19th. Sunday (Year B)
(1st. Kings 19:4-8; Ephesians 4:30 - 5:2; John
6:41-51)
No one can come to Me unless the
Father who sent Me draw him, and I will raise him on the last day. It is written in the prophets: ‘They shall
all be taught by God.’ Everyone who listens to My Father and learns from Him
comes to Me. Not that anyone has seen
the Father except the One who is from God; He has seen the Father. Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever believes
has eternal life.
Those words indicate to us why, today, our Christian faith
is unacceptable to many who are liberal-minded, because they speak of our
having to listen humbly to One above and beyond us, One Who is totally outside
of our supervision or control; and what is yet more objectionable, they even speak
of our responsibility before that
mysterious One, to hear Him and respond appropriately:
No one can come to Me unless the
Father who sent Me draw him; everyone who listens to My Father and learns from
Him comes to Me.
Let us therefore -- who as disciples of Jesus are fully
aware of and responsive to the sublime mystery of divine holiness and love – now
reverently and gratefully consider the great blessing all of us gathered here for
worship have already received.
For today you and I have come to Jesus, and Jesus tells us
that we have come because the Father Himself has drawn us; which means that, in
the depths of our being, each of us has heard the Father, heard Him speaking to
us personally; and, having learnt from what He said to us in those secret depths, have come, at His behest, to Jesus.
Everyone who listens
to My Father and learns from Him comes to Me.
Of course, someone could -- especially in the old days --
come to Church because of social pressures of one sort or another. Even then, it could be said that the Father
was behind it all, and that such was the one way He, in His wisdom, saw to be
the best for us at that time and in the situation we then found ourselves. In such a case, however, we would not have
fully learned from the Father, nor would we truly have come to Jesus, until we
had progressed further and attained to personal faith, as Jesus says:
Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever
believes has eternal life.
That is the first lesson for us today: coming to Church is
only fully meaningful and true in so far as we come with personal faith in, and
commitment to, Jesus as our Lord and Saviour; but, if we have come to Mother Church and to Jesus in that way, then Jesus
Himself assures us that we do have eternal life:
Whoever believes has
eternal life.
Nevertheless, that is not everything; because eternal life,
just like natural life, needs nourishment.
No normal mother and father, having given life to their child, would
leave it without nourishment, because the life they have given has to develop,
must grow. Similarly, the eternal life given
to us through faith in Jesus needs to grow, must develop, for such is the very
nature of life: it has an innate drive towards fulfilment and perfection, and the
only nourishment for such further development of eternal life within us is
indicated by the following words of Our Lord:
I am the bread of life.
What does He really mean with those words? Can we not get nourishment from Him whenever
we pray to Him, study the Scriptures or, perhaps, share in silent meditation like
certain modern Christian groups do who do not have the Eucharist?
Of course, when we do such things there is no doubt that we
do get a blessing from Him. Nevertheless,
Jesus meant something much more than that: for He spoke of eating the bread that He would give; eating in the way the
Israelites ate manna in the desert when they had to go out to collect the manna
before putting it on their plates, so to speak:
Your ancestors ate the manna in
the desert, but they died; this is the bread that comes down from heaven so that
one may eat it and not die.
Praying, reading and studying God’s word, are all most important
aspects of a living faith, and yet, Jesus quite deliberately said that even
those who come to Him with faith must also, eat His bread:
I am the bread of life. This is the bread which comes down from
heaven that one may eat it and not die. I
am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will
live forever.
So, we live by faith, and to help our faith grow and produce
its fruit we need to eat this living bread which Jesus gives. What, then, does “eating” mean here? It means chewing, consuming, because the word
He uses is the normal word for those actions; and, of course, the Israelites in
the desert did actually eat the manna:
Your ancestors ate the manna in
the desert; whoever eats this bread, will live forever.
Now, we all know that there is a difference between true eating
and just receiving food into our mouth: indeed, even taking food into our
stomach is not really eating if we do not digest it and find nourishment from
it. So it is with this Bread of Jesus:
we need to prepare before eating, so as to eat It with dispositions that will
enable us to receive nourishment from It.
What then are those dispositions?
