Sermons by Fr Guy Nicholls (Cong Orat), our Chaplain

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ,

Assisted Dying, what is it? Assisted Suicide is the proper description. AD=Usurpation of a term.

Dignity, what is it? An organisation which assists people to commit suicide and campaigns for it to be made legal. ‘Dignitas’ = Usurpation of a word for tendentious purposes.

Easy to make out a case on compassionate grounds for putting to death someone suffering and destined to die soon. Why? Compassion sounds good, and the case for assisted suicide sounds perfectly compassionate. Surely safeguards can be put in place? What safeguards can be certain to last? But how does anyone know when someone will die? In my experience many expected to die soon last a long time, while the opposite also is true. Even doctors have only a informed power of guessing.

Every few years someone attempts to change the current and very well-established law which proclaims that to assist another person to commit suicide is a crime. Yet so often in the past it has failed. The last time was when a former MP in this constituency introduced such a bill.

Think of abortion: in 1967 this was lade legal and we were told it would only be safe and rare and in exceptional circumstances of danger to a mother’s life. Yet for years it has been virtually ‘on demand’. I remember the first time I heard the name ‘Keir Starmer’. It was when he was DPP and refused to prosecute certain doctors who were blatantly breaking the law by signing certificates permitting abortion on women on the grounds of mental health when they had never even seen the women concerned – just because certain persons wanted abortion for convenience.

So in the case of euthaniasia/assisted suicide. It may begin with safeguards, with clear limits in law, but what about pressure put on a dying person to stop using up resources uselessly? What about pressure from relations who want to get hold of an elderly relative’s property?

There is another such assisted suicide bill about to be introduced into Parliament. and there is a greater chance that it will be passed this time, given the range of views among the MPs elected to the Commons last July. The most atheistic and anti-life parliament ever in our history.

Now although it is the case that whenever such a change in the law has been rejected in the past, as was the case with Marris’s Bill in 2016, this never stops the proposers of euthanasia from continuing to keep up the pressure. And they are well supported by the supposedly neutral BBC.

Yet even though the proposers of assisted suicide continue to present bill after bill in Parliamnet until such time as the law finally is changed, will a bill opposing suicide ever be allowed afterwards? Think again about abortion.

The pro-suicide lobby insist that their proposals are measured and limited and appeal to compassion t justify their planned change to the law. But in reality all such protections are gradually removed. Remember conscience clauses or doctors and nurses opposed to abortion? Where are they now? Now you can’t even publicly opposed abortion without the serious risk of being sent to jail, and even without saying a single word! Yes, Isabel Vaughan Spruce, the fearless campaigner against abortion was compensated after two wrongful arrests, but think of Adam Smith Connor. He has not only been arrested for the same alleged ‘crime’, but sent to prison.

If the assisted suicide bill is passed, then the same will happen to anyone who opposes euthanasia some time in the future, and I predict it won’t be very long. Just as being anti-abortion has now become seen as fanatical and socially unacceptable, so too will being anti-assisted suicide in the future.

In fact, it is already happening on the quiet in hospitals. People who are seriously ill and in a coma which won’t permit them to speak, are being starved to death. This was the Liverpool pathway of a few years ago. But although there was an outcry against it and it was stopped, it just went underground and changed its name. Hospitals are still killing patients who are deemed unworthy of living any longer.

So it will be very easy to argue that people who are ill, whether dying or not, but are using up the valuable costly resources of the NHS, people who are depressed or feel guilty that they are a burden on their families, all these should accept the inevitable and allow themselves to be euthanised.

Our saint, whose feast we celebrate today, lived a famously long life full of many twists and turns and dramatic vicissitudes. He endured many painful personal difficulties as a result of them. Many of these were bereavements he suffered frequently through life; the sudden, early death of his dearest sister Mary, for instance, was to remain within him as a deep sorrow until the end of his own very long life over fifty years later. He could not even think of her in his old age without shedding tears. But there were other kinds of personal losses which he endured frequently, and these were also very painful, such as the loss of friends through their estrangement from him, or through betrayal of his friendship, but it is a fact that many of these came about as a result of his own actions and choices. What lay behind those choices is what we are celebrating today.

This feast falls on the anniversary of the single most catastrophic upheaval in his life (and I use the word catastrophic advisedly). Whereas on most saints’ days we celebrate their birthday into eternal life, that is not what St John Henry Newman’s feast day recalls. Instead, it was an event which took place when he was already halfway through his life: it was his becoming a Catholic at Littlemore on October 9th, 1845, an event which he described on that night in several letters to close relatives and friends, as his ‘being received into the one fold of the Redeemer.’ It was this step, he knew only too well, that would bring about a decisive breach with so many of his friends and colleagues in the Oxford Movement of the Church of England, a movement that he had started over a decade earlier with Keble, Pusey and others. He would also break off all contact not just with his university, which had been his home and workplace for well over a quarter of a century, but also with his remaining family, especially his remaining living sisters Jemima and Harriett, to whom he had always been close.

