Today, the 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time (Year B), we continue our readings from John 6. Recall that these six weekly readings from John are the only excerpts included in the Lectionary for Ordinary Time. The last reading will be next Sunday. The overarching theme for these six readings is that Jesus is the Bread of Life, but each of the six readings have a secondary but related theme. In today’s readings (John 6:51‑58), that secondary theme is wisdom.
Picking up from last week, Jesus says that whoever takes the food he has to offer will live forever—a life, we might emphasize, that begins in the here and now, as soon as we start to partake of this special food. But today, Jesus also says, “…the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” Not surprisingly, the people around are deeply shocked at this weird-sounding statement, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?”
There is a certain contempt, coupled with an ignorance of Jesus’ true identity, contained in the words “this man”.
Of course, the Jews were a highly cultured people with a long and distinguished history. Cannibalism was not one of their customs, and they abhorred the practices of some of their neighbors who were not above human sacrifice. But Jesus, who must have been aware of their reactions, only gives greater emphasis to his words: “Very truly, I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” To those listening, the eating of his flesh was bad enough. Now he adds the “insult” of telling them to drink his blood!
We have been going to Mass for so many years now, we have become completely inured to many of the things we hear. Again and again, we hear with complete equanimity: “Take this, all of you, and eat of it, for this is my Body…Take this, all of you, and drink from it, for this is the chalice of my Blood…” Imagine a complete stranger to our liturgy coming in and hearing those words! And they do…any non-Catholic visitor to Mass will hear them.
So let us now hear them for the very first time from the lips of Jesus as he spoke to them on that day: “…unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood…” Very strange words! Not only strange, but humanly repulsive!
The drinking of the blood must have seemed particularly disconcerting to a Jewish audience. They had both a reverence for and a horror of blood. They saw it as the very essence of life. How often had they seen their young men in battle lose all their blood and die! At the same time, to come into contact with blood was to become ritually unclean.
When a woman gave birth, she could not approach the Temple for several weeks, longer still, if the child was a girl. We remember the Gospel story of the woman who was suffering from a bleeding condition for 12 years. She desperately wanted Jesus to heal her, but because of the large crowd around him, she did not dare to reveal herself and her condition. In faith, she just touched the hem of Jesus’ garment.
Almost certainly this was the reason that the priest and the Levite “passed by on the other side” when they saw the man lying bleeding on the road in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-37). They were on their way to the Temple in Jerusalem and could not afford to become contaminated. And that was the lesson Jesus taught: they placed ritual purity above the love of neighbor.
We know that observant Jews today will only eat meat from which the blood has been drained (kosher). And now, here is Jesus asking these same people to drink his blood! You do not have to be a Jew to find the idea abhorrent. No wonder there were people who thought Jesus was out of his mind, apart from the scandal his words gave.
Yet, this idea is not considered abhorrent in some cultures. We are told that the Jesuit martyrs of North America died such heroic deaths that the warriors who killed them removed their hearts and ate them in order that they might gain some of the courage of those missionaries.
That is very much behind the idea of today’s Gospel, though not, of course, in any literal sense. So what was the exact meaning of what Jesus was saying? Was he just talking about the Eucharist, with which his words have an obvious affinity? No, it was much more than that. To eat the flesh of Jesus and to drink his blood is to be totally united with him and filled with his spirit and vision. It is to be able to say with St Paul: “…it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20).
It means totally sharing Jesus’ vision, his ideas, his values. It is to be totally identified with his mission to establish the Kingdom in this world. It is to be nourished by his Word as it comes to us through the Scriptures and have our lives directed by it.
Further, because his flesh and blood are so closely related with his suffering and death, we are to identify ourselves, too, with that total self-giving — to carry our own cross after him and to accept the sufferings that come into our lives. Today, Jesus is inviting us to follow him, to be with him, to share totally and unconditionally in his mission.
And that brings us to the secondary theme of today’s Mass: to live like this is true wisdom. In the First Reading (Proverbs 9:1-6), wisdom is personified as having built a house with seven pillars. She has prepared a magnificent banquet and then sent out her servants to call all those who are ignorant, who lack wisdom, saying: “Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside immaturity and live and walk in the way of insight.”
The Letter to the Ephesians (Second Reading, Ephesians 5:15‑20) also tells us: “Be careful, then, how you live, not as unwise people but as wise…”
The food that Jesus offers – the bread and wine that are his own flesh and blood – are the sources of wisdom, giving, as they do, a true understanding of the meaning and purpose of life. To eat that food is to be close to him, not just physically but in mind and heart. And that will be the link between Jesus as the Bread of Life and the source of Wisdom. The source of Wisdom in our lives is the total acceptance of the vision of life which Jesus gives. He is the source, the bread that provides that vision.
The special way in which we express that, and by which we remind ourselves of this call, is through our celebration of the Eucharist, where we eat the Body and the drink the Blood. But we need to remember that this is a Sacrament – it is the sign that points to the deeper reality, our ongoing relationship with Jesus Christ. In celebrating the Eucharist, we are saying that we want to deepen that relationship with Jesus, with his Gospel, and with the community that is his visible presence among us. This life in Christ is the nourishment – in the most real sense – of our life. Without this food and drink, we will die of starvation; our bodies, of course, will keep going, but in a very real sense we will have died.
So when we participate in the Eucharist and ‘receive Communion’, let us not do so passively as if Jesus was just coming to us. It is not just a pious, “Thank you, Jesus.” We need to receive actively. When we receive the host, the minister says, “Body of Christ”. And we answer: “Amen”, we truly mean “Yes!, I believe!” In so saying, we are accepting Christ and his whole Gospel; we accept his victories and his sufferings. We are saying we want to be with him all the way, to serve him with all our heart and soul and work with him for the making of a better world:
- a world of truth and love,
- a world of justice and peace,
- a world of freedom and happiness.
When we see ourselves as really part of that great endeavor, then we know that, in a very real sense, we have eaten the flesh and drank the blood of Christ.