Rest and Good Food

Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
    Doing the will of God can sometimes be tiring.  Elijah, in our first reading, feels fatigued, even enough to die.  Why he feels this way comes from the chapter before the one we heard today.  Elijah had just challenged the prophets of the false god, Baal, to a test on Mount Carmel, and they lost, and he slew the prophets of Baal.  King Ahab and his wife, Queen Jezebel, were none too thrilled, since they worshipped Baal, so Elijah had to run away.  In fact, Queen Jezebel had said, “‘May the gods do thus to me and more, if by this time tomorrow I have not done with your life what was done to each of [the prophets of Baal].’”  So Elijah is tired from running, and from running for his life while the king and queen of Israel try to capture him to kill him.  

    And it is here, underneath the broom tree, that an angel instructs Elijah to eat from a hearth cake.  Elijah eats, regains his strength, and then walks for 40 days and 40 nights to Horeb, which was another name for Mount Sinai.  This food must have been pretty good stuff to have him go from wanting to die and napping to walking for over a month.
    God knows we need rest.  He knows that we go through some awful things sometimes.  Even when we’re doing His will, we can get tired, especially when not everyone wants us to follow God’s will.  So what does God do?  He gives us the Mass as our time of rest.
    Now, I’m not advocating that you all fall asleep right now, and for those of you who already fell asleep because of the dullness of this homily, wake up!  But God gives us a day of rest, which for the Jews was Saturday, but which Christians almost immediately transferred to Sunday, so that we can regain our strength.  He Himself teaches us, as Jesus quotes in the Gospel today.  And He gives us the Body of Christ, under the appearance of bread, to satisfy us to go as long as we need to throughout the following six days, until we reach our next day of rest on the following Sunday.
    I think most people know they need rest, at least deep down in their heart, but how often people find excuses not to rest.  They will fill their Sundays with all sorts of other things, things which wear them out and make them more tired, but they won’t spend around one hour at Mass and they won’t take the rest of the day to just take it easy with family or friends.
    Mass is supposed to be restful.  It’s not meant to be frenetic and boisterous.  This doesn’t mean that Mass should put us to sleep.  But it is meant to be restful.  We rest intellectually when a church looks like a church.  We may not think about it much, but our minds constantly seek to understand the world around us.  They are constantly taking in pieces of information to help us interact with reality.  When everything makes sense, our minds are at ease; when something is off or not the way it’s supposed to be, our minds tend to focus on that.  So with this beautiful church, part of the draw is not just that there are expensive things, but that our minds understand that this place leads us to the worship of God and draws us out of the fallen world towards the heavenly Jerusalem by the precious materials and its orientation towards where God rests, in the tabernacle.  When a church looks like a church, no matter how ornate or simple it might be, it helps our minds to rest.
    God also teaches us in the Mass as we hear His word proclaimed to us and hear it explained in the homily.  Sometimes the Bible does not come so easily to us, because it is complex and God has inspired it to sustain us until Christ returns.  So it applies to AD 400, and AD 2024.  Sometimes it gives us historical facts, sometimes it gives us poetry, sometimes it gives us analogy, sometimes it gives us apocalyptic literature.  Some we can easily understand passages, sometimes we need help understanding what God is saying.  But there is a rest that comes from listening to good stories.  I remember in third grade that, right after recess, my teacher would read to our class a chapter of a small book, and that helped quiet our bodies and our minds down after the frenzied pace of recess.  Or think of a parent reading a bedtime story to kids as they try to get them to fall asleep.  Hearing helps us rest, and hearing the inspired Word of God gives rest to our souls.

    Lastly, God gives us Himself as food, which strengthens us.  The Eucharist is the source of our strength to live as Catholics in a world that increasingly opposes Catholicism and the teachings of Jesus.  The Eucharist is to Catholics what spinach is to Popeye.  Without it, we cannot be the people God wants us to be.  But how often do people skip Mass because there’s a sports tournament, or because they’re up north, or simply because they were out too late on Saturday night?  People bemoan that there are youth sports played on Sundays, but then they take their kids to the games and tournaments anyway.  If you want Sunday sports for young people to stop, stop taking your kids.  Let your coach know that you don’t participate in games on Sundays.  If enough people do it, they will stop having games.  Sandy Koufax, a Jewish pitcher who played for the Brooklyn, and then Los Angeles Dodgers, refused to pitch even in game one of the World Series because it was Yom Kippur.  
    We need rest, and God has given us a day of rest, where we can rest with Him in a place that helps our mind to rest and worship, while hearing the truth given to us through the Scriptures, and being sustained by the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist.  Don’t skip your rest.  You will need it for the road that God will lay out for you over the next six days!

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.