Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time

The words I have spoken to you are Spirit and life

The last two weeks, John's gospel has begun with "murmuring" in response to Jesus' claim to be the Bread of Life.  Today, it isn't "the Jews" who are murmuring, but Jesus' disciples.  After the discourse on eating Jesus' body and blood, that it is real food and real drink, he has forced the hands of those who purport to follow him; it is time to separate those who can commit to this truth from those who cannot.  For those who would like to believe in a Jesus who demands that we only "follow", but not believe what he says, this is a very problematic set of verses.  Jesus now reveals why this truth is not self-evident, despite "following" him in his ministry:

"For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted him by my Father." 

In John's gospel, because of Jesus' claim to be God's bread sent down from heaven, "many of his disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied him."  

The gospel does not indicate how many left, but turning to the disciple who would later deny him three times, and the one to whom Jesus would call the cornerstone of his church, asks Simon Peter "Do you also want to leave me?"  The reply is remarkable: "To whom shall we go?  You have the words of eternal life?"  

Peter and those who continue with Jesus don't see their discipleship as an option; they can't imagine life without Christ.   Peter didn't say "I'd really like to stay, but..."  For Peter, following was not an option, not because it was easy, but because he could not see any other possibility.

In considering what gathers us together weekly to celebrate in communion with one another and the real presence of Christ, could we confess, as did Peter, that we have no other place to go, because for us our encounter with Christ together is "spirit and life"?  

Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Hoc est Corpus Meum

If you noticed a similarity between the graphic for today's blog and the Latin title ("This is my body"), it will come a no surprise that hocus pocus is derived from the Latin mass' words that the priest uses in the consecration of the bread into the body of Christ.  Sacrament is often mistaken for magic.

Mistaking the rituals of Christian worship for magic goes back well over a thousand years to the Romans' misunderstanding as to the nature of the Eucharist, and how we can "eat" the body of Christ; Christians were, among other false charges, regarded by many as cannibals. Recently, I had a young man at my parish explain to me why he has a reluctance to attend Mass: "Its too magical; I can't relate to a magic Jesus".  And herein lies the difficulty many have of understanding the nature of sacrament as distinct from magic.

When the Temple authorities argued about Jesus' proclamation that "I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world", they encountered the seemingly impossible.   Then it gets even stranger when Jesus says "...unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you . . . . Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him." No wonder the many of those outside of Christianity regarded Christians with suspicion.  What a doctrine!

But Jesus is calling us to be more than an agape-meal fellowship, more than simply a gathering of like-minded do-gooders who sit down and enjoy a common meal.  While the sacrifice of the Mass is indeed symbolic, it is the symbol that brings the reality of what it symbolizes to life.  Put another way, the bread and wine of the Mass are symbols that bring the reality they symbolize (body and blood of Christ) when taken in faith.  Jesus is asking us, as a matter of faith, to enter into a new reality---a reality that makes communion with his sacrifice a present-day reality through this sacrament.

The "common meal" aspect of the Mass has enjoyed the emphasis for the past 40 years or so, but John's gospel reminds us that our Eucharistic sacrifice joins us, physically, with the reality of Christ's sacrifice.  Christ's calls us to more than an important memory-meal by declaring "For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink"; he is calling us to a physical reality, not through a magical act, but an act grounded in faith.  Magic needs no faith, but sacraments require it. As Catholics, any one of us may come to the Eucharist with insufficient faith, but it is the faith of the gathered assembly, indeed, the faith of the entire Church, which allows us to participate in this reality.  The symbol becomes what it symbolizes even if we individually lack sufficient faith.  Clearly this is not hocus pocus.

