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.

A Godly Diet

Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

There are all sorts of diets these days: Atkins, South Beach, Paleo, No Carb, and the list goes on and on.  The different types of food you eat are supposed to help you either lose weight or maybe grow muscle mass, or help with a particular health goal.  Growing up watching cartoons, I was very familiar with the Popeye diet, where, if you wanted to grow strong, you downed a can of spinach.  I didn’t know what spinach was (we never really ate it at my house), but it seemed to work well for Popeye.  I have had spinach in salads and Greek food since, and it’s pretty tasty, but I can’t say that I have become as strong as Popeye when I eat it.

Our first reading, psalm response, and Gospel reading all have to do with eating.  So if you’re getting hungry, that’s understandable.  In the first reading, an angel tells Elijah to eat, or else “the journey will be too long!”  And our psalm and Gospel both speak about tasting the Lord.  The Psalm says that we are to taste and see the goodness of the Lord.  And Jesus in the Gospel talks about Himself as the Bread of Life, and if we eat of Him we will live for ever.  

We need the Eucharist.  It is our spiritual diet that gives us strength to live as Christians.  Vatican II called the Eucharist the source and summit of our Christian life: the fount from which we gain all of our strength to follow Jesus, and the goal of our life, because heaven in the wedding banquet of the Lamb of God.  We tend to talk about the Eucharist as food for our Christian journey with people who are dying, as we give them Viaticum, which literally means “on the way with you,” but in our daily lives, even when we are not dying, we need Jesus to be with us on our way to Him.  

The Eucharist is our spiritual life, because it is the life of God, the true flesh and true blood of Jesus.  We taste the goodness of God by tasting His Body and Blood in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist.  And yet, from the very beginning, we have also protected the Eucharist and required preparation for it, since it is not any everyday food.  St. Justin Martyr, in the early second century, spoke about how the Eucharist was only for those who were baptized and believed what the Church taught.  It wasn’t for everyone.  And to this day, we still hold that, unless one is Catholic, one cannot receive the Eucharist in a Catholic church (with very few exceptions).  Those who are not Catholics, even if they believe in Jesus, cannot partake of Holy Communion with us, because they don’t have communion with us, and we are never closer to each other in the Body of Christ than we are in the Eucharist.  

But even beyond that, sometimes even Catholics lose communion with Jesus and with the Church through grave or mortal sins, sins that separate us from the saving grace of God given to us in baptism.  And so the Church requires us to have that communion restored, to be healed of our grave or mortal sins before we present ourselves for Holy Communion, for, how can we have communion with Jesus in Holy Communion if we have separated ourselves from Him through sin?  Now perhaps you are thinking to yourself, “Well, I’m not aware of any grave or mortal sins, nor have I been in some time, so you’re losing me, Father.”  Praise God that you have been sustained in grace.  But others may struggle more, and, as a good shepherd, I need to warn the sheep about pitfalls.  If we have skipped Mass through laziness, if we are guilty of adultery or fornication, if we have taken God’s Name in vain, or any other grave sin, then we need to go to confession first before we present ourselves for Holy Communion.  Otherwise, our unworthy reception of the Eucharist does not help us on our way, but becomes another obstacle to having God’s grace and life within us through the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ.

But beyond what we shouldn’t do, what does the Eucharist do for us?  If it is the food for our Christian journey, how does it give us strength?  For one, the Eucharist unites us to Christ more closely than we could ever be with anyone else on earth.  We often think of marriage as the greatest exchange of love between two persons, but infinitely greater than that is receiving the Eucharist, because we receive the love of Jesus which was made manifest for us when He died on the cross for you.  If no one else existed on earth, Jesus would have still died for you; that’s how much he loves you, and that love is consumed when receive the Eucharist worthily.

A second effect is that our venial sins, the small ways that we have said no to God, are wiped clean.  All those little things that we do, and we know what they are, that are not what we should be doing as followers of Jesus, those things are washed clean in our souls.  The Eucharist is a great way to find forgiveness for our small sins (not our mortal or big sins, but our small ones).  

A third effect is that we get to taste heaven.  We often talk about being so close to something that we can almost taste it.  In the Eucharist, we can taste heaven, because we receive Jesus who is in heaven.  When we receive the Eucharist, heaven exists within us, and the more that we live the life of heaven here on earth, the more we’ll be ready for it for ever at the end of our lives.  The more we practice for heaven, the more we’ll be ready for it at game time.  Through the Eucharist, the veil that separates heaven from earth is pulled back, and Jesus gives us Himself so that we can experience it in a small way.  What a great blessing the Eucharist is for us!  There is nothing more valuable on earth, because nothing is more valuable than Christ, and the Eucharist is His Body and Blood.

I want to leave you today with a beautiful prayer written by St. Thomas Aquinas for the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, the Body and Blood of Christ.  I invite you to learn this prayer, and perhaps make it a part of your preparation prayers before Mass begins.

O Sacred Banquet, in which Christ is received, the memory of his Passion is recalled, the soul is filled with grace, and the pledge of future glory is given us.  Amen.