Homily for the Twenty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time (B)

Over the past several weeks we have been hearing Gospel readings from the Sixth Chapter of St. John’s Gospel: The Bread of Life Discourses in which Jesus makes clear that He is the Bread of Life.  He is the true bread come down from heaven.  His flesh is true food and His blood is true drink, and whoever eats His flesh and drinks His blood has life eternal.

I said last week that such teachings would have been absolutely scandalous to a first century Jew.  Jews were forbidden from eating the flesh of an animal with its blood, and contact with human blood made a person ritually impure.  To eat and drink human flesh was as abhorrent an idea to Jesus’ contemporaries as it is for us today.

In last week’s Gospel, the crowds asked incredulously: “How can this man give us His flesh to eat?”  But rather than back down, Jesus heightened the realism of His language: I noted that when Jesus repeats that only those who eat His flesh have life within them, He chooses to use a word that basically means to ‘gnaw’ or ‘munch’ on His flesh.

In today’s Gospel we hear about the results of Jesus’ clarity of teaching, the implications of His refusal to say only what the crowd wants to hear, or to couch His words in pious niceties.

“This saying is hard; who can accept it?” the crowds ask.  And St. John tells us that, “As a result of this, many of His disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied Him.”

Friends, there have always been and will always be many ‘sayings’ of Jesus that are hard; that are difficult to accept.  Today, perhaps more than ever, there are many people who find certain teachings of Christ’s Church difficult to accept and hard to follow.

I’m sure that many such difficult teachings come quickly to your mind: the Church’s teachings on the sanctity of human life, its prohibition against artificial contraception, abortion, and euthanasia; the Church’s definition of marriage and its prohibition against same-sex marriage, cohabitation, and pre-marital sex; the Church’s teachings on the dignity of labor, the rights of immigrants and refugees, and the tragedies of war and militarization. 

And then there are the even more fundamental teachings: to forgive as we wish to be forgiven; to care for the widow and the orphan; to believe in a God who became a helpless child, and was executed as a criminal, and rose from the dead! The list easily goes on and on.

To the ears of modern-day Americans, focused as we are on individual freedom and choice, mesmerized as we are by science and technology, insistent as we are on accumulating more and more for ourselves and fashioning worlds of our own truth, these teachings are hard and even scandalous. 

Just as in the crowd of today’s Gospel, there are many who choose to “return to their former way of life,” to live no longer for Christ, but for themselves. 

Others of us remain, but we do our best to ignore the hard truths that Jesus teaches.  We sometime choose to live not for Him, but for our own particular definition of His teaching, leaving aside whatever we find too hard to hear, or too difficult to accept. 

Like Peter, who even tried to dissuade Jesus from proclaiming the hard truth of His coming Passion, some people even advocate for the Church to abandon those teachings that are deemed to be too hard, too demanding, or insufficiently “modern.”

But brothers and sisters, as St. Paul makes clear in our second reading, from his Letter to the Ephesians:  “The Church is subordinate to Christ.”  The Church does not have the authority to alter the teachings of Christ, but rather She has been given the commission of proclaiming the saving truth of His teaching to all people. 

As Blessed John Paul II and Pope Benedict have said so often, the Church does not impose, She proposes.  And underlying all the teachings the Church puts before us is the same fundamental choice that Joshua put before the Twelve Tribes of Israel in today’s first reading:  

“If it does not please you to serve the Lord,” Joshua told the people, “decide today whom you will serve.”  Friends, all of us serve some master, and we cannot serve more than one.  We either serve God as He truly is – and through serving Him see the necessity of serving our brothers and sisters – or we serve something else we have fashioned into our god: some ideology, or our own ego, or our addictions to possessions, power, or pleasure.

So, the question Jesus asks the Twelve in today’s Gospel is asked of us as well:  “Do you also want to leave?”  Do you want to leave Him by departing from His Body, the Church?  Do you want to stop accompanying Him by avoiding the scandal of the Cross, by trying to set your own terms for discipleship?

This question is not and should not be an easy one to answer because answering it demands a great sacrifice from each and every one of us, without exception.  Answering it requires that we all lay down our lives, our egos, our expectations for how things “ought to be,” and pick up our cross and follow after Christ. 

Therefore we must all pray, for ourselves and one another, that we might have the grace that is required to answer with the Israelites in today’s first reading: “Far be it from us to forsake the Lord … For it was the Lord … who brought us … out of slavery.  Therefore we also will serve the Lord, for He is our God.”  Brothers and sisters, we have all received too many blessings from the hand of God to doubt Him or to turn away from Him because we think His teaching is too hard or because He asks too much of us.

