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?
