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I once lived in a formation house with a person who was unique. Fellow scholastics had two descriptions of him depending on one’s communal relationship with him. Living with him is a tragedy. Not living with him is comedy. Most fascinating was anything he did not understand was considered stupid. And since he was not from Ireland, you can imagine the number “oirish” customs and norms that were stupid for him.
Today we enter the arena of laws and given that some of them are not easy to understand or to accept, we might also be tempted to judge them as stupid. The 1st Reading is pretty clear as Moses admonished the Israelites entering the Promised Land to uphold the laws that have held the community together because they had come from God and no one was to add or subtract from them.
But we are also familiar with the term, “man-made laws”. It was exactly what the Pharisees did. They identified 613 commandments or mitzvah complete with customs and taboos. The philosophy behind all these promotions and prohibitions is a God whom we can bargain with. I do this or I refrain from doing this and because you are a just God, you must reward accordingly. St Paul fought against these obligations and taboos by asking the people to be formed interiorly by the Spirit, to be inwardly transformed so that we may know the will of God.
Christ had many encounters with the Pharisees who had no problem piling on guilt upon the masses without themselves being subject to them. Today such a spirit thrives in those who insist on the “rules for thee but not for me”.
The Second Reading of James gives us a clue for what it means to keep the law. He or she rushes to assist the poor and needy. That is the nature of the pure religion. As Christ railed against the Pharisees, it begs the question of the purity of heart because one can cling to the rules or rites without the heart in it.
One of the challenges we face is this. A person attends Mass every day; runs from one Novena to another; prays the Rosary at every opportune moment; fasts three times a week; makes a pilgrimage every year. Is that person a better person? Is he or she automatically closer to God? Or what if the person still sins. He visits prostitutes. She gossips relentlessly.
Modern man looks at this break between belief and behaviour and concludes that religion is ineffective but more than that, hypocritical. An easy target is a Pharisee. Somehow we cannot run away from conflating hypocrisy with a fuller religion. It appears that the more one is religious, the more there seems to be incoherence in practice. What is the problem? What is the solution?
The solution does not lie in getting rid of religion although it is a modern and natural reaction. Since religion harbours hypocrisy, the natural solution to reducing hypocrisy is to rid ourselves of religion. A better response would be to take a closer look at Christ and His challenge.
Ritual purity is not about us. It is never about how “clean” or how “pure” we are before God. It is not a case of making myself “clean” so that I can face God. The presumption is that I am on par with God and that it is up to me to perfect myself in order to face a perfect God. The truth remains that no matter how pure we are, we are never worthy of God. Thus, the answer is to look at the purity of Mary, namely her Virginity and ask what that is all about.
The Church has taught since the beginning that Mary remained a Virgin. Why is it that important? Virginity expresses dedication rather than purity. She was whole-heartedly dedicated to the Lord. The analogy is the tabernacle in every Church. It is reserved only for the Blessed Sacrament. Nothing and not even diamonds can be kept there except the lowly consecrated bread. Why? The tabernacle resembles the womb of Mary. She remained a Virgin because there is no place in her womb for anyone else except her Lord and Saviour. There is no one in the heart of Mary, except her Lord and Saviour.
Likewise for us. Laws are the structures whereas the heart is the flesh. The solution is to cultivate a heart for God. That is why Jesus said so simply to the Pharisees: Nothing from outside can make you unclean inside. What is unclean comes from your inside. If you are filled with evil and violence, you can be sure that your demeanour will exude that.
A true love of the laws must bear fruit in our behaviour. Sometimes we can get caught in discussions about how much we are observing a rite. On the other hand, there are those who react to the perception that there are too many rules and regulations to the point of stifling one’s creativity or desire to serve.
What is missed out is this: where is the heart in all these? To those who love, no distance is ever too great. Anyone who has fallen in love knows this. You will go out of the way, and not only that, you willingly embrace suffering because of love. But to those who struggle to love, even a step is an inconvenience. As the Malays say in their proverb. “Mahu seribu daya. Tak mahu, seribu dalih”. Translated, it literally means that “if you want, you will deploy a thousand attempts. If you do not want, you will table a thousand excuses”.
