Food of the Covenant

Fourth Sunday in Lent

    In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.  Amen.  Growing up I never liked cooked broccoli.  I would eat raw broccoli, like on a vegetable platter, but for some reason the smell or look of cooked broccoli just didn’t do it for me.  At some point in seminary, there was a formal dinner with cooked broccoli.  I didn’t want to pull a George Bush, but I also didn’t want to leave food on my plate.  So I took a bite.  It was actually good.  Granted, it was dripping with butter, but it was really good.  Since then, I have been able to eat cooked broccoli, (as long as it doesn’t have melted cheese on it).
    Today’s Gospel, the multiplication of the loaves, points to the Eucharist.  Indeed, this passage forms the beginning of John chapter 6, what we commonly refer to as the Bread of Life discourse.  Our Lord reveals that He is the Bread of Life, and that whoever eats His flesh and drinks His blood has eternal life within him.  John is known for not including the institution narrative of the Eucharist, as the three other Gospel writers did.  But the entirety of John chapter 6 provides its own magnificent exposition on the Eucharist as the flesh and blood of Christ.
    But this heavenly food, this Bread of Angels, is not for everyone.  Christ provides His Body and Blood for those who are part of the covenant, the new covenant sealed in His Blood.  The Eucharist is for the children of the Jerusalem from above, those born of the free-woman.  It is for those who have been set free by Holy Baptism from slavery to sin; those who live in the freedom of the children of God.
    But why focus on the Eucharist now?  In a few short weeks we will be celebrating the Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday, and entering into the Passion of the Lord on Good Friday, to which the Last Supper and every Eucharist points.  But, if you listened at the beginning of the Gospel passage, it said that the Passover was near, just as our celebration of Christ’s Passover is near for us.
    Every Mass celebrates what Lent prepares us for: the Passion of the Lord.  At each Mass we enter into that one Friday that allowed us to be good with God.  Each Mass we are given the opportunity to enter into the offering of Christ to His eternal Father, and celebrate in an unbloody way the very bloody sacrifice of the Savior on the altar of the cross.  
    The bread we use is offered by us, but is received by Christ and miraculously changed to be enough for all.  We don’t have much, but our Lord makes it “super-substantial” (what the Greek word in the Our Father literally means while we say “daily” bread).  He makes it–by the power of the Holy Spirit and through the ministry of a priest who acts in His Name and Person–a way that we grow in grace, a way that we have our very God inside of us.
    And just as we prepare to celebrate the Passion of the Lord, so we should prepare to receive the fruit of the Passion of the Lord which is the Eucharist.  How do we prepare?  For Lent we fast and abstain.  And so the Church asks us (tells us) that we are to abstain from all other food except water and medicine for one hour before we receive Holy Communion (unless our health requires some other sustenance).  As we give alms during Lent, so during this Mass God asks us to give of the blessings He has given us for the benefit of the Church, and for this parish particularly, to support the spreading of the Gospel right here in Flint.  Lent invites us to enter more deeply into prayer, and so, as we’re able, we should seek to pray before Mass to prepare our minds to focus on the holy things which are present before us, as the veil which separates heaven and earth is pulled back and we join with the angels and saints in worshipping the Father through the Son in the power of the Holy Spirit.  For some, especially parents of young children, praying before Mass may be very difficult or seem nearly impossible.  But even as parents seek to keep their children from crawling or running away, or walk in the back to try to calm their child down, there is the chance to offer that desire to focus on the Mass as a prayer to God, the sacrifice which is proper to parents in their vocation when the children are young and don’t understand the greatness of what takes place each Mass.

    Later in John chapter 6, our Lord teaches that unless we eat His flesh and drink His blood, we do not have life within us.  Receiving the Eucharist in a state of grace imparts to us the new life of Christ to which the Passion points.  Lent is not an end to itself.  It always points to Easter, just as the Passion always points to the Resurrection.  Christ wants us to share in His new life, which prepares us for the new life that never ends as we worship God with the angels and saints in heaven.  We usually think backwards when we think about the Eucharist, as we think of the Last Supper and the Crucifixion.  But the Eucharist also points forward to the end of time, when God will be all in all.  And so, as we receive the Eucharist in the present, we become partakers in the past, present, and future salvation accomplished by our God.  That is why we can pray with St. Thomas Aquinas:
 

O sacrum convivium!
in quo Christus sumitur:
recolitur memoria passioni eius:
mens impletur gratia:
et futurae gloriae nobis pignus datur.

Or, as one Dominican translation renders it:

O Sacred Banquet
in which Christ becomes our food,
the memory of His passion is celebrated,
the soul is filled with grace,
and a pledge of future glory is given to us.  

Let us pray:

O God,
in this wonderful sacrament
you have left us a memorial of your passion.
Help us, we beg you,
so to reverence the sacred mysteries
of your body and blood
that we may constantly feel in our lives
the effects of your redemption.
Who live and reign with the Father and the Holy Spirit,
God, for ever and ever.  Amen.

