20th Sunday Year B - Homily 6

Homily 6 - 2024

What was behind Jesus’ desire to reveal to both his disciples and also the crowds the wonderful message that has been contained in the last few Sunday Gospel passages?

His message has been unfolding and slowly but constantly building up, revealing our on-going unity with Jesus and with each other, that we celebrate in startlingly practical terms in the Sacrament of the Eucharist.

Jesus saw that unity in terms of life shared together by the whole world. He spoke of our drawing life from him, which life he in turn drew from the Father, the author and creator of all life and being. Because of that flow of life, he spoke of his living - being alive - in us, and we living in him.

He spoke of it as an eternal life, a sharing in the very life of God.

In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus spoke of that sharing in and living of divine life as life in the “Kingdom of God”. The Gospel of John approached the mystery in a much more graphic way, beginning with the story of Jesus’ feeding a crowd of about 5000+ people who had followed him out into an empty wilderness. That in turn had raised issues of the “bread from heaven” that had led on to his revealing of the sacrament of the Eucharist.

It will help to review this background. What was behind the crowd’s following Jesus in the first place? Without their being able to articulate an answer, there seems to have been something about Jesus that powerfully attracted them. And Jesus, on his part, did not see the crowd and their need to be fed as a nuisance, but was obviously drawn to them by his care for, and even love of them. Both Jesus and the crowd seemed to experience some similar mutual attraction — [something similar between us and him !! ], to be expressed in time and celebrated in and through the Sacrament of Eucharist.

Jesus offers us the possibility of our sharing life together, of our loving with his life, the same life that he lives with God his Father. He lets the Sacrament lead us beyond where words can… He talks about it graphically in terms of our “eating his flesh and drinking his blood”. The “now”Jesus whose flesh and blood we eat and drink in the Eucharist is the Risen Jesus; but we must not forget that the flesh and the blood that we consume are the flesh once cruelly broken and the blood drained from that body on the cross — the clear indication of the depth of his love for us sinful humanity, and at the same time, of his utter faithfulness to his Father, the source and the reality of all love. Our “Amen” expressed through our eating Jesus’ flesh and drinking his blood is our protestation of our readiness to love as he did: to love God, and to love others without exception.

Despite everything we hear and see to the contrary, I think that we, too, with and like Jesus, do truly yearn to love. We know “in our bones” that, until we choose to love, happiness will elude us.

Through the sacrament Jesus gives each of us the opportunity to step back momentarily from life and to come to terms with our true inner self and its yearnings.