If the loss of so many dear and beloved persons was a sorrowful end to the entire first part of his life, it was more than made up for by something that was of inestimable value and joy: for on entering into this one fold of the Redeemer, the Catholic Church, Newman was filled with unquenchable joy and gratitude to God. On that fateful day he went into his library, on whose shelves stood the volumes of the Church Fathers he had been studying assiduously for years, and taking them down he joyfully kissed each of them, exclaiming, ‘now at last I belong to you!’

Belonging to the Church of the Fathers was far more than merely arriving at a common mind with historical figures from a remote past. As he wrote in the Essay on Development, the work in which articulated his reasons for seeking admission to the Catholic Church, Newman was truly entering a body, a vast entity with an organic unity in time and throughout the world. It was a body which was poor and despised in England generally and in Oxford especially at that time, socially and educationally inferior, barely emerging from centuries of persecution and the contempt of the powerful, yet Newman realised that these rather secretive, poor and despised people were essentially much more than they outwardly seemed. They were in truth members of one and the same as the communion that had contained and nourished the great fathers of the Christian faith: Athanasius, Ambrose, Cyril, Augustine and Leo. Belonging to them meant that he was now part of the same body, the body of Christ no less, sharing in the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, as St Paul had described the essence of the Church of Christ to the Ephesians.

This is the true significance of the words spoken by our Lord at the Last Supper and which we have just heard in the Gospel: ‘I am the vine’. All his life, Newman was utterly consistent about one thing in particular: his search for, and dedication to, truth. It was this that had inspired his great attempt to recover the apostolical character of the Church of England, which fuelled the vigorous expenditure of time and energy which he devoted to the Tracts that he not only largely composed, but personally distributed to clergy far and wide around Oxfordshire in order to reawaken the sense that the Anglican Church was not an instrument of the state or government of England, but was truly a branch of the apostolic Church of Christ. Truth always came first in Newman’s life; and obedience to wherever truth led him. That night in October, 1845 was a new stage in the long search for truth, and one that was destined to bring him not only to the unity of the faith, but also to mature manhood in Christ.

The kindly light had been leading him since his earliest years into the fullness of the life of the vine, the true vine. For he had come to see that the Church is the vine of Christ, and that he must enter into the life of that vine if he were to have any life within him. For, cut off from that vine he could do nothing. It was a step bought at a heavy price, but one that he knew was even worth such a cost. A month after his reception into the Church and his first Communion, he wrote a letter of farewell to one of his oldest remaining friends and comrade-at-arms, John Keble, thanking him for all that his friendship had brought him. Yet Newman wrote aware that they would be sundered from now on, since Keble would remain in that communion in which they had both been brought up. Knowing this, Newman wrote these words: ‘Let it be your comfort [my dear Keble] when you are troubled, to think that there is one who feels that he owes all to you, and who, though, alas, now cut off from you, is a faithful assiduous friend unseen.’

The pain of being cut off from Keble, as also the pain of being cut off from his sisters and many others besides, he could yet endure because he firmly believed and truly, that he was now most certainly not cut off from the true vine. He had laboured for many years within another communion, believing that he was part of the true vine, yet coming to realise that it was an illusion. The truth was more difficult to discern than simply viewing the surface. The splendour of the church and university to which he belonged, which had nurtured him, was not anything to set alongside the true vine of the apostolic and catholic Church which was not only the one fold of the Redeemer, but was His living body on earth.

Newman was now not only grafted onto the true vine, but was now subject to all that the Lord said at the Last Supper must happen to any branch that lived in Him: in order to bear much fruit, every branch in Him must be pruned or, as the original Greek word puts it, ‘made pure’, cleansed of all that would keep the branch less than fully fruitful as the Lord willed it to be. So it would prove many times throughout the forty five years that still lay ahead of him in this world. Newman would undertake many great works for the love of God and so many of them would seem to fail. This was undoubtedly a great part of Newman’s share in the cross which was the pruning or purification of his soul and will. Although he was not to enjoy the fruits of his labours and sacrifices in this life, they would grow to maturity in another age. It was only after over a hundred years had passed since his departure out of shadows and images into the reality of eternity that his holiness would at last be acknowledged by the universal Church at his canonisation, and even now more fruit is promised as the Church discerns his extraordinary gifts as a teacher of the faith, considering whether to make him a Doctor of the Church in our troubled times.

And there is one particular sign of Newman’s continuing influence in our times that I want to end with. It was by God’s providence that in 1847, when Newman was seeking how best to use his gifts within the Catholic Church, he was guided to the figure of St Philip Neri, the 16th century founder of the Oratory in Rome. The Oratory was to prove to be Newman’s new home in the Church, which was to make up for, and more than compensate for, the loss of his first home and of his family and friends.