That is why we gather, and together participate in this sacrifice. The priest's sacrifice is the gathered sacrifice of the faithful.  What is done at the altar does not begin and end with the priest, but begins with the faithful and ends with the faithful; the priest is called to mediate this reality sacramentally.  The Eucharist celebration is presided over, and the elements consecrated by a priest, but he does so first and foremost as a member of the faithful gathered.  The power to consecrate the elements is not his power, but the extension of the work of the Holy Spirit from the community of the faithful. As our Orthodox brothers and sisters experience in the words of the priest before receiving communion: " Holy Things for Holy People."  Christ's body and blood belong to us, because we belong to Christ.  Christ's one, physically real sacrifice becomes physically real in us when we receive as a member of the Church his "true flesh" and his "true blood".

Ninteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

"Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him"

This line taken from John's gospel is the core of what Catholics believe about unity.  However, this unity of which John speaks is sometimes confused with uniformity by the institutional Church..  Case in point: the recent doctrinal investigation by Rome of the Leadership Conference of Women Religious assessing how well the organization is aligned with Church teaching on matters of "feminist issues"(op. cit. NCR).  Specifically, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith is concerned that the LCWR is silent in matters of birth control/abortion and marriage norms set by the institutional Church, and that it gives dissenting voices from Church teaching, some of them quite radical (i.e. espousing a post-Church spirituality, post-Jesus, spirituality [op. cit. Bishop Leonard P. Blair]). The name of this investigation is formally called a "doctrinal assessment".  The goal is to have the LCWR align what they say (or what they allow their members to say publicly)  with official Church teaching; for Rome, having holy people saying different things about what it means to be an ecclesiastical community undermines the Faith for all believers.  However, it is this mistaken notion of uniformity for unity that I believe is a threat to the Faith.  Pope Benedict wrote

"We cannot keep to ourselves the words of eternal life given to us in our encounter with Jesus Christ: they are meant for everyone, for every man and woman. ... It is our responsibility to pass on what, by God's grace, we ourselves have received."
- Pope Benedict XVI, Verbum Domini, 2010

This is precisely what the sisters of the LCWR are attempting.  In their mission statement, they declare that bringing the Good News, "to further the mission of the Gospel" to the "world today"is the animating nexus of their community.  The Good News is often messy, because everyone who has been transformed by this "encounter" with Christ has, as part of her or his story, the uniqueness of the encounter.  Different that these encounters may be, we seek community to share our stories, and listen to the stories of others from the founding of the Church in the first century down to the present.  It should not be surprising, then, that the meanings attached to these personal experiences diverge in many places--good for spiritual health, bad for institutional uniformity.

Jesus said I am the "living bread" because he established a relationship with his disciples that continues as "living bread", a nourishing relationship through the Holy Spirit.  The unity, of which the Church speaks so much about, is borne from this living and dynamic relationship, and yields poorly to the box-building structures of institutional rule-making; unity is full of dissent, divergent understandings and practices, and embraces everyone who claims a relationship with Christ within and without the institutional Church. The keeper of uniformity is doctrine; the keeper of unity is dialogue.  It takes greater faith to live working with unity than simply abandoning the responsibility of communion by blind obedience to institutional decrees; one's conscience must be given the ability to speak truth to authority.

Dialogue is communion, because it presupposes sharing rather than declaring.  That isn't to say that there can be no doctrine or statements of definition, provided they are a product of this dialogue, something the Church increasingly is seeing as a threat to its centralized authority.  To be a living church, is to allow the messiness of relationship and espouse the humility to seek a new direction when the old one no longer speaks Good News to the world.  If we seek the eternal in human institutions, we worship a false God.

Jesus' admonition in today's gospel to "stop murmuring among yourselves" because "no one can come to me unless the Father, who sent me-draw[sic] him."  He then goes on to cite Isaiah 54 "They shall all be taught by God."  Our first and primary teacher in our spiritual journey is not the decrees of church, per se, but God, or more specifically, our living and dynamic relationship with God through Christ and the Holy Spirit that is tested not against a rigid authority, but against a sensus fidelium--honoring the experiences of the faith-filled as a foundation of expressing what we believe and understand to be true. When Church doctrine no longer speaks to the faithful, it becomes bread with bleached flour, void of sustaining nutrition, not the Bread of Life from which one may eat and never go hungry.