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.”