It’s the 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time and today’s gospel is once more on the Bread of Life discourse of our Lord Jesus Christ, which is just like last week’s gospel reading, a continuation of the previous week’s gospel. You can read it in your Bible in John 6:51-58.
“I am the living bread from heaven, whoever eats of this bread will live forever. The bread I shall give is my flesh and I will give it for the life of the world.” The Jews were arguing among themselves. “How can this man give us his flesh to eat? So Jesus replied, “Truly, I say to you, if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. The one who eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives eternal life and I will raise him up on the last day. My flesh is really food and my blood is truly drink.
Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood, live in me and I in them. Just as the Father, who is life, sent me and I have life from the Father, so whoever eats me will have life from me. This is the bread, which came from heaven; not like that of your ancestors, who ate and later died. Those who eat this bread will live forever.”
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May I exhort our readers to please read this gospel passage very carefully and slowly because these are the very words of our Lord Jesus Christ that you will only find in the Gospel of St. John. I’m asking you to do this because you will note that our Lord Jesus Christ was telling this to his disciples, many of whom he fed in the Miracle of the Loaves, so they followed him to the other side of Lake Galilee, perhaps because they wanted the Lord to feed them again.
In short, they followed the Lord across the lake believing that if they followed him, they wouldn’t have to work anymore because someone was going to feed them. This is why in the Sunday gospel last August 2, our Lord Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, you are looking for me not because you saw signs but because you ate the loaves and were filled. Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you. For on him the Father, God, has set his seal.”
But his disciples did not get this message or perhaps they refused to understand the Master, especially when he said that he is the Living Bread that came down from heaven. So our Lord repeated his statement and said to them. “Truly, I say to you, if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. The one who eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives eternal life and I will raise him up on the last day. My flesh is really food and my blood is truly drink.”
But his disciples were bewildered. This teaching was beyond their comprehension because they did not yet know how the Lord would give his body and blood. They mistakenly thought that the Lord Jesus Christ was making cannibals out of them. Call our generation lucky in the sense that we are able to read this part of the gospel and understand what the Lord Jesus Christ really means in talking this kind of language. Because he was referring to the Holy Eucharist that he would institute during the Last Supper.
So for more than a thousand and a half years, this was the centrality of the teaching of Christianity… that our Lord Jesus Christ was sent by The Father from heaven to be born of the Blessed Virgin Mary as prophesied in Isaiah 12. He would suffer in agony and die as the “Suffering Servant” as prophesied in Isaiah 53 and he would rise from dead and ascend to heaven to sit at the right hand of The Father.
During the Last Supper, our Lord Jesus Christ instituted the new covenant when he raised the bread and broke it and gave it to his disciples and said, “Take this, all of you, and eat it; this is my body which will be given up for you. Then the Lord took the cup of wine and said to his disciples, “Take this all of you and drink from it; This is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant. It will be shed for you and for all so that sins may be forgiven. Do this in memory of me.”
We Catholics hear this passage said in every Holy Mass during the Consecration of the Holy Eucharist. But I’ll bet you that a great number of Catholics no longer believe that our Lord Jesus Christ is truly present, body, blood, soul and divinity in the Holy Eucharist.
To prove my point, sometimes when I meet with friends and we talk about spiritual matters, I would ask my friends what they would do if the Lord Jesus Christ suddenly appeared within our midst? The majority of them would say that they would bow and kneel… perhaps in fear. But this very same people do not kneel when the Lord Jesus Christ is raised in the Holy Eucharist. Some of them kneel only because the others are doing it. But we must all kneel because as we’ve been taught, Jesus is truly present, body, blood, soul and divinity in the Holy Eucharist. May God bless you all.
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