Sunday
17 (B): Read – 2Kings 4:42-44; Jn 6:1-15
Over the next few weeks, the Church will have us read the entire Chapter 6 of St. John’s Gospel which is essentially
about the sacrament of the Eucharist. Since the Eucharist replaces the Passover in the new dispensation established by the
Lord Jesus, Chapter 6 of St. John, especially to help the Jewish readers of the time, is filled with references back to the
events of the Exodus. The Passover meal was, and still is for the Jews today, a perpetual memorial of God’s liberation
of Israel, and was consumed during the actual slaying
by God’s angel of the first-born of Egypt. So too the Eucharist is the perpetual memorial of God’s liberation of
humanity from death which we eat during the Mass, which is the sacramental re-presentation of the actual sacrifice, of the
slaying, of the Lamb of God. This means, therefore, that we assist really and truly at Christ’s self-offering to the
Father, as if we were standing by Mary, John and the Magdalene. His self-offering to us in His Risen Body is now given, from
the Father through the Spirit, in the Eucharist. As our catechism teaches us, the glorified Christ, Body, Blood, soul and
divinity, is truly, totally and permanently present in the Eucharist, under the appearances of bread or wine, as long as those
appearances persist.
In the account of the multiplication of the loaves which we hear today Jesus is preparing His followers to understand
and accept this doctrine, beautiful but difficult. He is the new Moses. There will be a new Exodus, His death for us. He is
also the new manna, the true and living bread come down from heaven. He teaches all this, first, by the miracle itself, by
showing his power as Lord of nature, and, second, also by performing it around the significant time of the Passover, in the
context of a meal. What does He seek from the people? A response of faith, that is, the acceptance of Who He Is, and the spontaneous
surrender of themselves to Him, to His Word and to His power. So the miracle is but a prelude to what Jesus will then teach
them about the bread of life and about that bread being the medicine of eternal life. He knew He had first to excite their
faith in Him in order then to teach them the difficult doctrine on the Eucharist and so to receive the full expression of
their faith in Him.
Yet, many misunderstood what Jesus was looking for. He wanted their faith: they wanted an earthly King who would satisfy
their earthly longings. They do recognize Him as the “Prophet who was to come into the world”, but they interpret
it all in too worldly a way: too much of the world and not enough of the Prophet! But even as “the Prophet”, for
them, as a new Elijah, Jesus would crush the Romans; as the Messiah he would provide banquets of lavish food and wine to banish
hunger and need. Later on in John’s Gospel, Jesus admits almost with exasperation to Pontius Pilate, no less: “Yes,
I am a King, but my Kingdom is not of this world.” The Jews insisted otherwise. And as Jesus again says to Pilate: “For
this I was born, for this I came into the world: to bear witness to the truth. All who are on the side of truth hear my voice.”
Jesus is the King of Truth. We know well Pilate’s cynical response to this: “Truth? What is that?” And in
some senses, the response of the crowd in wanting to force Jesus to be their magical politician, was equally cynical: “we
don’t want the bread of true life you offer; we want our stomachs filled.”
Whoever does not receive Jesus Himself as the Truth incarnate cannot in truth receive Jesus Himself made flesh and
blood in the Eucharist. For the Eucharist is the Truth; and if you are not in full communion with the Truth, neither are you
in full communion with the Eucharist, no matter how often you receive it. How can we say “no” to the Truth of
Christ, taught to us by His Will through the Church, yet say “amen” to the Body of Christ administered to us by
that same Church? The Eucharist will only fill our hearts with true love if we allow the Truth to fill our minds and hearts
with the true light of Christ’s Word! Otherwise, as most of us sadly know from our sinful experience, we will live in
a form of spiritual schizophrenia: happily Catholic when it suits us, and bad-temperedly so when we are challenged to go beyond
the comfortable limits of our moral and spiritual compromises. Yet, my friends, we must all understand that the choices we
make have their consequences, both now and in eternity.
Still and yet, Jesus tries so hard, so mercifully, so compassionately, to approach us all and help us come to Him through
the so many signs of His goodness. But He wants a two-way relationship, in which His longing thirst for our faith in that
goodness, for our hope in His promises and for our love of His Truth and Will, will indeed be quenched. His truth is not spoken
to limit our freedom to think or to undermine our dignity. His truth is not aimed at spoiling our lives, our needs, our dreams.
His truth is spoken to bring us true freedom!; an inner sense of order and purpose to the jigsaw of our fragmented lives.
Jesus wants no fragment of our lives to be lost, but to be gathered up, redeemed and made whole in the peace of His Truth.
If we do not trust His truth, and trust the way He teaches it to us through His Mystical Body; if we do not allow ourselves
to be convinced by the signs of His attentive and burning love: then we will miss the point even of the Eucharist, for the
Eucharist is His greatest miracle, the greatest statement of His greatest Truth: God’s immortal, undying love for us.
So, we cannot pick and choose from the Truth for our self-serving purposes. The history of the Church is littered with
heresy which is akin to fragmenting Christ Himself, or hijacking one or other aspect of the Gospel to justify one’s
own personal preferences. But Christ guarantees the whole Truth to us: He promised His Apostles that precisely at the Last
Supper: “There are many more things I have to say to you, but they would be too much for you now. But when the Spirit
of Truth comes whom I shall send to you from the Father, He will lead you to the complete truth.”
