NINETEENTH SUNDAY OF YEAR "B'

NINETEENTH SUNDAY OF THE YEAR "B"

John 6,41

Introduction: The Holy Eucharist should not be taken for granted. To receive the Eucharist is the greatest privilege on earth. Nothing compares with it and nothing ever will. Shortly before he died, Pope John Paul II encouraged all Catholics to grow in what he called “eucharistic amazement” – in other words, to actively resist the tendency to take the amazing gift of the Eucharist for granted. So what is the best response of all to the Eucharist? It is awe, wonder and worship. Jesus awaits us in this sacrament of love. Let us not refuse meeting him in adoration, in faith and contemplation, and to make amends for the serious offences and crimes in the world. Let our adoration never cease.

 

The Homily: When we invite friends for a meal, we do much more than offer them food for their bodies. We offer friendship, fellowship, and good conversation. When we say, “Help yourself, take some more, don’t be shy, let me pour you another drink”, we offer our guests not only our food but also ourselves. A spiritual bond grows, and we become food and drink for one another.

In the most complete and perfect way this happens when Jesus gives himself to us in the Eucharist as food and drink. By offering us his body and Blood, Jesus offers us the most intimate communion possible.

Whether at home or in a restaurant, when we gather around the table to eat the same food, we are very vulnerable to one another. We cannot have a meal together in peace with guns slung across our shoulders and revolvers attached to our belts. We leave our weapons – whether physical or mental – at the door, and enter into a place of mutual vulnerability and trust. When breaking bread and offering it to one another, fear vanishes and God comes very close.

The Eucharist tells us not simply how Jesus Christ is present to the Church as it gathers for worship; it tells us what God offers to people who eat at the same table, engage in human conversation, and enjoy the same gifts together. Eating together can be a redemptive happening. Like any human activity, eating is ambiguous. It is also in need of redemption. It is never totally free of excessive self-seeking. Eating could be a self-destructive thing. A man may devour his food to feed his isolation. He may make eating a substitute for more important things from which he escapes. Or the longing for food masks a person’s desire to remain infantile and have an ever present mother to care for his needs.

There may be redemption together in eating, even though people, especially children, are more exposed to the destructive while they sit around the same table. Negative remarks about other people can impinge on the young minds and destroy the natural love in the heart. Eating together can also be an enforced coming together of people who try to avoid one another all day. Eating together can be accompanied by a carefully screened conversation by which each tries to keep the other out of his life: a nervous juggling with words, occasional jokes that hurt, and remarks by which one triumphs over the others, until the longed for moment arrives when everybody rises from the table and returns each to his own isolated life. Such meals are devastating. They only feed the sickness in us. They nourish what is skeptical and untrusting in us. Such meals encourage our fears and angers. They widen our alienation from human life.

“I am the Bread of Life,” declares Jesus. He takes a basic human activity and elevates it to a redeeming event in the Holy Eucharist. Sharing the same food, acknowledging our common need, and helping one another to fulfill it, opens us to fellowship. The Divine Word is present at table. To those who eat together in a human manner is offered reconciliation and the inner rebuilding of life. The wounds inflicted by our self-centeredness are in part healed by the love that is being shared. As friends eat together, the Eucharistic mystery is offered to them, not in its explicit and specified form as Christ personally present, but in the implicit and more general form as the presence of the Spirit by whom all Christians may share in Christ’s death and resurrection.

Let me end with this beautiful PRAYER written by the Irish poet, Padraig Pearse:

I have made my heart clean tonight

As a woman might clean her house

‘Ere her lover come to visit her.

O Lover, pass not by.

I have opened the door of my heart

Like a man that would make a feast

For his son’s coming home from afar.

Beautiful, thy coming, O Son.

Amen.