Month: August 2018

Phew, there’s a lot of mess in the Church right now.

The only answer has to be, not lay review boards, not “transparency,” not blog posts–those things might help, but they aren’t the real solution–but Peter’s words in this Sunday’s gospel: “Master, to whom shall we go?  You have the words of eternal life.” And we have to realize that, as at the end of the Bread of Life discourse in John 6, “Many of Jesus’s disciples who [are] listening [say], This saying is hard, who can accept it?” and “As a result of this, many of his disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied him.”

Having once pledged our life to Jesus is not enough.  Having been in the past “a good Catholic” (whatever that means) does not mean we will stay–in fact, the Council of Trent said it is a heresy to believe that no one falls away, and Jesus “knew from the beginning” that some who were following him at the time would later not believe, and even betray him.  The further we follow Jesus, the harder and the more mystifying it will be. We have to turn and turn again, always to accompany, not some favorite public figure or ideology or “culture” (whatever that means), but “him.”

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Our first two readings brilliantly lead us into this dynamic.  Joshua says, “If it does not please you to serve the Lord, decide today whom you will serve. . . . As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”  We need to say that every day.

The good news is that “the people answered” by looking back on all the Lord had done for them, and returning to him.  The Psalm response sums that up: “Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.” Why do we follow Jesus? Because he is good, and we have been blessed to taste and see his goodness–and all that tasting and seeing culminates in the Eucharist.

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Ephesians 5 gives us one amazing application.  (I tried to write a separate post on it, but I am on vacation with my family, and even my main Sunday post is getting finished late.)  The reading is a little subtle. We might be tempted to read the Jesus part out and make things really practical: wives are supposed to submit, husbands are supposed to lay down their lives.  Alright, but:

Something that’s been striking me recently about St. Paul is that he always talks about Jesus.  We can talk for hours about Church politics (see above, on “lay review boards,” etc.–but consider any other conversation) without ever uttering the name of Jesus, or even making oblique reference to him.  But once you pay attention to it, it’s amazing, wonderful, how Paul never says anything without talking about Jesus.

Is he talking about marriage, or about Jesus?  Of course he is talking about marriage–but his deeper point is to say, whatever you do, do it in the name of the Lord.  Relate everything to Jesus. He’s not just saying, Jesus is one nice example of what self-giving love means–now go and be self-giving.  He’s saying, whenever you think about being a husband, a wife, or anything else, think nothing but Jesus. WWJD is a bit over-simplified compared to Ephesians 5, but it’s on the right track: nothing but Jesus.  “This a great mystery: but I speak in reference to Christ and the Church.”

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And so we come to the conclusion of John 6.  Yet again, John is bringing other things into the context of the Eucharist.  In this chapter, he turns the feeding of the 5,000, (then, more subtle, a rereading of the Exodus and what it means to do God’s work and receive his help), “isn’t this the son of the carpenter?”, the Last Supper, and now Peter’s confession of faith–all things in the other three Gospels–and he spins all of them into the context of Eucharistic adoration.

There is a direction to this narrative.  The miracles proclaim his divinity, “isn’t this the son of the carpenter” proclaims the Incarnation, last week’s section focused directly on the Eucharist–and now we hear what it means to follow him.  All summed up in the Eucharist. We learn who he is, we encounter him in the Eucharist–and he says, whenever we go to Mass or adoration, “Do you also want to leave?” And so the Eucharist is our Fiat, our “Thy will be done,” our embrace of his word and his plan–and his Church, built on Peter’s profession of faith.  When we go to the Eucharist, we say, yes, Lord, I accept the Bible, I accept faith, I embrace my membership in the one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church–and I embrace the call to think about marriage, and everything else, in terms of, “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”  “As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.”

And we realize the source of all our strength, our only possibility, is in the Son of God–”We have come to believe and are convinced,” the chapter ends, “that you are the Holy One of God”–the one who ascends and descends, the one who alone unites humanity to the Father.  There is no other way.

Where are you looking for solutions outside the Eucharist?

Last week I said John’s Gospel rereads the other Gospels.  In the second part of the Bread of Life Discourse (John 6), we saw John revisiting the “Isn’t this the carpenter’s son” scene, but in a Eucharistic context.  This week, we move on from the Incarnation to the Eucharist itself.

The other three Gospels give us the Last Supper: “This is my Body.  This is my Blood.”  John skips that—we know that.  Instead, at the Last Supper, he gives the washing of the feet and then the great prayers, culminating in the prayer for unity.  He’s showing us the meaning of the Eucharist.

But here in John 6, it’s the reverse.  John knows that we already know about the Last Supper, and about the Mass.  But he wants us to dwell in it.  We have a kind of Scriptural Eucharistic Adoration, a prolonged time of gazing on the mystery we celebrate at Mass.

(Jesus said lots of things, lots of places; there’s no need for the Evangelists to make things up—but they do choose which things to present, to help us understand.)

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Mostly, he insists on the insane mystery of it.  On one side are massive statements about the consequences of the Eucharist: “Whoever eats this bread will live forever.”  “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you.”  “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood . . . I will raise him on the last day.”

