August 18, 2024

Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time Cycle B

Proverbs 9:1-6; Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6:51-58

I’m going to show my age here, I think a lot of you are going to relate. When I was about 12, there was a hit song that hit the air waves: You Light Up My Life. It was by a woman named Debbie Boone, who was the daughter of my mom’s all-time favorite singer, Pat Boone. I'll admit, this is a lovely song and, though young, I still remember that I liked it. At least at first. But then it seemed to be played all the time, like every third song you heard on the radio. You younger people probably can’t relate, given that the internet and mobile devices have provided people today with a lot of options for music. But in the seventies, unless you were at home and had a record collection, you were stuck with what you heard on the radio, and when you were away from home, the radio was it. It turned out that You Light Up My Life spent the most time at #1 on the pop charts as any song up to that time. So when you heard the song for what seemed like the 700th time, you kind of tuned out.

Well, we are in our fourth week of having chapter six of Saint John being read as our Gospel, the bread of life discourse. And I hope that you are not starting to tune out. It would be easy to ask yourself: How many times is Jesus going to tell them this? Why don’t they get it? Jesus is the bread of life, people. Deal with it. Stop grumbling among yourselves and saying he must mean something else. For the record, Jesus says “I am the bread of life” four times in this single chapter of John [John 6:35, 41, 48, 51]. Well, actually two times as bread of life, once as the living bread, and once as the bread from heaven, but you get the point.

Well, I think that Jesus spends so much time on this because he knows that people aren’t truly understanding it, and he thinks it is vitally important that they do. And starting today, he has moved from the more general bread of life into the more specific talk about the Eucharist, his flesh and blood. Two weeks ago, the crowd was grumbling that they wanted more bread to eat. Today, they grumble that they don’t understand this flesh and blood thing. Next week, many will move on from grumbling to refusing to believe and ending their discipleship. Jesus is spending the time to explain this to us. Saint John’s Gospel, the one that we read from today, was the last one to be written, probably sixty or seventy years after Christ’s death, according to most biblical scholars. As with the other gospels, he can’t write down everything that happened, what he and the other apostles and disciples remember Christ saying. Saint John knows what his congregation is having the most problems understanding, and so his gospel reflects that. Matthew, Mark, and Luke would also have written what they knew but also stressed those events that would have the most impact on their communities. This is why, for instance, we believe that Matthew and Mark were writing to a church filled mostly with people who had been Jewish, while Luke was writing to a church that had been mostly Gentile, or non-Jewish. Biblical scholars who study them in depth can tell by the way they structure their stories, who they mention are in the audience around Jesus, that sort of thing.

So how does this inform our understanding of what is going on in the Gospel? I think that Saint John believes that the Eucharist is what we in the Catholic Church believe it to be, summed up briefly as the real presence, and he wants his church to understand this clearly. This is why he puts in statements made by Jesus that he remembers that clearly point to that understanding. For instance, “For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink” [John 6:55 NABRE]. Now he puts this in right after he tells us that the crows were asking “How can this man give us [his] flesh to eat? [v. 52b]. In other words, the early Church also struggled with this idea of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and John and the other evangelists made sure they recorded the teachings of Jesus that they remembered on this topic. So the lack of understanding and refusal to accept the most obvious meaning is not a modern phenomenon, nor did it begin with the Protestant Reformation. People have always asked “how?” And believers have always said, “God told us it was true.” This is a response that both answers the question and doesn’t answer the question.

Now I’m not going to stand here and tell you how this can be. I’ve admitted in previous homilies that I don’t know. But there are a lot of things in the world that I don’t understand but are nevertheless true. The question is, am I going to believe, and to that I have to answer yes. Next week, we will hear the end of the bread of life discourse. We will hear many disciples say “This saying is hard; who can accept it?” [v. 60b]. It will be the very first verse in the Gospel next week. When we hear that – “who can accept it?” – what is your answer going to be? There are three answers that were given in the New Testament. Some left discipleship, unable to accept it. Some, including the apostles, accepted it. Peter, speaking for this group will ask “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life” [v. 68b]. And there is a third option: Judas chose to stay with Jesus, but just not believe. These are the three options. So I ask you again: Are you going to be able to accept it?

If you think about it, you don't hear You Light Up My Life hardly ever any more, even on those stations that play hits from the Seventies. Most of you that weren't alive at that time probably don't know it. As with most fads, it faded into oblivion. So our challenge to day is to make sure that we don't let this question of the real presence become something that we just stop thinking about. Are we going to tune it out, or are we going to embrace this important mystery of our faith?

As we continue with the Liturgy of the Eucharist, may we appreciate the spiritual life that Christ gives us in his body and blood, the bread of life. May we be given the grace of faith to embrace what we don’t understand completely and not just try to tune it out. Then everyone will see the real presence of Christ dwelling in us, forming the body of Christ, his Church, through the body of Christ, his Eucharist.