Yet in setting up the Oratory in England Newman was constantly beset by many problems and insecurities. For instance, his deeply held hopes of founding an Oratory here in Oxford were frustrated in his lifetime and were only to be fulfilled exactly a century after his death. In such trials as this he made his own the prayer of the Oratorian Church historian, Cardinal Baronius, who prayed to St Philip imploring him to ‘visit this vine which thy right hand planted with so much labour, anxiety and peril.’ May the English Oratory, this humble branch of the true vine, flourish and produce its fruit through the intercession and example of saints Philip and John Henry. May Christ the Redeemer prune and purify us, so that we may use the grace given to each of us for the building up of the body of Christ until we all attain to maturity, to what St Paul calls ‘the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ’, in the glory of the saints in heaven. Amen.

Dear Sisters, dear brothers and sisters in Christ, you may not have noticed, but this is the third week running that children have played a significant part in the Gospel. The first time, three weeks ago, our Lord took a little child and said to His Apostles, ‘anyone who welcomes one of these little children in my name welcomes me.’ Then last week, His words were dark and alarming, warning that ‘anyone who is an obstacle to bring down one of these little ones who have faith, would be better thrown into the sea with a great millstone round his neck.’ And finally, today, He shows His indignation, even anger against those of His disciples who were trying to keep parents from bringing their children to be blessed by Him, ‘Let the little children come to me; do not stop them; for it is to such as these that the kingdom of God belongs. I tell you solemnly, anyone who does not welcome the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.’ Mark then tells us that He put His arms round them and laid His hands on them, and blessed them.

These three sayings of our Lord manifest His love for children and His appreciation of their special closeness to the kingdom of God, which comes from their innocence and openness. It is the corrosive power of sin that blights this. Our Lord refers to those who effectively spoil the innocence of children in His warning that those who corrupt the young deserve to be drowned. Adult life, He suggests, needs to recover this simple trust. It is not easy, but it is necessary in order to be able to enter heaven.

But there is another aspect to today’s particular Gospel that is of great importance. The Gospel began with the Pharisees putting a question to our Lord concerning the permanence and indissolubility of marriage. They are testing Him to see what He will say. In the book of Deuteronomy, Moses had permitted divorce, but it was seen to be shameful, so the Pharisees asked our Lord in what circumstances was divorce permissible? Our Lord’s reply was uncompromising. This permission was only a toleration granted because the people were ungovernable, and not because God approved it in any way. On the contrary, God had made marriage indissoluble from the beginning of the human race, as we heard in the first reading from the Book of Genesis, and so it was not just for the Jews, nor for religious reasons alone that marriage is declared indissoluble, says the Lord, but because it is written into human nature that way.

This is what many inevitably see as a hard saying, but this is nothing new. The Apostles were amazed, as we can read between the lines, and asked Jesus to explain His meaning further. Does He really mean what He seems to have said to the Pharisees? Yes. But why? Why does the merciful Lord, the great forgiver of sins, the friend of sinners and tax-collectors, say something that He knows full well will be a bombshell to many who hear Him say it.

This is very serious indeed. Only a few days ago in Rome at the Synod, there was a penitential service at which forgiveness was asked for those who, and I quote, ‘use doctrine as a stone to hurl at others.’ You may wonder what this really means; I do. For instance, is it wrong, sinful even, to teach what our Lord taught, even when this is painful to hear and difficult to put into practice? If so, then this accusation of using doctrine as stones to hurl at people must be directed even at our Lord Himself. That surely cannot be right!

So much is at stake. Marriage is not just about good feelings, or about romantic love. Our Lord talks about a man and a woman becoming one flesh, not just setting up a partnership. Incidentally, what a terrible word ‘partner’ is, when it is used as a deliberate replacement for ‘spouse’. Partners, in the way we use the English language, means persons with whom we either do business, or play games. What a terrible model for a spousal relationship that is! A spouse is someone to whom one person has given him or herself. It is a gift of one’s entire life to another, a gift of mutual trust, and a means of creating a unique bond of unity which cannot be broken in this life. The word ‘partner’ can hardly be fitting for such a crucial relationship as that between a man and a woman for life!

The reason why our Lord lays such great emphasis on the unbreakable bond of those who become one flesh is itself of huge significance to our times. In 1967 Pope St Paul VI published one of the most important letters not only of his reign, but of our age. Like our Lord’s saying in today’s Gospel, it was shocking in its unswerving directness and clarity. In that letter, called Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul against all expectations taught that artificial contraception is always wrong, even in marriage, even when circumstances are profoundly difficult for a husband and wife. It is essential to human life that a married couple, made one flesh by God, in all their acts of loving marital union, should be open to the gift of life, that is, of children. Once you separate out the bringing of children into the world from the act of intercourse, you change radically what intercourse is. It can become a game, a partnership, and no longer a sharing in God’s creative love. Anyone can play that game if the responsibility of having children can be eliminated. Humanae Vitae teaches that the real fruit of Christian marriage is children, should God so decide. But if sexual acts become divorced from the begetting of children, then a lot of distortions follow. For instance, children are no longer seen as the fruit of the union of man and wife, and so it is no accident that less than ten years after contraception had become generally accepted, IVF was invented, in which babies were conceived in the laboratory rather than in the womb, a process in which many human embryos, when surplus to requirement, are simply wantonly destroyed. And once you take apart the idea of man and woman as one flesh giving life to children in the family, then you begin to conceive of all sorts of other distortions of marriage itself, such as so-called ‘same-sex marriage’, in which it is impossible for the two partners to become one, life-giving union. Whatever such unions are, they are not ‘marriage’ as human nature has been designed by God, nor in the sense that it is taught here by our Lord.

