20th Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year B
John 6: 51-58
Feed on Jesus
by José Antonio Pagola
According to John’s story, once more the Jews are unable to go past the physical and material, and interrupt Jesus, scandalized by the aggressive language he’s using: «How can this man give us his flesh to eat?». Jesus doesn’t take back his affirmation, but gives his words a more profound meaning.
The nucleus of his explanation allows us to go into the experience that the first Christian communities were having when they celebrate the Eucharist. According to Jesus, the disciples don’t need to just believe in him, but they should feed on and nourish their life in his very person. The Eucharist is a central experience for Jesus’ followers.
The words that follow do nothing but highlight their fundamental and indispensible character: «My flesh is real food and my blood is real drink». If the disciples don’t feed on him, they could do and say much, but they mustn’t forget his words: «You won’t have life within you». In order to have life within us we need to feed on Jesus, nourish ourselves on his vital life-force, place deep within us his attitudes and his criteria for living. This is the secret and the power of the Eucharist. Only those know it who communion with him and feed on his passion for the Father and his love for God’s children.
Jesus’ language has great expressive power. He makes this promise to whoever knows how to feed on him: «That person lives in me and I live in that person». Whoever is nourished by the Eucharist experiences his relationship with Jesus not as something external. Jesus isn’t a model for life that we imitate from outside. He nourishes our life from within.
This experience of «live in» Jesus and allow Jesus to «live in» us can transform our life at its root. This mutual interchange, this intimate communion, difficult to express in words, constitutes the true relationship of the disciple with Jesus. This is what it means to follow him, sustained by his very life-force.
That life that Jesus transmits to his disciples in the Eucharist is one that he himself receives from the Father, an inexhaustible Fountain of life at its fullest. A life that isn’t extinguished by our biological death. That’s why Jesus dares to make this promise to his own: «Anyone who eats this bread will live forever».
Without doubt, the most serious sign of the crisis of Christian faith among us is the so common abandonment of the Sunday Eucharist. For those who love Jesus, it’s painful to observe how the Eucharist continues losing its power to attract. But it’s more painful yet to see that even within the Church we watch this happening without venturing to react. Why?
And the Word Became Eucharistic Bread
Fernando Armellini
Today’s Gospel takes up the last verse of last Sunday’s. It is an important verse because it marks the passage in the speech of Jesus, from the “bread of heaven,” understood as Word, as the wisdom of God, to the theme of the Eucharist.
The Jews understood that, when he spoke of the bread of heaven, Jesus referred to his Gospel, the divine message he brought to this earth and, in the face of this unprecedented claim, they reacted, raising questions and concerns. The statement that begins today’s passage is even more disconcerting: the bread to eat is not only his teaching but “his own flesh.”
We explained last Sunday that for a Semitic “meat” does not mean the muscles, but “the whole person,” considered in his weak and fragile aspects. Man is flesh because he is an ephemeral, a vulnerable creature destined to death. So it is clear to the audience that Jesus is not making a cannibalistic proposal, however, the appearance of his outrageous demand remains and the reaction of those present is understandable and justified. They discuss among themselves, “How can this man give us flesh to eat?” (v. 52). They understand that he no longer refers only to the spiritual assimilation of God’s revelation, but also to a “concrete eating,” not metaphorical. They wait for an explanation.
Jesus does not care about their embarrassment and, instead of softening his words, he confirms what has already been said, adding an even more crude, insistently repeated demand: it is necessary to drink his blood (vv. 53-56).
This is something repulsive for a Jew. Many biblical texts strictly prohibit this practice (Lev 7:26-27), “for the life of the flesh is in the blood” (Lev 17:10-11), and life does not belong to man, but to God. Even today, when they kill an animal to eat them, the Jews bleed it to death in the most accurate way, so as not to appropriate its life. They pour the blood on the ground to return it to God.
The belief that vital force resides in the blood explains the use that was done in the Old Testament, in the rites of consecration and purification. The way in which the covenant between God and the people at the foot of Sinai was celebrated, with the blood is significant. There was a solemn sacrifice of communion, then Moses took the blood of the victims and poured half on the altar, a symbol of the Lord, and half on the people, saying, “Here is the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you” (Ex 24:6-8). With this gesture, the communion of life between God and Israel was established and their mutual belongingness sealed. It was as if between God and the people relations of consanguinity were established.
It is this mindset that Jesus puts his speech on the need of eating his flesh and drinking his blood, to enter into communion of life with him and with the Father.
In the passage from the first to the second part of his discourse, we may have gotten confused. He promised: “Whoever believes has eternal life” (v. 47) and now he says: “The one who eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives eternal life” (v. 54). If in order to have eternal life, faith in his word is enough, the acceptance of his proposal, his Gospel, what need is there to approach also the sacrament of the Eucharist?
In today’s world, with the absence of priests, most of the Christian communities, on Sundays, do not have at their disposition the Eucharistic bread, but only the bread of the Word. We are confident that, by this single food, they get an abundance of life. Why then the Eucharist? Is not the Word enough?
Let’s assume that this sacrament—that really makes Christ present—does not replace faith in his Gospel. This is fundamental and indispensable. Communion is not a ritual magic, as it were the rites performed by the initiates in the pagan mysteries. It is not a drug that acts automatically and gets the healing of the sick even if he or she is unconscious. It is not correct to think that to receive the grace of the Lord, it is enough to make many communions. Jesus did not recommend to do many communions, but to “eat his flesh and drink his blood.”
The Eucharist has no effect if it is not received with faith, that is if it is not an expression of the inner decision to accept Christ and to allow him to animate the entire life. Before receiving the Eucharistic bread it is always necessary to read and meditate on a passage of the Word of God. Those who agree to become one person with Christ in the sacrament must first know his proposal for life. A contract is not stipulated without having attentively read and evaluated all the terms.
We have introduced the theme of this Sunday with the reference to the meaning of the rite. Now we resume it for a better understanding of the discourse on the Eucharist.
Immediately after Easter, Christians have felt the need to celebrate the founding event of their faith, the death, and resurrection of Christ. They did not have to invent a ritual to reproduce the event because Jesus himself had set it up. Prior to his passion, while he sat at table with his disciples, he took bread, gave thanks, broke it and gave it to them saying, “This is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me” (Lk 22:19).
Faithful to this order of the Lord, Christians began to come together to celebrate the Eucharist on the first day of every week. Moving in this regard is the credible testimony of Pliny, from Bithynia. He wrote to Emperor Trajan: Christians “have the habit of meeting on a fixed day before the rising of the sun, singing among them alternately a hymn to Christ as to a god, to engage with an oath not to commit crimes, robbery or brigandage, nor adulteries, to live up to his word, not to deny a deposit demanded by justice. Having performed these rites, they have a habit to separate and come together again to take their food, whatever they say, is ordinary and harmless” (Pliny, Ep. X).
It is a feature of the rite to be repetitive, to follow a fixed pattern. Woe to us if, every time we greet each other, instead of “good morning” and the handshake, we had to invent always new formulas and gestures. The rituals are repetitive, but not useless because they create what they mean. The greeting not only shows that there is an agreement between two persons but produces and enhances mutual harmony. The gift of a rose makes a relationship of love bloom, manifests it and nourishes it. The roar of the fans shows sympathy for a team and keeps alive the passion for sports. The military parade celebrates and inculcates patriotic love.
This is the strength, the effectiveness of the rite.
The early Christians had only one Eucharistic celebration per week. Today we can attend mass every day. If repeated with faith, this sacrament which means union with the Lord of life makes this union more solid and deeper.
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