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Sunday 19 (B): Read Jn 6: 41-51
Without wishing to repeat all I have said, or all you have heard, the past two weeks, allow me just to recap.
For five consecutive Sundays around this time the Church has us proclaim most of the 6th Chapter of St. John’s
Gospel. One
way of summing up that chapter is to say that Jesus presents Himself in it as the fulfillment of the
Old Testament and as the embodiment (literally, in “His flesh”) of the New and Everlasting Testament. He does
so by performing miracles directly reminiscent of the Exodus (the multiplication of loaves recalls the manna; walking on the
water recalls Yahweh’s opening of the crossing through the Red Sea for His people), but which also anticipate the new
and definitive Exodus: indeed, Christ’s own death, resurrection and ascension is the real Exodus. It is not the
passage from a political slavery to a politico-religious freedom in an earthly place, but the “passage” (cf. the
Transfiguration) from the jaws of hell to the heights of heaven: He does it to gain freedom from sin and eternal death for
us. His Word of Truth and faithfulness to the Father is the new Law, the sacrament
of His Body and Blood is at once the perfect sacrifice for sin and the Bread and Drink of eternal life. In return, all He
seeks from us is that we should accept Him as our Savior, Redeemer, our Word and Bread of eternity and our Hope of Heaven,
the true Promised Land, the true Jerusalem.
Belief in Him is what Jesus seeks as the doorway into our hearts in order to bring us out of ourselves and enrapture
us up into that Exodus of His. That is the meaning of our baptism. Ours is not a private religion where God comes in and closes
the door to keep “everyone else out”. Once baptized, love and hope are also born, and in the grace of all three
theological virtues Jesus will free us from error, from the isolation of hatred and sin and from the despair of eternal death.
He does this by feeding us the Bread of His Word (the manna in the OT symbolized the Torah, the Law of God) and of His very
own Body.
In the rather haunting text of today, Jesus speaks, however, of the mysterious intimacy existing between Himself and
His Father and of how our being “enraptured up into” Jesus is primarily the work of the Father, drawing us into
that “fascinating and tremendous” inner life of God. You will remember that, in the Garden of Eden, humanity once
walked with God in the familiarity of the “evening breeze”, but the murmuring jealousy of Satan and the tragic
mistake of our first parents ejected us from the divine familiarity. Jesus seems to take up these ideas in one fell swoop
when He says: “Stop murmuring among yourselves (the sign of evil’s effects in us). No one can come to me unless
the Father who sent me draw him, and I shall raise him up on the last day (the opposite of ejection, rejection and perdition).
It is written in the prophets: They shall all be taught by God. Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes
to me.” It’s as if He’s saying: “Quieten the restless fidgeting of your anxious hearts, and, in that
silent stillness, listen to the Father, learn from Him and you will feel your heart being drawn to me, the Son.” To
be taught by God was the prophetic promise accompanying the new covenant, regarding which Jeremiah, for example, speaks when
he writes of Yahweh “writing His law on their hearts.” Have you every stopped to imagine in silence the Hand of
God on your heart, erasing the errors of sin, shame, repressed guilt and the rest, and, instead, writing upon it His Word
of infallible truth, fidelity, constancy and mercifulness? One might feel shivers of both terror and exultation at sensing
how the Father Himself, “the Creator of all that is, seen and unseen”, touches the individual heart, speaks to
the heart … to break it, to recreate it and to perfect it in the image of Jesus. That is what it means to be “drawn”
by the Father: it is the religious experience of conversion, not as a sensationalistic external show, or as lengthy, tearful
speeches, but as an unspeakably profound shift, undetected earthquake, even, in the depths of the heart. The ejection from
Paradise is reversed; the heart comes Home.
Of course, God as Trinity never ceases to teach us: be it through the order and beauty of creation, our own experiences
of life, both sweet and bitter, through the Teaching Authority of His Church, His Scriptures and also in the intimacy of prayer
and right conscience. But the focus of all this learning is, in the words of Jesus Himself, “to come to me”, to
Christ. Eternal Truth, Grace and Life, by God’s own Will, are to be found only in Jesus Christ. Other breads, partial
truths, good life-styles might offer solace for a time: but whatever is authentically good in all of these comes ultimately
only from Christ in order to lead us ultimately back to the same Christ. The Catholic Church rejoices to see the presence
of different elements of Christ’s truth and action in other churches, communities and in the secular world itself. For
the Spirit of God breathes freely. But She knows that the full meaning of those elements, their completion, their perfection
is to be found only in Christ Himself, the Head of the Body which is his Church. This is our faith. Hence, Christ Jesus in
His Risen Body, in His sacramental Body and in His Mystical Body, which is the Church, draws all human beings unto Himself.
He is the source of gravity, and all things must eventually either be made one in Him or, if not, be lost.
There is a tendency, originating with man himself, to consider that, in a free society, more or less anything goes,
provided it does not create what is termed “public disorder”. Great store is rightly laid by “freedom from”
many horrendous things: tyranny, terror, war, disease, famine or poverty. The problem is that sometimes included in those
“horrendous things” is Truth itself, God Himself! Yet, it is only logical that we cannot be free from the Truth
who made us, from the Truth that constitutes our reason for being, from the Truth that will be our destiny. And as destiny,
Truth will judge us as to whether we have used our freedom to live that Truth in love and hope, or whether we have distorted
our freedom to live an “alternative truth” of our own personal or collective invention, perhaps even attributing
it wishfully to God.