And so it is that our Lord, as well as firmly rejecting the whole practice of divorce as accepted by the Pharisees, also points to children as being the crown of this union for life of a man and a woman. It is because this teaching of our Lord’s has been rejected in our society that divorce is now so freely available, and is so very common in practice and, unsurprisingly, cohabitation has now become more common even than marriage itself. But what does marriage really mean if it is not permanent, - if it is not a lifelong union made to express love and mutual trust in the bringing up of children that a couple have together conceived and brought into the world?

Nearly 60 years on from Humanae Vitae we can see all too easily how the breakdown of the real meaning and purpose of human sexuality in marriage has led the world down a terrible cul-de-sac of broken relationships, loneliness, abuse and perversions of many kinds. Only a return to the clear teaching our Lord gives in the Gospel can bring society back to health and provide the loving conditions for children to grow in trust and confidence, and so to be better fitted to make good, stable, loving unions themselves once they reach adult life. It’s what the grace of the sacrament of marriage is given for; to strengthen married couples in all ways. By abandoning Christ’s teaching, the world has plunged into a downward spiral of sexual chaos and misery. Our Lord was not afraid to teach a hard saying when He knew how much was at stake. But He never used truth as a stone to cast at sinners. Neither does His Church cast stones at anyone when she teaches what Christ taught, precisely because the entire future happiness of the human race depends on that doctrine.

St Mark is the most compressed of all the Evangelists. What a lot he packs into today’s Gospel! It began with Our Lord’s question ‘who do men say that I am?’ and continued with a prediction of the Passion, together with Peter’s remonstration against this and our Lord’s rebuke to Peter, and concluded with the universal call to discipleship in the carrying of the cross.

Now we need to know a very important thing: that St Mark’s entire Gospel was written effectively as an introduction to its most important and truly climactic part – the account of the Passion and Resurrection. That also helps us to make sense of the passage we have just heard, which looks forward to the cross and resurrection.

So back to that first question which our Lord puts to His disciples: ‘who do men say I am?’ They, meaning some or all of them, but no one of them in particular, tell Him that there is a great breadth of opinion about Him; He is reckoned to be John the Baptist or Elijah or another one of the Prophets. This tells us that people had a good opinion of Him, they rated Him well, He was popular. But this was clearly not the full picture. It was moreover not what our Lord expected His own disciples to believe about Him. That is why He goes on to ask them, ‘but who do you say I am?’ He is implying that however good an opinion the general public have of Him, it is not the same as He expects His disciples to have; otherwise, He wouldn’t have asked them the same question. He clearly expects a different answer. It is an important moment. He has never asked them this question before.

So it is that Peter speaks up first, as so often in the Gospels. He seems to be the one to put into words the thoughts of others, to be their spokesman, the one who sees beyond the surface of things to the inner heart. So it is that he proclaims confidently and boldly, ‘You are the Christ!’ But Christ’s response to this, in this Gospel at least, is strangely muted. Not in this Gospel do we hear our Lord’s answering words we know from St Matthew, ‘Blessed are you Peter’ and ‘I say to you that you are the rock etc.’ but instead two unexpected and disconcerting things: first, He issued a command to them to keep this secret, and secondly, He gave them a teaching, but in mysterious terms of Himself as ‘the Son of Man’, a figure taken from prophecy, especially the prophet Daniel, connected with God’s majesty and His will to save mankind, and the prophet Ezechiel, who uses the title ‘Son of Man’ when he was called by God to be His messenger. This mysterious and solemn prophetic teaching is that Christ will suffer grievously, be rejected by the authorities of their own religion and people, that He would even be put to death by them, but also that He would rise to life on the third day after He had been killed.

Peter speaks up again, but now He takes our Lord aside to speak privately to Him, saying that this must not happen – the Christ must not suffer. We can imagine that this is issued more as a rebuke to Jesus than as a pious wish it may not come to pass. It is as though Peter is saying to Jesus: we are investing a great deal in you. We recognise your unique status as the Messiah, and therefore you have a role to fulfil. You must be our leader, the king promised from ages past by God to set His people free from foreign domination. You must certainly not talk in this alarming way about terrible suffering and death. Then comes our Lord’s bombshell, as if the foretelling of suffering and death were not already enough to cause despondency and alarm; for whereas Peter has spoken privately to rebuke our Lord, the Lord for His part openly furiously berates Peter, saying ‘Get behind me, Satan!’ Strong words!

