Father THOMAS IDERGARD SJ
Homily for 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time
2024-08-25
Year B: Joshua 24:1-2, 15-18; Ps 33; Ephesians 5:21-32; John 6:60-69
St. Lars Catholic Church, Uppsala (English Mass)
Dear sisters and brothers in Christ,
We have come to the end of several weeks of following Jesus’s teaching in the sixth chapter of the Gospel of St. John about his true and real presence in the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. Christ’s own sacrifice of divine love is made present in the Church’s sacrifice of bread and wine, to provide spiritual nourishment in a physical form for our increasing participation in God’s eternal life, starting here and now, and to strengthen us in all the sacrifices we make for divine love when we truly follow Christ.
When many of the listeners in today’s gospel react to Jesus’s invitation to eat his flesh, they do not understand that he is speaking literally, in a way that will manifest itself sacramentally in the Eucharistic bread carrying his own whole life and thus his flesh, into our flesh. Many of the listeners instead think that he is speaking symbolically with an ancient Hebrew expression for war crimes. Hence their outrage.
But Jesus does not adapt to what listeners, then and now, find easily digestible and fitting to purely human norms and experiences. Without considering what we want to hear, Jesus tells us what we need to hear: “Does this upset you? What if you should see the Son of Man ascend to where he was before?” He wants us to trust that what he says is literally true. If we do not trust what he says regarding the Eucharist and the other six sacraments, we cannot trust his revelation of divine love or his resurrection either.
When God speaks, reality changes literally and profoundly. Unlike our words, the eternal Word does not refer to something that exists. It causes things to come into existence, or to receive a completely new existence. The Gospels all testify to this power: “Lazarus, come out”, “Little girl, I tell you, stand up”, “Be clean” to the leper, “Be silent” to the storm, etc.; just like the word God speaks at the beginning of creation: “Be light”.
In the same way, the divine Word transforms the bread into the Body of Christ during Mass, when Jesus himself says, mediated by the priest consecrated in the unbroken order of faith from the Apostles, that “this is my Body”. To receive Holy Communion in a Catholic or an Orthodox Mass is to publicly and openly profess that you hold this to be true as well as the authority of the Church that provides it, to provide it.
Also today, people, even Christians, recoil when realizing that God in Christ, the Word made flesh, wants to change us; from God’s image, in which everyone is created from the moment of conception without exception, into God’s likeness, which is sainthood and eternal life. Taking Jesus seriously in his claim to be the only way to God the Father, leaves little room for compromise with my own views and interpretations.
Individualism, however, tempts us to believe that true spiritual life is governed by our conditions; that we can pick and choose what we like from the teaching and example of Jesus presented, on his direct assignment, by Catholic faith; or, more spiritually aggravating, that we can actively turn a blind eye to, openly oppose, what we do not like or understand. Or individualism tempts us to think that it is mainly others who should listen or do better.
Christ has established and sanctified the Catholic Church where His and the Father’s Spirit is fully operational, despite the sins of all of us there, and wants to help us receiving divine life. Through the seven sacraments. Through the revelation of the Bible and the unbroken tradition of the Apostles, what is called the “rule of faith” and cannot be changed, not even by councils or popes, because truth remains truth. And through the intercessions and example of the saints. As we heard in the second reading from Ephesians, Christ and the Church are, in this sense, one.
Our task, or vocation, is therefore to receive the Catholic faith and morals in full, even if we might need a long time, in most cases a lifetime, to understand and embrace them. God’s gift of himself can only be received, i.e., the grace of the sacraments can only work, if we do what we can to give ourselves completely to him. In the case of Holy Communion, believing what Jesus says about his real presence in the Sacrament and having confessed serious sins before receiving.
To allow Christ and his norms, the Kingdom of Heaven, occupy more and more space in our lives, helped by the Holy bread of the Eucharist, is to always praise the Lord, as our responsorial psalm put it. This work of grace in our lives, for our change and transformation to holiness, can be painful and difficult because it both entails and presupposes sacrifices. Of which the first and most basic is the insight of being a sinner in need for forgiveness and reconciliation.
Measuring life by our standards, we do not need forgiveness. But then we will never know Jesus, who is not a wisdom teacher or a peace prophet, but God who comes in a human, physical and visible form to everyone who understands that they are weak and in need of healing. The difficult thing is not to reach out for Jesus’s hand at the bottom of life, in misery of various kinds. No, the difficult thing, and therefore Christian vocation in its full, is to see, amid one’s successes, strong opinions and stubborn, triumphant will, one’s own true inabilities, weaknesses and need for healing. For this, the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ presented to us in the Holy Eucharist is our best and most reliable help.
In our first reading from the book of Joshua, we heard how the people of Israel confirmed their willingness to serve the Lord in their new homeland, by recalling God’s liberation of them from slavery in Egypt.
Our continuously deeper yes to God is also helped by us sometimes meditating God’s traces and marks, large and small, in our lives, and giving thanks for what God gives and for how he carries, through obstacles, difficulties and darkness. In doing so, we will see and recognize where we might be drifting away, or have turned away, from what Christ teaches through the Church. Then, we can ask for help to respond better and better, with more and more of our lives, rooted in the Church’s profession of faith, which St. Peter expressed in today’s Gospel, and which his successors, the Popes, in every age, have the ultimate task to help us to express through living it, more and more: “Lord, who shall we go to? You have the message of eternal life, and we … know that you are the Holy One of God.” Amen.