Those are extraordinary claims.  Resurrection has a special force.  It’s a claim, first, about Jesus himself: to say that he can raise the dead is to assert the highest power in the universe.  And he doesn’t say, “I will ask my Father,” but “I will raise him.”

We’ll see that Jesus has higher things to give than the resurrection of the body—but the body is part of it, and it’s something that prevents us from turning everything into little metaphors.  No, he says this bread contains absolute divine power.

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But the other thing he says is that he is talking about bread.  (It’s not bread: it’s Jesus, who can raise the dead.  But he comes in the form of bread.)

There’s a progression of words for “eat.”  There’s the normal eating word, which we’ve seen a lot lately.  But then there’s another one, that we’ve also seen, like cattle.  That comes up again when he says, “My flesh is true food.”  It’s not a vague spiritual word, it’s the coarse word of the crowds gobbling barley loaves: this is eating stuff.

And then there’s the famous “trogon.”  My old Greek dictionary uses the word “craunch” (instead of “crunch”).  I don’t know where that “a” comes from, but I love it.  It’s not a spiritual word.  It says, look, it’s going to be in your mouth, and your teeth are going to hit it, and it’s going to make noise: craunch.

John emphasizes the same thing with dialogue.  “The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’  Jesus said to them, ‘Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh . . . .”  They don’t say, “Oh, what an interesting metaphor,” they’re upset.  And he doesn’t say, “oh, no, you’ve misunderstood, the eating thing is just a metaphor,” he says, “Craunch.”  This Incarnation stuff is serious.

First he says, “you’d better eat [a normal way] or you will have no life.”  Then he says craunch, craunch, craunch.  “Who crunches my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will resurrect him.  My flesh is what you eat, like you gobble barley loaves.”

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The deeper point is “eternal life” and, even deeper, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him.”  “Remain” might be John’s favorite word.  It too is a Eucharistic adoration word.  Dwell here, stay here, live with me.  “I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me [craunch] will have life because of me.”  I want to be your substance, your very life.  Discover my mystery in the Eucharist.  You don’t get life except by receiving me, in my fleshy breadiness.

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The other two readings take this crunchy earthiness back to the spiritual.  “Wisdom has . . . dressed her meat, mixed her wine. . . . Come, eat of my food, and drink of the wine I have mixed.”  The Eucharist is the wise meal, and it is the meal that gives us wisdom itself as our food, so we can live by wisdom.

And in Ephesians we read, “live not as foolish persons but as wise. . . . Do not get drunk on wine . . . but be filled with the Spirit”: let the Spirit be your wine.  And as the drunk sing, so you will be “addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and playing to the Lord in your hearts, giving thanks [eucharisting] always.”  Our drink is not earthly, but spiritual.

And yet it comes through the earthiness of the Incarnation and the Eucharist: through Christ alone.

How do you keep alive the centrality of the Incarnation and the Eucharist, of Christ and Christ alone?

We continue with the Bread of Life discourse from John 6.

In the first reading, Elijah is out of strength.  But the Lord gives him bread from heaven, and then he can walk forty days and forty nights to the mountain of God.  “Get up and eat, else the journey will be too long for you!”

But the New Testament always transforms the bodily things of the Old Testament into spiritual, or rather, moral things.  Our reading from Ephesians tells us we have been sealed with “the Holy Spirit of God” “for the day of redemption,” and therefore should put away “all bitterness, fury, anger, shouting,” etc., and “be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving . . . as God has forgiven you in Christ.”

We always say the journey is too long for us, we don’t have the strength to be like Christ.  And that’s true!  But he gives himself to us—“handed himself over for us as a sacrificial offering to God”—so that, by receiving him as our bread, we can take on his way of life.  Only because we are fed with the bread of heaven.

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John’s Gospel rearranges things to give us deeper theological perspective.  For example, in a couple weeks we will read his version of Peter’s proclamation; in the other Gospels, Peter just proclaims him Lord, but John puts it in the context of the Eucharist.

So too this week we read how John incorporates the line, “Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary?”  He puts that into the context of the Eucharist, too.  “The Jews murmured about Jesus because he said, ‘I am the bread that came down from heaven,’ and they said, ‘Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph?  Do we not know his father and mother?’”

John is attentive, first, to the Incarnation.  His Gospel begins, “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.”  So too here, first, he brings us to the clash of how he can be “son of Joseph,” member of their community, and also say, “I have come down from heaven.”  In fact, he pauses for much of our reading today, steps away from the Bread, and just talks about the Incarnation.

Jesus says a funny thing, “Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me.”  You’d expect it to be the other way around: “everyone who listens to me comes to my Father.”  But John picks which of Jesus’s words to use to emphasize his divinity.  No one comes to the Father except through him—and so the Father always draws us through Jesus.

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This is the way of the Incarnation.  Our first two readings help us understand.  On the one hand, we need to love God with a strength beyond our own, to reach to him with the Spirit of God.  Because of sin, I don’t love God all that much.  Even without sin, I could never know him the way he wants me to know him.  He wants to give us way more than our human nature can reach.  That is the work of God.