What does our Lord mean by this? Yesterday we celebrated the Feast of the Exaltation, or Triumph, of the Holy Cross. It is a feast of some grandeur, in which we recall the victory won by our Lord over our sin and death by His own death on the Cross. But we should never ponder that victory without recognising the tremendous cost at which it came. In a church in this diocese which I know, built in the 1960’s, the then Parish Priest did not instal a crucifix over the altar but an image of the risen Christ instead. After all, he explained, Christ is not dead now, He is risen! Of course, this is true. But when we behold the cross, as we do particularly on Good Friday, but also throughout the year, we are not acting as though Christ Himself is still on the cross, but rather we are recalling its power, its stupendous cost to Christ for us, a cost which remains always present and relevant. So, just as we cannot have Easter Day without Good Friday, neither is there a resurrection from the dead unless Christ had first died, and the way in which He died was appallingly painful and humiliating: a death reserved to the lowest stratum in Roman society. It is hardly surprising, therefore, given the horror of crucifixion that Peter should have reacted so strongly and negatively to Christ’s prediction here,. However, it certainly is surprising that Our Lord responded so strongly and negatively to Peter, even calling him ‘Satan’.

It must come as a surprise to many to hear our Lord speak like that to Peter. Peter was the first leader of the Apostles, the first Pope, as we should say. But this should help us to learn something very important: that even being the first apostle, even being the first Pope, doesn’t mean Peter always gets things right. And if he didn’t get everything right, then neither does Peter’s successor as pope necessarily get everything right. Christ’s rebuke to Peter in this Gospel could apply to any of Peter’s successors who stray from the truth about our Lord. There have been such popes throughout history: e.g. Pope Liberius in the fourth century and Pope Honorius in the seventh century taught serious errors about Christ. They were subsequently condemned and corrected by the Church in General Councils. Of course, the same thing could happen again. So, if ever a pope should say something which goes against Christ’s teaching such as what we heard just now in the Gospel Acclamation: ‘I am the way, the truth and the life; no one can come to the Father but through me’, and instead should say that e.g. Christ is not the only way to the Father; that all religions are just as valid ways of reaching God as the Catholic one; that while there is one God, the many different religions are like different languages expressing what we humans believe about Him; then such a pope would indeed be worthy of rebuke by the Lord Himself and the Church would have to be wary of him and in due course correct him. Peter cannot change what Christ has taught, neither can his successors. So, just as Peter cannot take away the cross from Christ, neither can he rightly deny what Christ teaches. But it is only the Lord who can rebuke Peter in person. While the rest of the Church may recognise that something may be wrong in what a particular pope says, it is only for that pope’s successor or for the whole Church in Council to correct him.

Our Lord’s next words are central to what we should always remember about His death on the cross: ‘If anyone wants to be a follower of mine, let him renounce himself and take up his cross and follow me.’ This is why we keep the cross ever before our eyes. By ‘renouncing oneself’, Our Lord means, of course, that we must deny any inclination to live life solely for our own enjoyment. But He also means that we must not abandon the faith He has taught us just because it seems difficult, nor fail to defend any of those truths which we proclaim in the Creed which the rest of the world rejects. For, as our Lord says: ‘anyone who wants to save his life will lose it’, meaning that anyone who chooses to follow the way of the world instead of the way of Christ will not inherit eternal life. It is only if we are prepared to lose our life, that is, to stand out against the mind of the world where this differs from or rejects Christ’s teaching, only if we are prepared not only to stand in witness to Christ the person, but to defend His Gospel which He has taught us and remain faithful to it despite all errors that the world prefers, then indeed we will be saved as Christ has promised.

Dear Sisters, dear brethren, if you are looking for a picture of hell, you might go to the weird and disturbing images of the Flemish 16th century painter Hieronymus Bosch, who portrays humans being tortured in nightmarish ways by strange and horrible beings. But there is another way of envisaging damnation, less visually arresting, but no less frightening than that of torture; it is the idea of complete isolation. To be cut off from all contact outside oneself – unable to hear anything, unable to speak; how long could anyone endure such a self-enclosed state? How soon would such claustrophobia descend into madness? Jean-Paul Sartre famously said that “hell is other people”; but we might well correct this and suggest instead that hell is oneself, utterly alone for ever.

It is for this reason that Our Lord’s miracle in the Gospel we have just heard is so powerful a symbol of salvation. It is the opening up of a human person closed off from all contact with others by his inability to hear and speak clearly. We were made to communicate, and to be communicated with. Human beings are, by nature, social beings. To be deprived of the sense of hearing and the power of speech is to be seriously diminished as humans.