A simple test for us is the obligation. How many of us find ways of escaping any regulation? We do the minimum in order to fulfil what is required. But amazingly the Church is fantastic because she does not disdain this attitude. Like Christ, she never stops inviting us to a higher plane of love. Look at the contrition in our repentance. Imperfect contrition is the fear of hell. Perfect contrition is sorrow because I have offended God whom I should love with all my heart.
The world will not change if we add more rules or structures of “goodness”. The “globalists” believe they can force people to respect “rules” of engagement, that is, to accept diversity, equity or inclusion. Compulsion can only go as far as the heart is willing because without the heart, those compelled will pay lip-service. What is needed is more love in our hearts for God. The more we love God, the easier the laws are from Him.
Finally, those of us who value freedom associate the exercise of the faculty with choices available. The more choices the greater the freedom. But in truth, there is no absolute liberty to do as we wish because true freedom is to be free for excellence and never to be free for licence. Those who opt for personal licence will always find God’s laws to be burdensome. Those who opt for excellence will always search for the spirit that guides our laws. To those who love God, they will delight because His laws serve as a lamp to their feet, and a light to their path.
We are accustomed to our distilled water that we forget what ordinary government-supplied water tastes like. “Distillation” does that to most reality. It is somewhat akin to the way we hear Jesus. We distil His message meaning that we process it. In most cases we accept the Jesus who speaks like us but try to ignore the Christ who speaks unpalatable truths. It is a kind of distillation.
It is the last Sunday of our excursion into John 6. The full truth of Christ’s teaching has to be reckoned with. Those who think His language intolerable reacted strongly to Him. How could He? How dare He?
We can appreciate the Jews’ reaction because we also have a similar experience. We are more and more conscious of past injustice and the world has embarked upon a noble quest to redress historical wrongs. Coupled with the need to right past wrongs, we seem to be in a state of being offended by the past. Recently an actor remarked that it is no longer possible to make comedies because they would offend people. These days, nobody can say anything without somebody being offended.
Remember the scene where Jesus He drew in the sand? He was surrounded by a horde ready to stone an adulterous woman. He looked up and saw no one except the outcast. He comforted her gently by saying that since nobody dared to cast the first stone neither would He condemn her. But most crucially, He did not simply let her go. Instead, He challenged her to sin no more. In short, Jesus comforts but He also challenges.
This is important because we have a Jesus who tried to convince the crowd against crowning Him King. Instead of providing earthly strength, He would grant them the stamina for eternity. The only criterion was for them to eat His Flesh and drink His Blood. They could not accept Him. But Jesus was not offended that all but the Twelve abandoned Him.
Christianity is a religion of the cross-roads. We have to choose. And in some cases, our choice will offend even the gentlest of people. A good example is the teaching of St Paul in the 2nd Reading. According to the Apostle, the glue that holds together a couple is the love of Christ. In this relationship, a wife is to obey her husband. A husband is to love his wife. In this era, what many would find objectionable is the instruction for a woman to obey her husband. In an epoch where equality is everything, how dare a priest preach this?
The barrier to appreciating this Pauline teaching is the word “obey”. Many are unable to see beyond such a subjugating connotation of the word. What if the obedience is actually one side of the coin only? If a wife is to obey a husband, the reciprocal demand is that the man should sacrifice himself for the wife. Obedience and sacrifice are two sides of the coin of mutuality. Both are engaged in mutual self-donation. How cool is that? If a man demands obedience from the wife, he should be the first lay down his life for her. A man whose idea of life is to sacrifice for his wife is not going to be a tyrant.
In the 1st Reading, Joshua presented the people of Israel the option of how they want to live. It was no longer Moses who headed them but as they were poised to enter the Promised Land, the people must choose. Our challenge today is not really about choice. The word “choice” suggests that one can choose. Closer to the truth is not that we choose or can choose but rather it is God who must choose.