And if we struggle with answering this all-important question, as we all do from time to time …  when we find ourselves struggling to remain with Christ and to accept the clear but challenging portions of the Gospel … we are meant to lean on the strong faith of the Church.  We are meant to stand with the Apostles, who may not have understood completely, but who stood fast with Christ in today’s Gospel. We are meant to ground ourselves firmly on the rock of Peter’s faith. 

Peter, the very one who in his human weakness tried to run from the scandalous Cross, is now given the faith to answer Jesus’ question for all the Twelve and for all of us when he says: “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

"You have the words of eternal life."  Friends, here is the ultimate lesson from today’s Gospel: Even the most difficult teachings of the Gospel, even the “hard sayings,” are not designed to scandalize, confuse, subjugate, or torture us.  The teachings of Christ, which the Church preserves and proposes, are all of them designed to bring us to the fullness of life: both in Heaven at the end of time, and also here in this life.

We have the assurance of Christ Himself who doesn’t go back on His hard teaching but says to the wavering crowd: “The words I have spoken to you are Spirit and life.”  And we have His fundamental promise elsewhere in John’s Gospel: “I have come that they might have life, and have it to the full.”

Consuming now the Body and Blood of Christ, we are assured of having Christ’s life within us.  May our Amen as we receive the Eucharist be our answer to the Lord’s pressing question: “Do you also want to leave?” … “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of everlasting life.” 

Homily for the Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B)

This past Friday August 17th marked a rather obscure but profoundly important anniversary.  On that date in 1525 – some 487 years ago – Ulrich Zwingli, the Swiss Protestant reformer, published a book on “the meaning of the Lord’s Supper.”

Zwingli claimed to have had a dream in which he was allowed to understand “the Eucharist in a whole new way.”  His novel belief was that the bread and wine of the Eucharist were only symbols, not really the body and blood of Christ, something not even Luther or Calvin claimed to be true.

That this anniversary is obscure is obvious enough.  But I also said that this date was profoundly important.  And indeed it is because Zwingli’s position has come to be held by the vast majority of Protestant Christians around the world.  Differences in Eucharistic theology are some of the most crucial issues dividing Catholics and Protestants to this day.

But sadly, many Catholics are themselves confused about the reality we celebrate in the Eucharist.  In 1992 a Gallup Poll interviewed just over five hundred American Catholics.  They found that twenty-nine percent of respondents actually claimed Zwingli’s position: that at Communion we receive “bread and wine, which symbolize the spirit and teachings of Jesus Christ.”

Another thirty-four percent of respondents claimed to hold some version of either Calvin or Luther’s position.  They believed we receive “the Body and Blood of Christ” but they were confused by what the Church teaches regarding precisely how this change occurs.

According to the Gallup poll only thirty percent of respondents could correctly identify and claim the Catholic Church’s true teaching: that in the Eucharist we really and truly receive the Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus Christ under the appearance of bread and wine.  Only the accidents of bread and wine remain: the substance of the bread and wine have sacramentally been changed into the Body and Blood of Christ.

Over the last several weeks we have been hearing Gospel readings from the sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel.  This section of John’s Gospel is usually referred to as The Bread of Life Discourse because it contains Jesus’ exchanges with His Jewish audience regarding the manna that the ancient Israelites had eaten on their forty-year sojourn in the desert.

Jesus makes clear that He is “the living bread that came down from heaven.”  Whereas the Israelites ate the manna and still died, those who eat the true bread from heaven will have eternal life.

And what is this true bread from Heaven? Jesus states plainly: “the bread that I will give you is my flesh for the life of the world … my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.”

This was terribly scandalous for Jesus’ Jewish listeners.  Blood was understood to be the life-force of living creatures and to consume blood of any kind, let alone human blood, was unthinkable.  And yet here is Jesus telling them that they must eat His flesh and drink His blood!

No wonder Jesus’ listeners asked incredulously: “How can this man give us His flesh to eat?”  In next Sunday’s Gospel we’ll hear their further reaction and as you can well imagine it isn’t positive.

But please note that Jesus doesn’t back down.  He doesn’t “offer a metaphorical, spiritualized interpretation of His words.”  He does not say that He was speaking merely on the level of symbol.