But what we also notice about Our Lord’s healing of this poor deaf-mute is the manner in which He does it. Already known to have powers of healing far beyond anything ever heard before, Our Lord is urged to lay His hands upon the man, to heal him. Yet this is not exactly what He does. He takes the man aside privately, puts His fingers into the man’s ears, touches the man’s tongue with His own spittle, looks up to heaven and sighs, before uttering a single word of command: “Be opened!” The drama of this scene is captured for us by the recollection of the very word that Our Lord used in Aramaic: “Ephphetha!”

But what does all this action and drama mean? Our Lord could, as on other occasions, have healed this man simply by laying His hands upon Him, or as with the lepers by a mere word of command; or, as with the Centurion’s servant and the Synagogue official’s son, even will their healing from a distance. Yet here Our Lord could not be more physical, more bodily, let us say even more ritualistic, in His actions. If we have ever wondered why God became man, as so many great thinkers and men and women of faith have done for centuries; if we have wondered, not in a sense of puzzlement, but in a sense of awe – we should look at this healing. For God did not need to become man in order to forgive man’s sins. God could heal our illnesses by a simple act of His almighty will. Yet He does not do so in that way, for it would leave something out of the picture that God wants us to know and understand. God became man in order to share Himself with us, and in order to allow us to share in the experience of His presence. God became man in order to overcome the isolation that sin had brought to man. Sin had alienated us from God. Recall how Adam and Eve, after sinning in the Garden, hid themselves from God out of fear. It was to overcome that fear and the isolation from God that sin had brought upon us, that God became man.

In His humanity, Jesus the Son of God is fully present to us. Our Lord’s human nature is not just a kind of packaging, by which we might gain access to something otherwise inaccessible. Our Lord’s human nature really belongs to Him, and in it His divine Person shines through and acts upon us. So in this miracle, God the Son Himself takes away the isolation of the deaf-mute by His own humanity – His fingers, His sigh, His spittle, His command.

This is the way of the Incarnation, of the Son of God made man. It is the way in which God has chosen to make us whole – to heal us of sin, and of the isolation and selfishness that sin both causes and symbolises. Moreover, this is the way Our Lord continues His healing work in the Sacraments of His Church. For when we are baptised, it is Christ Himself who baptises, who in His humanity gives us new life by water which symbolises both death of sin and selfishness, and the new life of communion in the Holy Spirit. When our conscience convicts us of our sins, it is to Christ that we turn, and Himself whom we meet in confession. We confess our sins in the Sacrament of Penance, not in order to tell Our Lord what He already knows, but to allow Him to touch us with His healing grace, and to speak His powerful word of command: “be absolved”, that is “be free” of your sin, of the impediment to your true freedom with which sin has weighed you down. It is Christ Himself who feeds our whole human nature, our bodies and souls, with His own self: Body, Blood, soul and divinity, when He gives Himself to us as the living bread in Holy Communion.

But having said all this, what, in the end, is more powerful than death? Death carries all human beings away. Whatever success or failure our lives may have to show, in the end we are doomed to the darkness of the grave. Yet even here Christ’s humanity brings us out. It was to the entombed Lazarus that Our Lord gave His powerful word of command: “Come forth!” and to those around that He said “unbind him; let him go free!” These words symbolise the power of the Son of God made man over death, and the ultimate isolation of the grave. Yet His power over death would not have been complete had He not shared death with us. And had He remained dead, then death would have conquered Him. All His wonderful miracles would, at the best, have been only a cruel sign of unfulfilled hope for doomed mankind. But Christ the Son of God made man is alive in glory. He has overcome the darkness and isolation of death for us men and for our salvation. In the Sacraments of the Church, it is the risen Christ Himself who continues to touch us, to anoint us, to speak His word of command: “Be unbound, go free!”

This is what our faith teaches us, that in Christ we are made fully human. Christ alone can touch us, can speak to us, with power to overcome our isolation, our death and our hell. In the Sacraments, He comes to meet us and heal us; and at Holy Mass, in the greatest and most wonderful Sacrament of all He gives us communion with himself. Neither in this life, nor in the next, is there anything better or more wonderful than that! The more we recognise this truth, and the better we prepare ourselves to meet Christ in His Sacraments, the more powerful His effect upon us, and we will find our true freedom and fulfilment, as He has always intended for us, in union with Him.

Dear Sisters, dear brethren, today we come to the final part of our five-week-long reading of the 6th chapter of St John’s Gospel in which we have been hearing in great detail our Lord’s teaching in preparation for the gift of the Eucharist, which was still in the future at the time of this important sermon in Capharnaum. By reflecting on this teaching we have been encouraged to meditate deeply on the true nature of the Eucharist which we celebrate each Sunday, and on the Body which Christ offers to us to receive in Holy Communion for our life and nourishment.