Apart from being easily offended, our ultimatum to God is that He should acquiesce to our lifestyle. We determine how we should live and God’s role is to be the rubber stamp. Remember how Jesus who sent the woman away also challenged her not to sin.
But look at opening act at the recently concluded Paris Olympics. They parodied the Last Supper of Christ in the name of diversity and inclusion. The last time, a cartoonish made fun of another major religion, cities got burnt in Europe. To add insult to injury, the spokeswoman gave a press release where she seemingly “apologised” to those who felt offended. Judging from this episode, God is supposed to accept the way we live and not the other way round. God gives us commandments and I am quite certain that they are not DEI, that is, diversity, equity and inclusion. The commandments may support the values of DEI but make no mistake that they are not the diversity, equity and inclusion of sin. In fact, all the commandments exclude sin of any kind from our behaviour.
It was not just the crowd who found Christ’s language intolerable. His Disciples too. Many of them could not stomach the truth in Christ’s command to eat His Flesh and drink His Blood. All of them abandoned Him. Jesus did not run after them to correct their misconception. Instead, He turned around to Peter and the Eleven and asked if they too would like to depart from Him.
Peter spoke for the Eleven and thereafter, through the centuries, his voice rings out for the Church: “To Whom shall we go, you have the Word of eternal life”. The Church has stood and continues to stand as the instrument to make present Christ so that those who receive Holy Communion regularly, might have access to eternity. The reality remains that each one of us might not always make the decision for Jesus Christ. We will fumble, fail and fall which means the decision for Him has to be made again and again and again. To choose Him is an act we must renew on a daily basis. This last bit of John Gospel is no longer about the establishment of the belief in the True Presence but rather it becomes our reckoning. Where do we stand? With God or without Him?
What can the world promise? It only has progress and novelty to distract us. Wisdom is enduring because it is consistent whereas novelty is temporary because it is capricious. One day formal and next day casual. When we are in a constant state of flux, it makes those who value consistency feel old and associated with it is the feeling is decrepitude. Nobody likes to feel old-fashioned.
Today, the 1st Reading stresses on wisdom. However our notion of wisdom is coloured by prodigy or enormity. Why? We are drawn towards the notion of more or abundance. Is it not true that the more data, details or facts a person knows, the more he or she is thought to be wiser? If you like, our idea of wisdom is encyclopaedic—to have such information literally like Wikipedia at your finger-tips.
Perhaps the wisdom we are chasing has less to do with the acquisition of facts. Rather, wisdom is acquiring a perspective which is divine, that is, to see the world as God does. Thus, the conversation between the crowd with Jesus today is one where the crowd could have gotten wiser. Sadly for them, it was a struggle. For us, we still have the grace to grow and ground our wisdom.
Since the Church has defended her teachings on the Eucharist for nearly 2000 years and because we want to enter more into this Eucharistic wisdom, we might survey what it means to truly eat the Bread of life.
According to Jesus, the Jews’ ancestors ate the manna from heaven but they had died and were long gone. Whereas the crowd was promised that by eating the flesh of Jesus and drinking His blood, they will live forever. The interesting feature about the promise is the act of consuming and the description used by Jesus. In fact, there is a physicality involved when the Evangelist John used the word for eating. He spoke of it as “trogon”. The translation of the verb is to “gnaw” or to “chew” which suggests that it is a more deliberate and intense exercise. The change from “eating” to “chewing” elicited objections from those who had heard Jesus. Furthermore, the instruction to drink blood went totally against the prohibition of Deuteronomy 12:23. They could not stomach the literal sense of Jesus’ commands.
