After the miraculous
feeding of the Five Thousand in John’s Gospel, Jesus proceeds with a long
Eucharistic discourse on the Bread of Life, which reaches its climax in this
morning’s passage.
Those who eat the Body and Blood of Christ abide in Him and He
in us: to abide, to remain, there is something comfortable and comforting about
its permanence. We sing the hymn ‘Abide with me’ which expresses the hope that
this might happen, the longing to be close to Christ.
Christ
gives himself to us so we may have life in this world and the next – it is a
tremendous thing to say, and a troubling one. Jesus is speaking in the
synagogue in Capernaum to Jews for whom the consumption of human flesh and
blood is anathema – it is unacceptable, and unthinkable. What Jesus is
promising goes against everything which they know and understand about their
faith. He calls them to do the unthinkable.
Thus,
is it hardly surprising that His disciples reply, ‘This teaching is difficult,
who can accept it’. That is a normal reaction. But it is not one which Jesus
will leave unchallenged. As he is the living bread which came down from Heaven
so He will go back. After His death and Resurrection, He will ascend to the
Father. Our being fed with the Lord’s Body and Blood is important, and what It
is is clearly linked with who He is: God, born for us, who gives himself for
us. It is linked to the proclamation of the Gospel, the Good News – the words
are Spirit and Life – and God gives himself so that His Church may be nourished
by Word and Sacrament.
It
is sad to think that even then ‘many of his disciples turned back and no longer
went about with him.’ Jesus had said something difficult, something troubling,
something which turned the accepted order on it its head. People were unable or
unwilling to accept what Jesus asked of them, and so He turns to his disciples
and asks them if they want to go away too. Peter the leader of the disciples is
the first one to reply: ‘Lord to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal
life. We have come to believe that you are the Holy One of God.’ Who can offer
what Jesus Christ does? Life, freedom, the Love of God. He has the words of
eternal life, and the disciples have come to know that he is the Messiah. His
words are our words, his confession of faith is ours so that we too can have
that same closeness to Jesus that the disciples did.
We
come so that we may hear the words of eternal life, the Good News of Jesus
Christ, and so that we may be fed by Him, and fed with Him, with the Body and
Blood of Christ, so that we can live forever because of Him. We can have a foretaste
of the Heavenly banquet of the Kingdom, here and now, we can be fed with Jesus so
that we can be transformed more and more into His likeness and prepared, here and
now, for eternal life with God, and that we start living that life here and now,
so that our faith is not a personal or a private matter but one which affects who
and what we are, and how we live our lives, so that our faith affects who and what
we are, and what we do, so that the Eucharist is our bread for the journey of faith,
so that strengthened by Christ and with Christ, we may live lives which proclaim
the Good News of the Kingdom. This is how are supposed to live together as a
Christian community, living in love, fed with love itself, here in the
Eucharist, where we thank God for His love of us. As children of God, loved by
God, we are to imitate him, we are to live after the pattern of Christ, who offered
himself, who was a sacrifice who has restored our relationship with God. It is
this sacrifice, the sacrifice of Calvary, which has restored our relationship
with God, which will be re-presented, made present here today, that we can
touch and taste, that we can know how much God loves us; that we can be strengthened
and given the hope of eternal life in Christ – that God’s grace can transform our
human nature so that we come to share in the Divine Nature forever.
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