Over the past four weeks we have heard our Lord say to those whom He had miraculously fed with five loaves and two fish, that He is the Bread of life, He is the living bread from heaven, and that the bread He will give will be His flesh for the life of the world. Then when those people were shocked and indignant at this, He went on to say that unless they eat His flesh and drink His blood, they will have no life in them - and that, on the contrary, whoever does eat Him, He will raise such a one up to eternal life on the last day. Now He has placed all this before them and this is their reaction: ‘This is a hard saying; who can accept it?’ It is in response to this question that our Lord states that no one can come to Him unless it is granted by the Father, and that ‘it is the spirit that gives life; the flesh is useless’ and ‘the words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life’.

What does Jesus mean when He says that ‘the flesh is useless’? Is He saying that the flesh He will give in the form of bread is without real effect? Hardly. At the time of the so-called Reformation, two leading heretics, Luther and Zwingli, claimed that the Church’s teaching about the Eucharist was contrary to Scripture. Now because they rejected what the Church taught and relied instead on their own interpretation of Scripture, they came to opposite views about the real meaning of our Lord’s words here, and almost came to blows over the matter. For Luther thought he was following Scripture faithfully by believing that our Lord’s words ‘This is my Body’ and ‘My flesh is real food’, were literally true. So, he defended the idea of the Real bodily Presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament. Zwingli on the other hand pointed to the words ‘the flesh is useless’ and argued from that that, because we can detect no change whatever in the bread before or after the words of Jesus have been said over it, therefore our Lord’s words were merely symbolic, and that what we receive in Holy Communion is still nothing more than mere bread. Therefore, as mere bread it is useless to anyone except as a memorial or symbol of Christ’s death, and most certainly it is not a real, living presence in its own right, much less the actual living Body and Blood of Christ.

But our Lord cannot have meant what Zwingli said. Why would anyone object to the idea of bread as a memorial, as a mere representative symbol? If that is all our Lord had wanted to say at Capharnaum, no one would have been offended. On the other hand, if Jesus was in fact claiming that bread was to be made into His flesh and wine into His blood, then no wonder the people at Capharnaum said: ‘This is a hard saying; who can accept it?’

What then does our Lord mean by saying, ‘the flesh is useless, it is the spirit that gives life’. Here the word ‘flesh’ means our merely material nature, deprived of the spirit of life. But in the Eucharist, in the Body and Blood of Christ, bread is changed into something that is most certainly endowed with the spirit of life; it is the living body and blood of Christ, not a mere sign of something else, dead or alive. For how can our Lord say that we must eat His flesh and drink His blood in order to have life, unless that flesh and blood were filled with life that they communicate to us who receive them?

Now you might think that because of this, I am saying that where Zwingli got it totally wrong, Luther therefore got it right. But that is not so. Unfortunately for Luther, He made a massive mistake about our Lord’s words. For although Luther thought he was accepting the plain meaning of our Lord’s words in Scripture that ‘This is my Body’, he did not accept what the Church teaches about how this is to be understood. For Luther couldn’t get over the problem, as he saw it, that whichever way he looked at it, the bread was still there after the words of consecration where the Body of Christ now was as well. So, when our Lord said, ‘This is my Body’, He was simply saying that He was giving us His bodily presence together with the bread that conveyed His Body. Do you remember that I mentioned a few weeks ago the song which says that Jesus is ‘here in bread and wine for me’? That is pretty well what Luther thought. For he was trying to say that the consecrated bread is two different things both at the same time: bread and Christ’s flesh. But this is not what the Church ever believed or believes. Rather, the Church has always believed that the words our Lord said at the Last Supper - ‘This is my Body…This is my Blood’ - actually bring about a complete change in that bread and wine, so that once those words of our Lord have been pronounced over the bread and wine, they are no longer bread and wine at all, but they are completely, and only, Christ’s Body and Blood. All that remains of what was bread and wine is the outward aspects of them: what our senses tell us: what we see, what we touch, what we taste. But those things are not the substance of what we receive, only the appearances.

For our Lord’s words are transformative, which means that they actually have power to bring about a total change in the bread and wine. So, Jesus is not ‘here in bread and wine for me’. He is present in His flesh and blood under the outward appearances of bread and wine. Luther’s idea, that bread and wine were still there but so in a sense is Jesus is actually nonsensical. This idea is called con-substantiation: which means two different substances or ‘things’, bread and Jesus’s Body, are both in one place at the same time. But you can’t have two different things in one place at the same time. So, before the consecration, here on the altar I will place bread and wine; but after the consecratory words of Jesus, no longer will bread and wine even partly be here, but His Body and Blood totally, under the appearances of bread and wine. This change we call ‘transubstantiation’, which means a total and complete change of all the substance, or the entire thing, that is there.

Of course, this requires of us an act of faith. It is precisely because we cannot see, touch or taste any difference whatever in what is on the altar before the consecration and what is there afterwards, that we need to make an act of faith that our Lord meant what He said,

or else He would not have insisted on teaching something so precise and definite as ‘This is my body…This is my blood.’