Eternal life is premised on truly eating (chewing or gnawing) the flesh of Christ and drinking His blood. For us, it is indeed a confirmation that His Flesh and Blood are the necessary food for eternal life. The 1st Reading now makes more sense. The feast prepared by Wisdom has a Eucharistic overtone. What is pointed by Wisdom is that the person who lives, lives in God and lives for God. In other words, to exist, as all creation does, is to be directed towards the Lord. Wisdom provides the banquet for this direction, this orientation or this journey. Thus, the wise person is one who recognises the food that Christ desires to give to us.
The food that is associated with the notion of eternity is even more compelling when we realise that the entire world is seeking to live forever. Look around us. There is a proliferation of the commerce or industry dedicated to wellness. The water that we drink is not good enough to be purified by public authorities. Somehow we need an extra step in purification provided by Amway, Cuckoo, Coway or Diamond. How many slimming down diets are there in the market? What about the various lotions and potions we apply to make us look younger. This is not a criticism of the wellness industry. To be hale and hearty is good. What we should be aware of is that the worship of youthfulness plus our desires to be healthy are indicators of this deeper search for eternal life, whether we know it or not, whether we accept it or not.
Man desires to live forever and as proof, we want to be perpetually healthy so that we may squeeze or pack as many years as possible into this earthly life. In fact, our vision is so bodily and this is fascinating. Christ alone gives us His Body to eat and His Blood to drink so that our vision of longevity can be fulfilled and it is not an earthly eternity. What He proposes is a change, a kind of bodily transformation that makes us copies of His perfect self. As the anaphora of the EPIII points out “when from the earth, He will raise up in the flesh those who have died and transform our lowly body after the pattern of his own glorious body”.
The long Chapter 6 of John’s Gospel challenges us to look further into the horizon so that the care and maintenance of our physical health must always be accompanied by our concern for our spiritual well-being. Thus, wisdom is not the accumulation of knowledge. It is to know where to search and to source for eternal life. This is where we may be stumped. Meaning? We are challenged because the act of knowing and recognising is stymied by our lack of consistent effort in reaching out for eternal life. Even if we know what is good, we do not always reach for it. It is the classic Pauline dilemma. We do what we should not and do not do what we should.
Thus, we must not think less of the Jews who murmured against Jesus when He asserted the necessity of eating His Flesh and drinking His Blood. We are not unlike the Jews when we claim to believe in the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ and yet our behaviour or rather our absence speaks volumes. Failure to attend Sunday Masses or shying away from the Adoration Chapels in many parishes belies a blindness that impoverishes our faith in the True Presence.
A 5th century saint, John Chrysostom remarked, "How many of you say, I should like to see His face, His garments, His shoes. You do see Him, you touch Him, you eat Him. He gives Himself to you, not only that you may see Him, but also to be your food and nourishment”. As the wise Psalmist urges us, “Taste and see that the Lord is Good”. Jesus is with us in the Eucharist. He longs to be there for us. Are we with Him in adoration? If not, what are we waiting for?
This just occurred to me rather late in life. Recently we celebrated a feast of the human body and that was the Transfiguration. If we were to count from 6th August, this would render the Assumption as a kind of novena, that is, 9 days after the Transfiguration. But there is more to it being a novena than meets the eye.
It would have made more sense for the Assumption to follow the Ascension. In Mandarin the same word is used to describe the both the events. They are recounted as Jesus and Mary rising up to heaven. In English, the word Ascension projects a portrait of Christ Himself possessing the power of going up whereas the Assumption suggests that Mary needed assistance as she was brought up to heaven. This subtle linguistic difference provides a better link between the Transfiguration and the Assumption because Christ’s emanation of dazzlingly white glory is the roadmap for the Assumption.
The Transfiguration celebrates both God and man. Firstly, on Mount Tabor, both Moses and Elijah appeared and spoke to Jesus. According to Benedict XVI, God had revealed Himself to both these illustrious prophets. Moses wanted to see God face to face but only managed to catch a glimpse of God’s back. Elijah could only feel God’s presence in the gentle breeze caressing his face. The full glory of God until now was beyond humanity’s grasp. It was kept hidden and Man could only spy God’s fleeting shadow until now. On Mount Tabor, God reveals Himself fully through the transfigured face and body of Jesus. As the fullness of the Father’s revelation it makes sense that the Voice thundered from the cloud to listen to Him.