Rather, He actually “intensifies the realism of His language.”  In the seminary I had class with the great Scripture scholar Fr. John Meir.  He pointed out to us that when Jesus tells the people to eat and drink His blood, He uses a verb that connotes not the delicate eating of a fancy meal, but rather voracious gnawing.  Fr. Meir chose the verb ‘munching!’  In other words, Jesus doesn’t let His listeners off the hook – He wants them to deal directly with the stark realism of His words.

Well, as those Gallup Poll numbers indicate, even today people still find the realism of Jesus’ words difficult to accept.  Even Christians who otherwise interpret the Scriptures literally can’t seem to take Jesus at His word when He says “this is my body … this is my blood” and “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you do not have life within you.”

But brothers and sisters this is precisely what we understand to be true when we celebrate the Eucharist.  We are not play-acting as a quaint memorial to Jesus. We are mystically re-presenting the sacrifice of Calvary and sacramentally consuming His flesh and blood.

Flannery O’Connor, who died in 1964, was one of the greatest American authors of all time.  As a Catholic living in the American South she often encountered those who misunderstood the Faith, yet in her life and writing she was always a great defender of it.

In one of her letters, she told a friend about a discussion she once had about the Eucharist:

Five or six years ago I was taken “by some friends to have dinner with Mary McCarthy and her husband, Mr. Broadwater … She [had] departed the Church at the age of 15 and is a Big Intellectual. We went at eight, and at one I hadn’t opened my mouth once, there being nothing for me to say in such company …

Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. Mrs. Broadwater said when she was a child and received the host, she thought of it as the Holy Ghost, He being the most portable person of the Trinity; now she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one.

I then said, in a very shaky voice, ‘Well, if it’s a symbol, to hell with it.’  That was all the defense I was capable of, but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it … except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable … Understand … that, like [a] child, I believe the Host is actually the body and blood of Christ, not a symbol.”

Friends, this should be our appreciation of the Eucharist also.  If it is merely a symbol it is not nearly worth it!  If it is merely a symbol it cannot nourish us for eternal life as we know we need and as Jesus has promised.  If it is merely a symbol then we do not have Jesus’ life in us – we have not become what we receive.

But, as we heard in today’s Gospel, Jesus has not only told us that His flesh and blood is indeed true food and true drink, He has also promised: “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him … the one who feeds on me will have life because of me.”

So, we now approach this Eucharist with the eyes of faith seeing not bread and wine but the very Body and Blood of Christ they have become, sacramentally.  And leaving here today we live not for ourselves, but for Christ, of whose body we have all become members.

"I give thanks to God always for all of you ..."

Three years ago I served as the assistant director of my community’s undergraduate seminary at the University of Notre Dame.  During a football weekend, one of our seminarians hosted his uncle who was at that time studying for the permanent diaconate.  Don Longano joined our seminarians for Mass before the game and he brought along his pastor who had authored several books for our community’s publishing house.  Later that morning at the seminarians’ tailgate party I had the chance to meet and speak with Monsignor Vaghi.

Homily for the Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B)

I’ll be moving to my new assignment in New York later this week, but before school starts for me in early September, I’m going to spend a few weeks with my Mom and Dad on Staten Island.  While I’m home it’ll be easy for me to relax and unwind, and I’ll slip easily into the old familiar patterns and schedules of life at home.  Undoubtedly, one of the most important elements of such a routine revolves around food and eating.

Think for a second about your own home life as a family.  How much time, energy, and thought do you end up committing, each and every day, to food: to planning, preparing, eating, and then cleaning up from the meals we need to sustain ourselves.  It’s likely a considerable amount of time.

In my family we joke that we even end up spending a lot of time talking about food!  One of the most consistent questions asked at some point during almost all of our dinnertime conversations, is what we’re going to have for dinner the following night! 

In part, that’s because it really does take some forethought to prepare a meal; to decide what things go well together, what makes for a healthy meal, and then to gather the proper supplies.

But in fairness, it’s also because we can sometimes have a hard time deciding what we want, what we really have a hankering for.  We know we’ll be hungry again by then, but what is it that we’ll really want? What do we think will fill our hunger, not just for physical sustenance – in which case any old calories would do – but also for taste and pleasure.

After all, none of us want to eat the same old thing over and over again.  We all get bored easily and we grumble that we’re tired of the same old things.  We watch the Food Network, and we read the food section of the paper in search of new, and better, and more exciting recipes and restaurants to satiate our hunger, again, not merely for food – to be physically filled – but for the complete experience of a truly satisfying meal.