But he always gives it to us—in our way, according to our nature: that is the work of man, of Jesus Incarnate.  That’s why I corrected myself above: I call this web site “The Catholic Spiritual Life,” but a great Thomistic author says, we don’t have a spiritual life, we have a Christian life.  We can’t love God in some disembodied way, as if we were pure spirits.  That wouldn’t be us loving God, and thus it wouldn’t be true love.  So our reading from Ephesians talks about all those very practical things: not grumbling, being compassionate, etc.  There is no other way to love God.

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Ephesians talks too about Jesus becoming “a sacrificial offering to God for a fragrant aroma.”  On the one hand, Jesus teaches us—and enables us—to love God in a human way.  His sacrifice is not in the Temple but on the Cross.  It is the sacrifice of pure human love—or rather, of God loving through human flesh.  Paul stretches the language of “sacrifice” by taking that Temple language and applying it to ordinary life.

But on the other hand, Jesus also gives us a Temple activity.  He becomes bread so that we can offer him, his flesh, on the altar.  We eat that flesh, we become that flesh, we take it into our flesh and make it flesh in our ordinary lives—but we also offer that flesh on the altar as our sacrifice.  Jesus unites communion and sacrifice, God and man, worship and ordinary life, love of God and love of neighbor, bread and flesh and God.

And so he becomes “the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die. . . . And the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.”

How could your life be more Eucharistic?

Last week we heard the John 6 version of the feeding of the five thousand.  Now we begin four weeks in the all-important Bread of Life discourse.

The first two readings just give us the background.  In Exodus we have the story of “the grumbling of the Israelites,” to which God responds, “I will rain down bread from heaven for you.”  Our Psalm response (always a summary of our Prophet) says, “The Lord gave them bread from heaven.”  Jesus will tell us the “true bread from heaven.”

But in Ephesians, St. Paul says, “You should put away the old self of your former way of life, corrupted through deceitful desires, and be renewed in the spirit of your minds.”  In Ephesians, he speaks to a Greek, non-Jewish audience, so he adds, “no linger live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds.”  But he might say the same about the Israelites in Exodus: grumbling for material bread.  That is not eternal life.

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The key word in our part of the Bread of Life discourse is “signs”: “Amen, amen, I say to you” (means something important is coming) “You are looking for me not because you saw signs but because you ate the loaves and were filled.”

A sign is something that points beyond itself.  The point of miracles (the root, mira-, means look, wonder, be amazed) is not to get us a Mercedes-Benz, but to get us to think, to look beyond, and behind, the miracle.  The crowd recognizes this when they say, “What sign can you do, that we may see and believe in you?”  Funny, though, because they followed him to the wilderness because he was curing the sick, and then followed him to Capernaum because he multiplied the loaves, and they’re still looking for some miracle to testify to who he is.  (Our translation says, “believe in you,” but it might be better to say, “believe you,” as you testify about Another.)

Jesus says, “Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life.”  The Eucharistic bread itself is a sign, in two ways.  On the one hand, it is a new bread: not the food that perishes; as he said in Ephesians, “put away the old self, corrupted through deceitful desires.”  The Eucharist means turning from a focus on earthly bread to a focus on heavenly bread.  The bread turns into Jesus; no earthly bread is left, only Jesus.

But it’s also true that Jesus turns into bread, he comes to us as bread, he gives himself to us under the sign of bread.  There’s an important article in the Summa that I like to summarize as: If Jesus appears to you in person, or if the Eucharist turns into a child, don’t eat him!  We eat the Eucharist because there Jesus has appeared to us in a different form, he comes to us as bread.

Why bread?  Because bread is a sign of the spiritual work he is doing.  “The bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”  The Eucharist is a sign of Jesus as life-giving.  In it he fulfills our true desires: “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.”  The Eucharist does not mean that we will never experience physical hunger again; that isn’t the promise.  But it does mean that Jesus fulfills our deeper desires, our deeper thirst—our hunger and thirst for righteousness, as the Beatitudes say, or our thirst for the living God, as the Psalms say.  Our physical hunger is a sign of a deeper hunger, a deeper need, and in the Eucharist Jesus comes to us under the appearances of bread, as a sign that he fulfills that hunger.

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Jesus says, “Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life.”  They ask, “What can we do to accomplish the works of God?”  Jesus says, “This is the work of God, that you believe in the one he sent.”  The word for work here is the work for “labor.”  In the physical life, bread gives us strength to labor, and we labor to receive bread.  In the spiritual life, Jesus gives us strength to work, and we work to receive Jesus: he is the bread of life.

But the work is precisely to see the signs: “That you believe in the one he sent.”  Jesus is the way to the Father.  He is sent from the Father, and he comes to bring us to the Father.  What we are meant to do in the Eucharist is to follow the signs, to know Jesus as our strength, the one who gives us life, and our deepest hunger.

True “participation” in the Mass is precisely this awareness of the signs.  To eat the Eucharist without hunger, without longing for what Jesus gives us, is no salvation at all.  But to see the signs, to live by them, is to enter through the Eucharist into the life of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

How do you keep your awareness of the Eucharist alive?