Secondly, the razzmatazz surrounding Christ’s Transfiguration, apart from revealing His divinity, is also a celebration of human possibility. The detailed depiction of Christ’s bodily change highlights the prospect that each man, woman and child has in the same transformative journey. Now a novena away we have proof. Mary’s exalted position comes from being the perfect disciple of her Son, as described succinctly in the Vigil’s Gospel—still happier those who hear the word of God and keep it. As the disciple par excellence, she should be the first to experience the divinisation of the human body.
Assumed body and soul into heaven after her earthly life, Mary symbolises hope in the Resurrection and serves as a reminder of the promise of eternal life. If the Transfiguration is the celebration of God and Man, where Christ’s divinity was put on full display and then the Assumption is the evidence of Man’s destiny. It affirms what we can become because of our faith in Christ’s Resurrection.
We all attend Masses regularly and occasionally a funeral Mass. I wonder if this embolism, that is, the inserted anaphora [prayer] in Eucharistic Prayer III has ever struck you. Listen to it the next time you attend a funeral.
Grant that he (she) who was united with your Son in a death like His, may also be one with Him in His Resurrection, when from the earth He will raise up in the flesh those who have died, and transform our lowly body after the pattern of his own glorious body.
This anaphora is a description of the Transfiguration and also a blueprint for our future.
The fact is we all want a forever future. Maybe we should care less of longevity because the result may not be what we desire—the future is where our senses begin to dull as we sense our reaction time slowing down. For example, when we trip, if we were agile, we can quickly recover but when our senses are dulled, you can literally watch yourself fall and are helpless to respond. We will turn the corner of the future with brittle bones. Out of focus eyesight blurs all faces and features. Lotions and potions may just smooth out the wrinkles but can do nothing to reverse this ageing decline.
The answer to living forever is not solving the problem of death meaning that it is not found in delaying death. The future lies in a transformation of our earthly body. We may have focused too much on living forever not realising that “forever” is only possible when our bodies are transfigured and transcended to a higher destiny. As the Preface for this solemnity says, Mary’s Assumption into heaven is the beginning and the image of the Church’s coming to perfection. She is the sign of sure hope and comfort for pilgrims especially for those who desire to live forever. In this desire for eternity, let us turned to Mary and ask for her patronage because she represents the future where our humble body can also share Christ’s glory of Transfiguration.
I am nowhere near the shadow of the great Elijah but I definitely can identify with him because I want to die too. Each morning when I wake up, my neck is stiff but not a whiff of hot “vadai” awaiting me. But back to Elijah, the scones are once again a pre-figurement or a type for the Eucharist that God wants give us.
We have strayed far into the territory of John 6 and last week, the crowd that hungered for physical nourishment asked for a sign to prove Jesus’ divine credentials. In today’s Gospel, Jesus pointed to Himself as the sign that they have been searching for. He is the Bread of life because He has been sent by God the Father.
The crowd was clearly disoriented because they had Jesus sized up. For them, He was an inconsequential son of Joseph the carpenter. Their set idea of who Jesus is blinded them to the possibility of faith in the One sent by God the Father. Indeed, faith is never an easy path because life throws challenges at us, most especially when we search for God. One of the things that we must appreciate is that even though we give up and lose faith, He does not abandon us. In fact, He is constantly there for us through the Eucharist that gives us strength. This is why for us the Mass is important. If we reduce attendance to simply an obligation to fulfil then we would have failed to appreciate the true meaning of the Eucharist.
As the Bread of life, Jesus Himself established the necessity of the Eucharist for eternal life. In my limited pastoral experience, I want to share what I think for some of us is a failure to grasp the full meaning of the Eucharist as the Bread of life. The matter concerns the baptism of children in a marriage between a Catholic and a non-Catholic.