Related to this tendency, there is another, which is arguably more pernicious. It is the idea that human freedom serves
as a platform to claim a right to almost anything imaginable, or indeed unimaginable, “rights” which are often
based on no more than personal whim, desire or, perhaps, tragedy. But rights as such are not based on freedom, but are rather
exercised in freedom with the responsibility it entails; they are based on justice; the very word “right”
(“ius”, in Latin) comes from the word “justice” (‘iustitia”). And justice is based, not
on convenience, be it personally felt or socially agreed upon, but on what “is right”, i.e. the Truth. There is
a truth about creation and particularly about the human being as creature which predates any social convention, regional,
national or international. Right reason and right conscience seek to discover that truth, written in nature itself, and to
base issues of human rights and justice on that truth.
Some will argue that man and society have changed over the centuries, so there is no such thing as a basic truth about
man or society. Well, it is true that we all change over the course of our lives: in size, in wisdom … and also in mistakes
and in presumption; yet that does not mean we are different people. “I” am still “I”, be it at the
moment of conception or of departure from this life. Character, personality, skills and culture may develop, mutate and even
deteriorate. However, there remains the core identity of the human person, and it is this that we refer to when speaking of
the fundamental truth of the human person. The dynamic, evolving rhythm of creation, history, the world and society do not,
indeed cannot, eliminate that foundational truth: if anything, they only make it more evident. Is there really much different
in the world of today that we cannot identify as being seminally present in the great wisdom of the opening chapters of the
book of Genesis (1-12)? Many great and wonderful gifts, the struggle with freedom and limitation, lost innocence, envy, murder:
it’s all there – and it’s all here. Certainly, much on the outside has changed (technology in particular
gives the impression of exponential development), but has anyone yet plumbed the depths of the human heart to see if it has
changed? The great psychologists have tried, and done well to identify some of the great conflicts that afflict the human
being, but were never able to free themselves from those very conflicts. The truth is that only God truly sees the heart,
truly pities the heart, truly loves the heart, truly judges the heart. If our hearts have changed for the better over the
centuries, or over our lives, it is only by the mercy of God; but if we take a cold look at reality, perhaps we have not yet
let that merciful transformation take place.
Some might still insist: well, believe all that religious stuff if you want to, but I don’t have to, and at any
rate it makes no difference to me. It’s a temptation we all have: it’s the “murmuring” temptation
we heard in today’s Gospel. It has a whole variety of manifestations: e.g. I may say that 1+ 1 = 2: “maybe, but
I am going to change it”; … “maybe, but how can you be sure?”; … “maybe, but I don’t
like it”; … “maybe, but I don’t give a cookie and who does?”. Now, I am, of course, over-simplifying,
but there is a deeply worrying, if not sinister, movement afoot today almost to dismiss as irrelevant essential parts, if
not all, of the history of humanity, not only in the religious realm, but even in other areas of the humanities. I hear people
say “come on, father, we’re living in the 21st century! You don’t seriously expect me to believe
all that nonsense about the commandments, do you?”, as if that were of itself an astoundingly convincing reason to dispose
of all that happened in the previous twenty plus centuries. Certain trends want to reinvent the meaning of everything, from
marriage and the family to the rule of law, from God Himself to the Church. It’s as if some kind of disconnect has occurred,
as in a person who suffers from amnesia when having to think back beyond a certain period in their personal life. But new
meanings and new inventions will only have any meaning at all if they emerge in some form of compatible continuity and development
from what has gone before. Sometimes, if not often, that will indeed mean letting go of the old to welcome the new, but more
often, as Jesus says elsewhere, is it not rather a case of valuing the “old and the new”? When the new
is hailed out of unthinking and unreasonable rejection of the old, then the maturity, if not the sincerity, of those who hail
the new cannot but be questioned. The new should be welcomed from the deep-hearted embrace of the old, and not in a cold-hearted
and disdainful naiveté or arrogance. I think of the embrace of an old grand-mother for a tiny child; one senses in the other,
in the way proper to each, the true value respectively of the old and of the new.
As Jesus says, “no-one has ever seen God”, except Jesus Himself. No-one can claim to do in God’s
name what contradicts the name of Jesus, for in Jesus the entire universe was created, is knit together and will find its
ultimate fulfillment. Even in the Church, which has Christ’s authority to speak in God’s own name, we move along,
limp along, stumbling and fumbling, to discern and seek Christ’s saving truth for ourselves and for humanity. But when
we find it, it is the solemn duty of the Church to teach it, irrespective of any reaction from any quarter. It is not because
we cannot fail, but only and ever because He cannot and will not fail us. Yet we would fail Him if, even in
our messy awkwardness, we did not challenge both ourselves and the world in which we live to let ourselves once more “be
taught by God” and come to Jesus.
So, on our tiresome, pilgrim way to the Mountain of God, we need the
sustenance of the Bread of Life, in its Eucharistic and Teaching forms. Over the next three weeks, the Church will continue
to deepen our understanding of the “mirabile sacramentum”, the wonderful sacrament of the Eucharist so that, like
Elijah, we may not fear the journey nor the God who is the desire of every heart. Hence we move forward with courage and fidelity
and in the consoling knowledge that the Virgin Mother, Mother of the Eucharist, Mother of the Word, is accompanying us all
the way with Her powerful and loving intercession.
Msgr. Peter Magee
Sunday, August 10th, 2003
Our Lady of the Presentation,
Poolesville: 8.00 am & !0.45 am;
St. Michael’s, Silver
Spring, 1.00 pm.
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