The same Spirit who worked in Jesus in His entire public ministry; the same Spirit he breathed upon the Apostles for
the binding and loosing of sins: the Spirit He sent upon the Apostles at Pentecost to take the Truth to the ends of the earth:
that Spirit has not abandoned us! Until the end of time, the Spirit is the agent of Jesus to preserve His Church from error
in matters of faith and morals; the Spirit is the force-field around us preventing the gates of hell from prevailing against
us. This is the same Spirit the Apostles passed on to their chosen successors, known as the Bishops. The Apostles and their
successors, in matters of faith or morals, even in the darkest periods of the Church’s history (and one of them might
be today), exercised what we call the function of the Magisterium of the Church: to preserve, defend and promote in its integrity
the deposit of faith. It is the Spirit in the Magisterium that preserves it intact, not the human beings who hold the office,
for the Spirit is faithful to Jesus’ word and to those who keep His Word.
The Magisterium has had two main other functions since the Ascension of Jesus: the first was to give its seal of approval
to the writings on the sayings and deeds of Jesus in the texts we now know as Gospels. It was the Magisterium that decided
which books would constitute what we call today “the Bible”. In this sense, the Magisterium precedes “the
Bible”, even although it is subservient to it because it recognizes in its contents the inspiration of the same Holy
Spirit who inspires the Magisterium itself. The other main function of the Magisterium in the power of the Spirit has been
to interpret, to unfold and to develop the integrity of the Truth of Christ across the centuries; this is what we call Sacred
Tradition, with a capital “T”. The Councils, the Synods, the encyclicals and all these documents which constitute
the body of the doctrine of our faith: these all testify to the words of Jesus: “The Spirit will lead you to the fullness
of the Truth”.
Certainly there have been excesses in the use of authority and power in the Church, failures and neglect, as we know
all too well in our own times, and to our severest chagrin. But in matters pertaining to the truth of the faith itself and
to the truth of moral doctrine as it flows from that faith, the Church is preserved from error by the Holy Spirit of Jesus
the Risen Lord.
There are two conclusions I want to draw from all this for ourselves. The first is that we can be surer than sure that
the teaching of the Church in matters of faith and morals is the teaching of Christ Himself. Now, perhaps some take exception
to the way, the manner or the style in which that truth is communicated. And maybe they are right. But they would be wrong
to conclude that a weakly argued teaching renders that teaching questionable, null or void: that would be to confuse substance
with style and it would be to confuse doctrine with mere rational discourse. One thing is to say: “I don’t understand
this teaching”, but quite another is to conclude, “I therefore disagree with it”. Lack of understanding
may be the fault of the explanation, it may be a lack of the one who does not understand, or it may be both. But lacks can
be helped or worked on. Disagreement is quite different. Disagreement is a statement of rejection of a teaching because someone
believes he or she knows better than the Magisterium. But if we reject in this way, are we not being like the Jews in today’s
Gospel who, while recognizing Jesus as the Prophet, want to set aside Jesus’ own understanding of His mission to replace
it with theirs? And anyway, on what authority can we disagree with or reject the teaching of the Church, in part or in whole?
Conscience? But conscience is not the source of Truth; our conscience is not Christ, but rather the voice of God urging us
to choose to act in accordance with the Truth. And unlike the Magisterium, our conscience can err. So we all need great prudence
and humility in this context so as not to confuse legitimate freedom of thought or expression with a practical attitude of
disobedience to the Spirit of Jesus speaking to us through those Jesus Himself has appointed in the Church to be the guarantors
of the faith.
The second conclusion is this. Assent to the truth of the faith is not in the first place an act of the mind, but the
surrender of the heart, because the Truth is a Person before it is a formula. The heart’s love for Christ and His Church
is the greatest reason anyone can have for accepting the truth of the faith. Peter and the other Apostles, at the end of Chapter
6 of St. John’s gospel, will be no less bewildered than the crowd at Jesus’ teaching on the need to eat His flesh
to gain eternal life. But since they loved Him, they were able to answer the question of Jesus: “Do you too want to
leave me? … Lord, to whom
shall we go, you have the message of eternal life; we know and we believe that you are the Son of God.”
Many in the Church in recent times have been bewildered and scandalized by the failures of their leaders, priests and
Bishops, and I am sure many of you, too, have been tempted to say goodbye to the Church. Yet we need to learn to love the
Church and say to Her in imitation of Peter and the Apostles: “To whom shall we go? You have the message of eternal
life.” That is faith; that is faithfulness.
If we do not accept with faith, hope and love, this fundamental chain of connection between Jesus, the Spirit, the
Eucharist, the Apostles, the Bishops, the Church, the Magisterium, Scripture and Tradition, then we run the risk of turning
the Truth of the faith into one more ideology or thought system beside others. And we do it, to boot, on our own rather dubious
authority.
As we prepare to partake of the Eucharist and participate sacramentally in the sacrifice of Calvary, let us ask of
Him who died for us to renew deeply within us our faith in His Will and in His gift to us of the teaching authority of His
and our beloved Church, so that any of the fragments of our spirits that may yet be out of sync with that authority, may be
gathered up and fill the twelve baskets of the twelve apostles, so that nothing and no-one gets wasted.
Msgr. Peter Magee
Saturday, July 26th -Sunday, July 27th, 2003: 6.30pm, Mother Seton, Germantown;
10.00, St. Matthew’s, DC; 12.15, St. Dominic’s, DC; 6.00 pm, St. Raphael’s, Rockville