In this age of indifference, we tend to relegate religion as somewhat benign in the sense that we accept the assertion that all religions are the same. After all, every religion will teach its adherents to be good. In some cases, a Catholic, out of respect for the non-Catholic spouse will want to defer the baptism of the children. Furthermore, for modernity, religion is a matter of personal choice and should never be forced unto someone. The common sentiment expressed is to allow a child the freedom to choose since there is no difference in the goal which is to be good.
Jesus was rather absolute in His statement. The entrance into heaven requires eating His Body and drinking His Blood. When a Catholic parent refuses to baptise or freely chose not to baptise the child to initiate him or her into the faith, that parent does not know Whom he or she is receiving. I want to be clear that those who marry a Catholic wife or a Catholic husband, and who are not Catholic themselves, there is no compulsion to convert. However, your Catholic spouse has a duty to baptise the children, for if not, it introduces a performative contradiction into what they believe and how they behave with respect to their belief.
The Lord has been feeding the Church with His Body and Blood since the Last Supper. He does it through the long line of apostolic succession in which the priesthood is the principal instrument for this purpose. For Him to categorically state that eternal life is premised on consuming His Flesh and imbibing His Blood, then it must be up to Him to provide the means for the confection of His Body and Blood. When a Catholic parent receives Holy Communion, presumably, he or she wants eternal life. And if eternal life is a premium, it would be a dereliction of duty for a parent not to feed the same premium food to the child.
Furthermore, parents routinely choose for their children. To assert that allowing a child to choose his or her religion when they are old enough is contrary to the logic of parenting. Parents choose schools, hospitals, food, drink and even friends. Why not the religion? But most damaging of all is the fact that the Catholic parent believes that the Eucharist grants eternal life but withholds it from the child or children. Either the Catholic parent is selfish, which is not the case or he or she does not know Whom he or she is receiving.
The basic teaching of Jesus is simple. He is the Bread of life. He is the food that the Father gives in order for us to gain eternal life. Imagine the world that is not fully sacramentalised. How much of Who Christ is and wants to share with the world is not achieved at all. Converting the world to Christianity and Catholicism is not easy. But perhaps the start is not out there. It is in here. Where is our own reverence towards the Bread of life? Maybe, it is because we treat it so casually that others do not know how to value it.
Christ the Bread of life might be better appreciated by others if we ourselves have learnt how to appreciate this immense treasure handed to us. Before we want others to access the grace of the Eucharist, we should be the first to value it.
Finally, the Eucharist is like marriage. It is interpersonal which means like every relationship, it can deteriorate and languish in jadedness. When we have to attend Mass every Sunday, it can be reduced to a routine that we forget that the reason for going there is to strengthen our relationship. The rapport with the Lord is fortified by a preparation that is reverential, a repentance that is sincere and a gratitude that is profound. A closer union with Jesus in the Eucharist renders our baptism more fruitful and unites us more deeply into the mystery of the Church. Finally, the Eucharist is the only spiritual food proper for the pilgrimage to eternity.
You may have heard of the word “hangry”. It is a neologism, a new word for “a hungry man is an angry man”, hence, “hangry”. We began our Eucharistic turn last week as the Gospel strayed from Mark to John. A friend of mine used to remark that his memory is perfect but short. That described the Israelites perfectly. They had narrowly escaped Pharaoh’s change of heart and only by the grace of God were they shielded from slavery again. Yet in the desert, driven by their “hanger”, they forgot and murmured against God. Despite their ingratitude, God displayed kindness by providing them not only with bread but also with meat. At every turn, their grumblings were met by God’s graciousness.
As we delve deeper into the long Eucharistic discourse of John’s Gospel and going beyond the previous Sunday’s theme of God’s generosity, we are invited not only to savour God’s benevolence but also to purify our search as the hunger intensifies.
