John 6:51 - 58
Last Thursday I met a lady who is 102 years old. Her doctor sent her to rehabilitation because she thought it would help her continue to be independent for a few more years. She was getting to the point where she couldn’t walk very well. She lives alone but has a couple of friends who drop in once in a while. She had six children and is looking forward to a reunion with the three who are already in the next life. She told me she can’t wait to get to heaven and can’t see the point of prolonging her life. At the same time she’s happy and cheerful and interested in current events. Her mind is sharp and her body works pretty well. In our conversation she told me that she misses Sunday mass, because she can’t get there anymore. So she watches it on television. She says the rosary every day. When I asked her where she gets the strength to keep on going, she smiled and pointed up to heaven. I asked her whether she was on the list to receive the Eucharist, because some wonderful volunteers from our parish go to the nursing home every week to bring the Eucharist to Catholics there. She lit up and told me she had been wanting to receive it since before Covid -- she stopped going to church about that time. I asked her what the Eucharist meant to her and she replied that it was like going to heaven. And when I thought about it, she had a point.
If we think about our first parents, Adam and Eve, before original sin we hear about them having a certain intimacy with God. God told Adam to name the animals and to tend the garden. He created Eve from Adam’s body because he recognized Adam’s loneliness. He gave Adam and Eve all they needed to know to enjoy paradise, and probably a time would have come when human beings would live out their lives in joyful, painless toil, caring for the garden, and then enter heaven-- without dying. Children would be born without pain or discomfort and continue God’s command to “fill the earth and subdue it”. Some of the early church fathers recognized this and because they saw Mary as untouched to original sin, called the end of her earthly life a Dormition, or falling asleep, rather than death.
Jesus was sent to begin the process of restoring the human race to what God had originally intended. As he told Philip, “If you have seen me, you have seen the Father”. And elsewhere, “the words I speak to you I do not speak on my own; the Father who dwells in me is doing his works.” So when we see how Jesus goes about dealing with those around him, we can glimpse something about this plan.
First, Jesus chooses the Apostles. We don’t know why he picked them, especially Judas. But maybe he picked these very ordinary men to show us that everyone is invited. And he picks you and I. When we are baptized we are invited into this great mystery, to become children of the Father, like Jesus himself. Like Judas, we can turn down the invitation. You can’t love unless you are free to love or not love.
Second, Jesus teaches the apostles. We see in the scriptures that this was not easy. They misunderstand him over and over again, and they almost desert him for good in the end. Jesus teaches you and I through the scriptures and the Church. We don’t understand everything either, and frequently get mixed up in our thinking, because the world is always trying to separate us from God by confusing us, for one thing. In this month of the Sacred Heart, we are being told by our society to celebrate all those brave souls who are unhappy with the sexual identity God gave them. And being human, we feel for them, those with same sex attraction, those who feel they’ve been born in the wrong body. And we don’t understand. And our missionaries, once proudly bringing Christ to people who hadn’t heard the good news, are now out there tending to material needs -- a good thing -- and leaving the indigenous people to follow their own ways instead of entering into the Christian family. And we feel ambiguous -- Christianity will always alter a culture, and for some, that’s a terrible thing. Being taught by Jesus is a life-long effort.
Disciples in Jesus’ time not only learned from the Master, but waited on his needs and tried to imitate his behavior and mannerisms. They were, in a sense, servants. Jesus elevates his disciples to friends --” you are no longer servants, but friends, because I have told you everything the Father has spoken to me”. And The Father seeks our friendship as well -- he desires to make us like himself, as he did Jesus.
Holy Communion is the deepest form of friendship God gives us in this life. We literally become one with Jesus, who lives on in the sacrament. Holy communion is also the taste of the heavenly banquet to which we’ve been invited. And in Holy Communion, like the Blessed Mother, we have the privilege of bearing Christ, literally, in our bodies, if only for a short while. Holy Communion also unites us with all those saints down through the ages, with our parents and grandparents, and with each other, because there is only one Jesus Christ.
The second Vatican Council called the Eucharist the source and summit of Christian life. When the bread and wine are transformed by the Holy Spirit into the Body and Blood of Jesus, everything begins again; and when we receive his flesh and blood into our own, we approach and indeed, taste heaven.
