21^st Sunday, Year B; IC 4:13; August 24, 2003

The answer often given to Hamlet’s searching question, ‘to be, or not to be’, is that being is better than never to have been, no matter what the outcome of a man’s life may turn out to be. If there indeed are souls in eternal hellfire, we must conclude from our certainly of God’s all-good nature, that even this ultimate tragic existence is better than never to have been. Short of non-being, however, one might muse on the extreme possibilities of human misery and wonder whether life, for the unfortunate, is really worth it. Again, our Christian knowledge of merit and punishment in the next life, moves us to estimate that only eternity can gauge the success of life where the cross yields infallibly to glory.

This Gospel reading from Saint John includes a side comment by the evangelist that is surely one of the most pitiable that could be made about anyone. I quote it: “As a result, many of Jesus’ disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied him.” After having set one’s feet on the path that leads to heaven–through Christ–nothing worse can befall a man than to leave the Lord. Apostasy is the name of this sin. One who has know Christ, who has been a Christian, and then abandons the way of truth for any other way has–simply–done his very worst. It is not that he might not later rediscover his abandoned faith; surely this is possible. The point is that the faith is God’s most precious gift. Our Lord says here that no one can come to Himself unless he is given a grace. To have this gift flung back in His face and to refuse to believe is a monstrous crime. One can hear the grief in Jesus’ heart as He addresses His Twelve chosen ones, the Apostles, asking them, “Do you also want to leave”? Notice the freedom that this question acknowledges: the freedom even to quit the faith.

There was a similar choice of faith that had to be made in the incident read as our first reading. Joshua made a great convocation of all the tribes of Israel and inquired of them whether or not they would serve the Lord or some false deities.‘How could they refuse God’, one might think. And yet, the first commandment is the fundamental one upon which all the others depend and which, in a way, contains all the others. The choosing of God is made possible only because God first chooses the believer. “You have no chosen me, but I have chosen you.” Once the believer responds to the gift of faith that God provides for him, he has to match it with his own act of faith: ‘I was given faith, and I therefore choose to exercise it, yielding to God my mind so that I agree to whatever decrees–even when His decrees cut deep into my personal life and require me to curb my conduct. Obedience to God–which is of the will–must follow from faith–which is of both the will and the intellect. Believing in God and doing God’s will are both necessary for one to be saved in Christ.

“Lord, who will grant me to find you alone, to open my whole heart to you?” (IC 4:13). Faith is like life itself. Once it is given, it needs nourishment to keep it alive. In fact, we have the expression in the Church, a “lively faith” meaning the kind of faith that not only believes in God but that is joined to being in a state of grace. Holy Communion is the power behind a Catholic who believes all that God says. I have used the expression before that Communion is the “glue” that joins the believer to Christ. It is also God’s kind of down payment on a soul destined for heaven. The author of the Imitation gives vent to his longing when he sighs, “O my Lord and God, when shall I be wholly united to and absorbed into You, and wholly unmindful of myself–You in me, and I in you?”

Communion, for the person who is both aware of what he is receiving and in a state of grace when receiving it, is a true consolation in this valley of tears. It’s the ‘Bread that comes down from heaven’, the Panis angelicus, the angelic Bread become the bread for man (as the Latin hymn puts it). God could not have designed a more perfect thing to give us to ‘hold us over’ until heaven than Holy Communion. It’s the bread of wayfarers, of travelers on their pilgrimage. You must take Communion as the very purest food, like a medicine: not for its material flavoring of bread or wine, but for its life-producing nourishment and healthy effects. Communion can turn you into a copy of Jesus–provided you don’t resist its force through sin and neglect of your spiritual life. The way you treat your Communions, the way you come to receive Jesus at the altar tells your whole religious condition. If you want union with God, if you want sanctity, if you want heaven someday, you will come to Communion with reverence, with modesty, humility, and love–a love that may not necessarily feel anything in the emotions, but one that grasps on to Jesus with a fierce tenacity, like one who clings to his beloved protectively, with all his might.

Our Holy Communions add strength to our faith; they make us come alive, spiritually, and they prepare us for the day when we will have an uninterrupted Holy Communion and God will bestow Himself upon us unceasingly!