Thus, it is an invitation into a deeper life of the Eucharist. Just like last Sunday, St Paul in the 2nd Reading invited the Ephesians to put on the new self, to be formed in the goodness and holiness of truth. The old self when clouded by spiritual blindness is debilitated. Imagine the Israelites in their short-sightedness had preferred slavery to freedom. They were willing to settle for something less.
In their desert of desperation, it became a classic case of “better the devil they had known than the devil they did not know”. It appeared that at their back, they smelled food never mind that there they were oppressed. In front of them, they had no inkling of what was to come. Suddenly the back seemed more compelling. In this area perhaps St Ignatius of Loyola has a great wisdom for us. He asked that we remember and treasure the heights of consolation so that we can weather our storms of desolation. In other words, remember the highs because they can carry through the valley of darkness.
Like the Israelites, the crowd in today’s Gospel seemed lost in that valley as they were fixated with getting having more of the gifts rather than to acknowledge the Giver. They only desired more of the same but Jesus challenged them to peer beyond the immediate need for physical nourishment and be concerned with their spiritual well-being. But they could not for even after their witnessing a stupendous miracle, they still insisted that Jesus prove His divinity. Talk about blindness and gaucheness.
There was a certain malaise that powered their gaucheness or spiritual blindness. Before we patronise them, we are not immune either. They were dying for bread whereas we are focused immediate gratification. For the Israelite, it was basically a physical need. For us, our blindness is emotional. We are a therapeutic society obsessed with how we are feeling.
Emotionalism is a scourge we pay scant attention to. We have come to associate our well-being in rather sensible terms. Just to illustrate, are these two options interchangeable? Being good and feeling good. Clearly they are not. But our idea of “good” seems more associated with how we are feeling rather than how we are. Thus, we are driven to chase the good feeling rather than focus on the attempts at being good. The former is just an emotion or a mood. The latter is moral.
Recently we celebrated St Mary Magdalene on 22nd July. Did you know that there is a chaplet named after her? After reading the prayers, one realises that each prayer of the bead is associated with cultivating the awareness of one’s sinfulness and growing in spiritual freedom. The connexion between the awareness of sinfulness and contrition for one’s sins is important because without this awareness and the corresponding contrition for sins, the Eucharist does not really make sense.
Sinners need the Eucharist because it is the spiritual food that leads to eternal life. But if one does not acknowledge his or her sinfulness and the essential need for forgiveness, then Holy Communion is no more than a health supplement. Just to give an example of a health supplement, think of a massage therapy. Do we need massages? No, we do not. Do they make us feel good? Yes, they do. They may be good for our general well-being but they are not essential for our salvation.
In today’s Gospel, Christ challenges us to go beyond settling for mundane mediocrity. Just being full is not enough. Life should be more than getting our fixes because physical hunger must always lead us to spiritual hunger. Jesus told the crowd to believe in Him. They clearly could not even though He announced to them that He is the Bread of Life and this brings us to the 2nd Reading.
It begs the question of how we can be the new Christ if we do not nourish our spirit. The Eucharist is the true food of the soul. We prepare ourselves to receive Him and the best preparation is to know Whom we are receiving and knowing that there must also be a corresponding preparation which consists of the examination of conscience and going for confession on a regular basis. It is like cleaning the house in order to welcome not just any guest but The Guest.
This is indeed an invitation for all of us who regularly consume the Bread of Life to become more Christ-like in our behaviour. As we hunger and are fed by Christ present in the Eucharist, we must also feed others who are hungry and are searching for meaning in life. We can show others that the ultimate goal of life is not the fulfilment of our physical wants and needs. It is not even psychological or emotional equilibrium. The challenge is to become the bread broken for others; the candle burnt out to give light to others. As a thanksgiving, the Eucharist is never intended for a selfish existence but serves as inspiration for others to look for the true God: Jesus Christ, the Bread of eternal life. It is a supreme honour for us who receive Holy Communion and at the same time a profound responsibility too. Today’s Gospel reminds us of St Augustine’s advice: “Christian! Become what you eat”.