Friends, I’d like to suggest that if we think about it, this distinction between types of hunger, and our constant desire for something different and new, are in fact potent symbols for what is being spoken about in today’s readings.

Our Gospel picks up the story after last week’s miraculous feeding of the five thousand.  In today’s segment of John’s Gospel, the crowds follow after Jesus and He recognizes that they are only following Him because they have had their fill of the loaves.  The crowd is happy to have a free meal and they are hoping Jesus will continue to fulfill their very human need for physical, bodily nourishment.

But Jesus instructs them that they should work not for “food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life.”  He wants them to hunger not just for bodily sustenance but for the “bread that comes down from heaven” – which is to say the food that will fulfill the much deeper and more important desire for meaning, for wholeness, and for eternal life.

It is easy to provide for our physical, bodily need.  But we are not merely physical creatures.  We are spiritual beings who experience a much deeper type of existential hunger and longing.  If we do not seek to satisfy that deeper, spiritual hunger, then we will in fact never meet our deepest need or become our fullest selves.

Jesus explains to the crowd that He is Himself “the bread that comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.”  This is the spiritual food that will satisfy our deep, abiding spiritual hunger.  And we, of course, understand that Jesus gives us His very self as food and drink in the Eucharist precisely to give us such life and to sustain our spirits. 

But frankly, brothers and sisters, in our weakness we can sometimes become bored with this food.  Like the Israelites in the desert we grumble about still being unsatisfied.  Just as the Israelites longed to go back into Egypt, where they were slaves, but at least had decent food, we too can feel as if “the bread of life” hasn’t fully satisfied and that we still long for something else, something different, something new. 

In the end, though, the problem isn’t that God hasn’t provided, it’s that we don’t trust God enough to truly provide for our deepest needs and desires.  Instead, we hedge our bets.  We don’t fully give ourselves over to God.  We decide that we’re still in control, still capable of satisfying all our hungers by sating our appetite for all sorts of things: possessions, pleasure, power, or prestige.

But just as God brought the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt and asked them to submit to the Law, so too God has brought us into a new type of freedom from sin, provided we accept a new type of submission in which He alone is our God. He asks us to turn over every part of our lives to Him, to trust in His plan for our lives and in His desire and ability to provide for all we need.

We only find ourselves unfulfilled and unsatisfied because we are constantly rebelling and grumbling against such surrender to God’s control of our lives.  We are still hungry because like the crowds in the Gospel we come to God asking for the wrong thing, still looking to satisfy our physical, bodily hunger rather than our truest spiritual needs.

Friends, that’s why in our second reading from the Letter to the Ephesians St. Paul admonishes: “put away the old self of your former way of life corrupted through deceitful desires” – in other words, put away desires that deceitfully lead us not toward Him who truly satisfies, but toward dead ends! 

Instead, St. Paul wants us to fully become the “new self” that is “renewed in the spirit … and created in God’s way in righteousness and holiness of truth.”  St. Paul is trying to remind us that the fullness and the newness of life for which we long really is found in the “bread from heaven” which, as Jesus says, is to “believe” – to have faith and trust – “in the one who sent Him.”

So perhaps we should take time to ask ourselves what it is we most hunger and long for, what we devote our time and energy towards, in what or whom we put our faith and trust.  What it is that gives us a feeling of satisfaction and fulfillment, of joy, peace, consolation, and excitement?  And in contrast, in what ways do we long for Egypt by clinging to things that lead, in the end, only to “division, desolation, embarrassment, and regret?”

Do we hunger most for success in our career, for financial security, or for material possessions?  Do we seek our fulfillment in how we recreate and vacation, how we vote, what we eat or drink, the clothes we wear, the car we drive? 

Or do we hunger most for, and find our satisfaction in, the time we spend with our loved ones and families, in the time we devote to prayerful communion with God, in the service we offer to those in need?

Do we have faith and trust in our own ability to secure fulfillment, happiness, and peace, or do we yield our lives to God and trust His plan for our lives, His ability to provide for all our needs?

Brothers and sisters, if we give over as much time, energy, and attention as we do to searching out the meals that will satisfy our bodily hungers, should we not give over at least as much time, energy, and attention to seeking out Him who can provide the “bread of life” which satisfies the deepest longings of our lives?

At this Mass, like the crowd in today’s Gospel, our prayer is: “Sir, give us this bread always!”  And in this Eucharist we are given the assurance that the Lord does indeed rain down bread from heaven, He sends us food in abundance, He satisfies our most abiding hunger.