PaddlingPadre

As we read this famous passage from John’s gospel, we can see that the crowd wrestling with how to respond to these striking words of Jesus. For context, we must remember that the people have sought out Jesus with great eagerness. They were there, if we recall the first part of this chapter, when Jesus had multiplied the loaves and the bread, and they had followed after him when he had gone back across the sea. But, tragically, the more they hear from Jesus, the plainer he is about who is and what is his mission, the more the crowd hesitates, and begins to push back; you can almost feel them becoming more anxious.

For the crowd, it seems, is happy to follow a Jesus who will give them bread and fish in steady supply, and it is even happier to follow a Jesus who will give them life-giving bread, so that those who eat of it need never hunger again. But then Jesus, seizing on their enthusiasm, invites his hearers to enter more deeply into the mystery of God’s providence, and with a striking degree of clarity and forthrightness, he lays it out plainly: “I am the bread of life that comes down from Heaven,” “I can raise you up on the last day,” “I am from the Father.”

Jesus says these things and he repeats these things, making plain, or as plain as such a thing can be, who he is and where he has come from, and the crowd… the crowd doesn’t quite know how to respond. They vacillate, weighing this invitation to faith, teetering on the edge of discipleship.

Their predicament is not, I think, so unfamiliar to us. Even today, in our ever more secularized culture, one will only rarely encounter a person who really dislikes Jesus, or who outright rejects him. Instead, among those who seemingly reject his divinity or his teachings or his Church, we often see an effort to redefine Jesus in more favorable terms. And so Jesus becomes a mere moral teacher who basically just taught that we all ought to be nice to each other. Or else he becomes a mere prophet as the Muslims believe, or else a kind of holy guru who taught one pathway to God among others. Or, even among believers, we can be tempted to seek after the things that Jesus promises: eternal life, consolation in suffering, ultimate purpose, etc., all while keeping the actual Jesus safely at arm’s length, contenting ourselves with reassuring affirmations that we are basically good people and that that is all that Jesus really asks of us.

But in all of this, from the atheist who improbably makes of Jesus a moral teacher who made no claims to divinity, to ourselves whenever we paradoxically want the things that Jesus promises without Jesus himself, we see the same thread: we will happily receive Jesus according to our own terms and our own conditions, but when it comes to receiving Jesus as he actually offers himself to us…that is a different proposition.

And this is why the crowd is vacillating, on the edge of accepting Jesus and rejecting him. They seen the things he has done, they have heard the promise of eternal life, and yet, is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph? Has he really come down from heaven? Let him be a prophet, that we can accept, but more than a prophet? Let him call upon God as Moses did, and let mana rain down from Heaven, but for he himself to be that mana? This puts the crowd in a difficult state. It is not just that what Jesus is saying stretches their imaginations with respect to what they thought possible, but more importantly it is that there is now before them an existential question. Jesus, in speaking as he has, is making clear that the only way to attain these things that he has promised, eternal life, the bread of heaven, knowledge of the Father, the only way to these things is to embrace him, to accept and receive him. The crowd must either give themselves totally to Jesus, or else, in spite of everything, in spite of their undeniable attraction towards him, they must reject him. In speaking to them as he has, Jesus has destroyed that illusion, which was only ever an illusion, that he could be had on any other terms but his.

And as for the crowd, so too for us. The only way that we can have Jesus, the only access that we can have to the Father, the only assurance that we can have of eternal life, is take Jesus on his terms, to receive him as he offers himself to us. And how does he offer himself? In the Blessed Sacrament of the Eucharist, the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar, a fact which we celebrate most especially on today’s feast.

And what is the significance of this? It means eating his flesh and drinking his blood, but it means far more than this. Indeed, if we think that it is enough to simply eat and drink of the sacrament in a frivolous manner, then as St. Paul says we are eating and drinking judgement on ourselves. No, the eucharist makes demands on us. The sacrament is no mere symbol, but neither are the sacramental signs of bread and wine idly chosen: we consume Christ, we take him into ourselves, we incorporate him into our very being. We must be totally vulnerable to him, as he is to us, and must allow ourselves to be transformed by him. Our sins and our attachments to sin must be put aside. In a word, we must be holy, as the One whom we receive is holy, and that holiness cannot be had on our own timid terms.

It is a marvelous thing, that God should come to us in this way, indeed it is the most marvelous thing. And so as He has come to us, let us also go to Him, receiving Him as He offers Himself: as the living bread that came down from heaven, his flesh for the life of the world.