This Jesus makes clear when He tells us that His gift of
Bread will actually be His Flesh, given up, offered, to His Father, for a most particular
purpose:
The bread that I will
give is My flesh for the life of the world.
The Eucharistic Flesh of Jesus we receive in Holy Communion
is given, He tells us, “for the life of the world”, which means, given in
sacrifice to His Father for the life of the world, to save mankind from
sin. Surely, therefore, we can now begin
to understand more clearly what should be our attitude of mind and heart as we approach
the Lord in Holy Communion.
First of all, we must approach in all humility, knowing
that we are not bestowing any favour upon Him when we draw near to receive Him,
for we need to be freed, cleansed,
by Him, from our past sins and enduring ignorance and frailty. Moreover, loving Him as yet imperfectly, we also
want and indeed need to love Him more, and so our second attitude of mind and
heart should be one of longing: longing to give ourselves, with Him to the
Father, in a spirit of loving self-sacrifice: being resolved to walk in His
ways, to carry our cross with Him to our
Calvary, seeking to carry and indeed love whatever ‘load’ the Father may choose
to put on our shoulders as true disciples of Jesus, while carefully avoiding
and firmly rejecting whatever is sinful.
Only with such dispositions can we approach and receive fruitfully Him
Who said:
I am the living bread that came
down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that
I will give is My flesh for the life of the world.
Those lessons, learnt from today’s Gospel, are confirmed by
St. Paul who told us in the second reading that we are called to:
Live in love, as Christ loved us
and gave Himself up for us, a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God. (NRSV)
That we might thus walk humbly along Christ’s way, offering
ourselves with Him in His sacrifice to the Father -- loving Him, in and together
with Jesus, in what is Jesus’ supreme expression of total love for His Father -- is precisely why the Eucharistic Food
is given us: for this Bread is given not simply to enhance our native powers such
as were required for the journey of Elijah to Mount Horeb:
The angel of the LORD came back
the second time, and touched him and said, "Arise, and eat, because the
journey is too great for you." So, he arose and ate and drank, and went in
the strength of that food forty days and forty nights as far as Horeb, the
mountain of God;
for the bread that Jesus bestows is given to enable us to
make a journey leading to the very portals of heaven: for loving Jesus, and with
Him the Father, is the closest we can possibly get to the Father on this earth,
it is the most intimate foretaste of
our promised share in eternal beatitude.
Our spiritual journey, our journey of ever deeper faith in
Jesus, was indeed faintly foreshadowed by the physical journey of Elijah to
Mount Horeb, but it was directly envisaged
and indeed made fruitful for us
by Jesus Our Lord when He spent forty days and forty nights in the desert fighting
with, and triumphing over, Satan. After
that epic conflict Satan retired temporarily while Jesus proclaimed the Good
News of the Gospel and laid the foundations of His Church. Then, apparently contesting the definitive
nature of Jesus’ previous victory, Satan once more entered the lists for an ultimate
struggle with Jesus where he pitted his dire threat of earthly suffering and
death against Jesus’ Personal power to promise and bestow eternal life. Jesus took up Satan’s gauntlet and, by rising
from the suffering and death of the Cross in the power of the Holy Spirit, He totally
destroyed the Devil’s earthly power, before finally ascending in bodily glory to
heaven, and thereby manifestly confirming the validity of His promise of
eternal life, and establishing the foundations of God’s coming Kingdom through the subsequent Gift of His most Holy Spirit
to Mother Church and, through her, to all His faithful disciples.
So, our journey in the strength of Jesus’ Eucharistic Food
is meant to lead us in the power of His Spirit to triumph over sin and
suffering in our lives, before passing -- with Jesus -- through death to our final
triumph over Satan. Thereupon, He will guide
us to the heavenly home where God the Father has prepared a festal gathering
for His Son, and where Jesus -- having prepared many rooms -- gives welcome and
rest to all who have persevered in His Name. Ultimately, He will lead all His faithful and
triumphant disciples into the glorious Presence of Him Who will embrace us as
His true children in Jesus and thereby show Himself to be the One true Father
of all, before – as the supreme source of all that is good -- inviting us to take
our place at His table where we will share in Jesus’ eternal happiness and glory.
