In our first reading today, many wonderful things are happening. Saul has now converted and begins his transitioning to Saint Paul. The Church relaxes therefore and begins to enjoy a period of relative peace in Judea and Jerusalem. Saint Peter, who by then has been already actively engaged in ministry and performing many miracles through the empowerment he received from Jesus, continues to astound many people by word and powerful deeds and so the Church continues to grow in the vibrancy and the purpose of its mission. We are told that the followers of Christ in these areas were ‘building themselves up, living in the fear of the Lord, and filled with the consolation of the Holy Spirit’ Acts 9:31.
This is wonderful, and it’s all because of Jesus, his goodness, his love, and the many gifts he bestowed on the early Church, which go way beyond just the miracles, which were a means through which heavenly joy and changed lives were an exterior manifestation that God was truly interested in them and doing something special, and had wonderful things planned ahead. The Magnificat captures our Blessed Mother’s initial joy at the contemplation of God’s sublime graces, and now the early Church can also proclaim with her, “the Lord has done great things for us. Holy is his name!” How could we not give him thanks and sing with joyful praise after we acknowledge how much the Lord has done (great things) for us?
This too, is the Holy Spirit’s gift to us.. to illuminate our minds collectively as the Church but also individually within each of us, he works, he forms, he purifies, he strengthens and he unites… he makes us bearers of peace, kindness, joy, love, mercy, gentleness… all his fruits and all his gifts. We need the Holy Spirit whom Jesus promised us as the Advocate who would “lead us into all truth”, because sometimes things will become difficult for us to understand, and so many opinions on truth were bound to conjure up so many errors and tragic impediments to the graces God wished to bestow on all his children.
Imagine for a moment what our Protestant brothers and sisters have missed out on, for centuries; the beautiful truths concerning our Blessed Mother—truths which can be traced all the way back to their foreshadowing in the Old Testament, but truths which ultimately give us as Catholics the comfort and security of knowing that Jesus’ own Mother, the Mother of God, was made to be our own Mother! They miss out on that. Secondly, they miss out on most of the sacraments. Yes, their baptism is recognized as lawful and valid (as long as it is administered properly with the proper form and matter), but what of the other sacraments? Imagine your entire life not going to confession because someone taught you that men were not given the authority by God to forgive other people’s sins (something Christ gave to the apostles post-resurrection which he himself was condemned for) and that confessing to God is sufficient. As if God needs to hear your sins. He already knows them. So here are our poor, deprived, but never forgotten, Protestant brothers and sisters who will never know the purifying and absolving graces of Sacramental confession, unless through God’s grace they convert, because a group of Christians way back five to six-hundred years ago decided to take biblical interpretation into their own hands. The Holy Spirit could never teach both at once: truth on the one hand and relativism and error on the other. Hence how important it is that we allow ourselves to be led, otherwise we walk away like many in today’s gospel, because they didn’t understand, and then form our own little cults and churches. Yet always, while the prodigal son is away, we continue to love them praying they’ll come back to their senses.
When we get to today’s gospel we see, that even before the reformation, Jesus is already contending with those who think they know better than the Holy Spirit. Those who think they know more than the Son of God. Like Peter, who after being told Jesus would suffer and die adamantly challenged the Lord on it, and was told to not be like Satan, who in pride tried to lead Jesus, to lead God in the desert, with his genius proposals – “Take that rock and turn it into bread, jump off the steeple of the temple, bow down to me and you’ll have it all!”
When Jesus announced the Eucharist, he did not give them the full picture. Like we spoke about yesterday about how God gives us directives, intuitions and illuminations, but never the full picture… that comes later with retrospect… and the ultimate form of retrospect perhaps, will be from heaven when we will see him and all his ways clearly, “face to face” as Saint Paul reminds us.
When it comes to the Eucharist, he never told those people who stopped following him to come back and give it time. He never said, “Guys, hold up a second. Lemme explain to you what’s goin on. Let me ‘fill in the gaps’ for you. Pretty soon, I will suffer and die, and that will be exactly at 3pm on Friday which for all time till the last day will be known as Good Friday. But on the night before, I will actually take bread, become present within it, and give it to my first priests, the apostles to consume. It won’t be just a symbol. Oh no, it will be my actual flesh and blood, yet veiled beneath the appearance of bread and wine.. you know, like Moses our forefather who approached God hidden beneath the veil of fire… same kinda thing, only better, because Moses could not consume the fire. This will be my way of giving you my body and blood, so relax with your imagination and the cannibalism that’s happening up there in your heads!” No, he gave them an idea, a directive, an illumination without getting into the details. So the question is why? Why would he not spell it out for them?
Why doesn’t God speak clearly and in detail to us about our lives, our future, and how to solve very specific problems? Why, why, why? I’ll tell you why: HUMILITY! God expects us to know and keep our place before him. He won’t intervene in human affairs according to the whims and demands of human dictates. He responds to humble prayer. He won’t be bossed around, but he humbly descends among us in the form of a slave, laying down his life as a ransom for us. But make no mistake about it, no body took his life from him. He laid it down of his own accord, and to Pilate he made this clear: “You would have absolutely no power over me, unless it had been permitted you from above” John 19:11. God will be bound by no one and nothing for he is the eternally-unlimited God and an example of this is what he was proposing as regards the Eucharist because what he proposed was something that only God would be able to accomplish. Imagine him saying, “Unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you will have no life in you.” What? How? If you give me your flesh and blood, how will YOU still be alive? Something just doesn’t make sense. And naturally so, to our mere mortal minds, and the way they began to imagine this happening was something they couldn’t come to terms with.
Those people who wanted to leave, he let them go, like the Father let the prodigal son go.. no argument, no drama, just the wisdom of the Father that knew his child would be back but that they needed to learn a lesson through their escapism and their withdrawal from difficult things. People leave for different reasons. According to the Pew Research Centre, twenty reasons are given for leaving the Catholic Church. The highest percentage of those who left and are now unaffiliated just “gradually drifted away from the religion” (71%). The second highest reason given was that the person stopped believing in the religion’s teachings (65%). So we gradually drift away and stop believing in the religion’s teachings. Same holds true for men who have left the priesthood. Most will say their faith left them. Yet when asked how their prayer life was fairing, almost all, without fail, admitted that it was non-existent.
Brothers and sisters, if we learn just one major take-away from today’s gospel and how people buckled and left when Jesus spoke about giving us his body and blood, it’s this: Faith is a gift. It is a gift open to all, but it is a gift to which one needs to be open to receive. Open to all, yet requires an openness to receive. In other words, it will not be forced on someone like studying is forced on a child eager to out and play hockey with his friends. Yet faith needs a proactive element from our end so as to cultivate it. We can have a field, but unless we tend to it, the harvest will never come. So too it is with our faith… we’ve been given this great treasure hidden in a field, but unless we open up that treasure we’ll never truly discover what’s on the inside, and what’s worse, we may just end up prematurely walking away without ever looking back and that would be a tragedy. As Bishop Sheen once said, “The great tragedy in life is not what we suffer, but it’s what we miss!” May you never miss your opportunity to be united to the Lord who loves you in the most sublime way possible, and receive the pledge of everlasting life and being raised on the last day, through his Eucharistic presence within you. Amen.
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