"Do you also want to leave?"

Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time

So the second week of August was not a great week for me.  It was one of those weeks, I know you’ve had them, where everything seemed to come together, but not in a good way, but in a way that kept draining me emotionally and spiritually.  I had my regular responsibilities of taking care of parishioners, which is both something that gives me joy and something that tires me out, and then my grandmother was dying (she passed away on Tuesday, 7 August), and then the news came out about Archbishop McCarrick and how he is accused of abuse of minors and engaging in homosexual relationships with seminarians and priests.  I buried my grandmother on Friday, 10 August, buried a parishioner of St. John the Evangelist in Davison on Saturday (because their church wasn’t available).  Then the weekend schedule, then continuing with my usual parish duties with a few hospital visits, and also working with the State Police trying to comfort a woman whose husband had just committed suicide and left her four children fatherless.  And then the grand jury report came out of Pennsylvania, talking about the horrific crimes perpetrated against children, some which could best be described by the word diabolical.  Let’s just say my emotional and spiritual tank were running on E.  

Bishop Mengeling, when he was still bishop of Lansing, would often say that he quit frequently, usually at the end of the day.  And I can honestly say that at points, especially as the news about Archbishop McCarrick and the priests in Pennsylvania came out, I wondered what sort of organization I was working for, and whether it was worth it.  I don’t mind all the work, and in fact I love helping others find God in difficult times, especially sickness and death when God seems so absent.  But to hear about so many brother priests who were priests in name only, who did not serve God’s people but preyed on them, that just killed my morale.

So today’s Gospel really hit home.  Jesus is finishing with what we call His Bread of Life Discourse.  He has told the people that unless they eat His flesh and drink His blood, they do not have life within them.  He has told them that what He is giving them is even more precious than the manna that God gave them in the desert.  And what do His disciples, those who followed Jesus, do?  “‘This saying is hard; who can accept it?’”  And they mostly leave.

What’s interesting is that Jesus doesn’t stop them; He doesn’t run after them to say that they misunderstood, that they were thinking about eating human flesh, when He was talking about the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist under the appearance of bread and wine.  He doesn’t even expand His teaching where He is.  If it were a numbers game, Jesus was not doing what He should have to keep His attendance high.  All Jesus does is ask the Twelve, the Apostles, “‘Do you also want to leave?’”  And honestly, in the midst of my fatigue, my lack of energy, my disgust at people who betrayed Jesus and misused the sacred office entrusted to them by Jesus, I felt like Jesus asked me, “Do you also want to leave?”  

There are a million reasons to leave the Church.  In heaven she is the immaculate bride of Christ, but on earth, she is made up of sinful members, sometimes very sinful members.  And I don’t have to look beyond myself to find a sinner in the Church.  There are myriad historical examples of the Church not doing what she should have, even if we take off our modern way of thinking, which would have been very odd to those who lived centuries and a millennium before us.  We’ve had popes, bishops, and priests who fathered children why claiming to live a chaste life; we’ve had lay people in public office who claimed to be doing the will of God even while they were anything but godly in their governance; we’ve been on the wrong side of history more times than we’d like to admit.  Sometimes pastors make decisions that we don’t like, that we think are bad decisions.

But while there are a million reasons to leave the Church, there’s only one real reason to stay: Jesus.  If Jesus really is God, and if the Church is really the Mystical Body of Christ, then even when the Church on earth messes up and does horrible things, my faith in Jesus can still remain.  If Jesus said that we need to be baptized, to be born again in order to have eternal life; if He said that unless we eat His Body and drink His Blood we do not have life within us; and if He set up His Church in such a way as to continue that power to make His Passion, Death, Resurrection, and Ascension–His Paschal Mystery–present for us through bishops and priests, then even when some whom He has chosen as priests act in a polar opposite way than Jesus, it does not shake my faith in Jesus and His Mystical Body.  It may break my heart, first and foremost for the victims who suffered so horribly, and then for an institution that I love which is going through a very painful purification from its sinful members.  But it doesn’t make me leave, because my faith was never in those individuals, but it was in Jesus.  They were supposed to lead me to Jesus and act in His name, but they weren’t Jesus Christ Himself.  

In the midst of this trial, Jesus asks us, “‘Do you also want to leave?’”  And you’ll have to decide how you will respond.  Maybe you want to leave because of the horrendous news over the past few weeks.  Maybe you don’t like the new Mass schedule.  Maybe you have a different reason that makes you want to leave the parish or the Church.  But to that question from Jesus, asking if I want to leave, I have to make my own the words of Simon Peter and Joshua: Master, to whom shall I go?  You have the words of eternal life.  I have come to believe and am convinced that you are the Holy One of God.  As for me, I will serve you, Lord.