blessed Sacrament then should makes us lament our sins and desire
henceforth to serve Christ with a greater devotion, a greater humility and with
good will.