Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

by Deacon Michael Hoonhout  |  08/11/2024  |  Weekly Reflection

We continue a month-long hearing from the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel, which began with Jesus multiplying the loaves and fishes to feed a multitude in a deserted place. When the crowd recognized the miracle as a sign that God’s Messiah would reenact the wonders of Exodus and again feed them heavenly bread, Jesus quite simply disappeared. He fled from their adulation, their plans to make him their king. He went deeper into the wilderness, higher up the mountain, to pray to his heavenly Father in secret.

The crowd could not find him, and the next morning they heard reports that he had crossed to the other side of the Sea of Galilee, even though they had seen he did not leave with his apostles in the only boat they had. When they find Jesus again in the synagogue in Capernaum, they ask, “Lord, how did you get here?”

It is worth remembering this question given what they say in today’s Gospel, for both the question and the answer are crucial for proper Eucharistic faith. Now, after Jesus had revealed to them that he has come down from heaven as the true bread of life, the crowd murmurs in objection, claiming they know Jesus’ origins. They know his father Joseph and his mother Mary, know that he is from Nazareth, and thus object that he cannot possibly have come down from heaven. But they really do not know how he got there or where he is from. They are using the truth that Jesus is indeed human to discount his divinity, not unlike what we can do whenever we use the truth that Jesus is indeed divine to discount his humanity. It is not one truth or the other, but both. Either / or is a mistaken theological judgment about divine mystery, something that also applies to the mystery of the Eucharist. For the Eucharist is the reality of Jesus’ Body and Blood with the appearance of bread and wine. It is mystery and sign, reality and symbol.

Mystery means living with more questions than answers. Mystery is not ignorance; it is knowing, accepting revealed truths that exceed the ways of this world. We put a proper faith in them when we ponder and reflect again and again upon what God has said and done, knowing that the light of its full meaning will break forth in our hearts and minds only on the last day when our risen Lord appears in glory. Every week we confess the same faith because the revealed mysteries of our salvation shed new light upon us as our lives slowly unfold. Jesus explains that the prophecy of Isaiah 54:13, “They shall all be taught by God” is fulfilled in us when we listen to God, learn what He has said and done, and come to Jesus. “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him.” A reflective engagement with the truth of God’s many acts of love for us (Liturgy of the Word) leads to faith (Creed), and without faith we should not approach the Blessed Sacrament (Liturgy of Eucharist). Only by this reflective engagement does faith grow into a life lived in the presence of Eternity. Eternal life is lived now, in this everyday world where nothing we see seems to have changed, including the bread offered on the altar. And yet, because divine mysteries have and do happen in this very world, how we see everything has fundamentally changed. And if we act on this new seeing, this faith, then we will change, and the way we relate to others changes. We can truly become what St. Paul calls us to be in the second reading: be kind to one another, compassionate and mutually forgiving. The love of Christ, recalled and received, enables us to love one another in the same way.

Being sustained in living this eternal life of faith and love requires eating the true bread from heaven: Jesus, the very bread of life. Without this coming to Jesus in the Eucharist, the Christian journey of faith becomes too long for us. To receive the Eucharist in faith does not mean we have to deny what one sees and tastes — the appearance of bread and wine is real, for Jesus is giving himself as food. But we are called not to limit our response to the Host simply to what our senses tells us, and this means receiving the Eucharist as a genuine encounter with the living Jesus. For the very Gospel we heard proclaimed, telling of what Jesus said and did in our world many years ago, is the personal memory and experience of the One we receive and meet under the sign of bread. To eat the Host with faith is to taste how good the Lord is by remembering how he has loved us. In faith we should ask each time the Host is in our hand, “Lord, how did you get here?” For even with the many, many times we have eaten the Host, we still do not yet fully know the heaven contained in the Eucharist.