As the Fathers of the Church teach, particularly St Ambrose and St Chrysostom, these words of Jesus, when pronounced by the priest at Mass, actually bring about a complete change from the substance of bread and wine into the substance of Christ’s Flesh and Blood. Indeed, St Ambrose also said that it would be ridiculous to deny that God can change one substance or ‘thing’ into another ‘thing’ when we already believe that He has created every substance or ‘thing’ that exists out of nothing at all.

Our Lord’s words at the Last Supper give life, and give life not only to the bread and wine which were dead matter until they were changed into Himself, but also give life to us who receive them in Holy Communion. Believing this is an act of faith. That faith, which inspires us to cry out ‘Amen’ when we receive Communion, can only come from the Father Himself. He plants that faith in our minds and in our hearts. St John Henry Newman wrote about the difference between faith and understanding in this way: ‘People say that the doctrine of Transubstantiation is difficult to believe; I did not believe the doctrine till I was a Catholic. I had no difficulty in believing it, as soon as I believed that the Catholic Roman Church was the oracle of God, and that she had declared this doctrine to be part of the original revelation. [Transubstantiation] is difficult, impossible, to imagine, I grant;—but how is it difficult to believe?’ Here Cardinal Newman drives to the heart of the issue. Understanding what substance is, and what it means to change from one substance to another, this is impossible - but believing it? No – Because Jesus has said it, and His Word is true. This is a matter of faith in God’s word as He has delivered it to us through the teaching of His Church. It was the same Cardinal Newman who wrote these famous words we often sing: ‘And I hold in veneration for the love of Him alone, holy Church as His creation, and her teachings as His own’. In other words, what the Church teaches is what Christ taught. To try and say that we can believe something different from what the Church teaches and yet hope to be faithful to Christ, which is what Luther and Zwingli tried to do, is to accuse God of contradicting Himself, which is utter nonsense, of course!

Last of all, we have heard in the Gospel an important exchange between our Lord and the Apostles when, as St John says, ‘Because of this [i.e. because of what Jesus had said about his Body and Blood] many of His disciples turned back and no longer went about with Him.’ Jesus turns to the Twelve and asks, ‘Do you also wish to go away?’ We can surely understand His deep sorrow at seeing those who had been miraculously fed by Him, who had been so enthusiastic to find Him on the other side of the Sea of Galilee, now turn away for good on hearing this teaching. That also is how we know it must be true. If He had not meant something so extraordinary, He would have told the people that they had misunderstood Him, but no. And now He asks the Apostles the question, ‘do you also wish to go away and leave me?’ As so often in the Gospels when our Lord asks all the Apostles a question, it is Peter who speaks up: ‘Lord, to whom can we go?’ Indeed, to disbelieve the words of Jesus is, in effect, to turn away from Him and to look for someone else to go after. Would we want to do such a thing? No, because as Peter continues, ‘You have the words of eternal life’. How true! Jesus has the words of life that will take us into eternity. Those

words transform bread and wine into His Body and Blood, and by that Body and Blood in Holy Communion He transforms us into Himself. Like Peter we proclaim our faith in Jesus as the Christ, the Messiah, the Holy One of God, the perfect image of the Father, the Only-begotten Son of God. Peter says, ‘we have come to believe and know,’ meaning that faith, or belief, is not a matter of opinion, but of knowledge of the truth. When we put our faith in Jesus and in His words and in His Church’s teaching, we then know the truth because God’s word is true. Amen, Lord Jesus. We believe that under the appearances of bread and wine you are truly present in your Body and Blood, soul and divinity, in the Holy Eucharist, for us.

Dear Sisters, dear brethren, as we continue with the fourth excerpt of our continuous reading from the 6th chapter of St John’s Gospel, we should note that something entirely new has now been added by our Lord. So far, since the miracle of the Feeding of the Five Thousand, He has taught the same people whom He fed with five loaves and two fish: first, not to look for bread that will only leave them hungry, but for the living bread; secondly, that He in person is that bread, and that those who wish to live must eat it; and now, today, most truly shocking of all that ‘the bread that He shall give is His flesh, for the life of the world.’

The crowd, until recently so eager to listen and learn, but who began to show signs of unease last Sunday, now react with disgust, ‘how can this man give us His flesh to eat?’ Yet our Lord does not back down. He says instead, using His most solemn teaching formula: ‘Truly, truly I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man…you will not have life in you.’ But this is not all, for He goes a step further, a step from which there is no turning back, for when the people hear what He says next, they will have to accept something all Jews would think utterly abhorrent, even taboo, or else they will have to reject Him altogether. What is this that causes such mayhem, such confusion, such horror and division? It is when Jesus says, ‘unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood…’ For blood is, to the Jews, sacred and they are forbidden by God to shed it and contact with it will make them ritually unclean. The very idea of drinking blood is appalling.

Nonetheless, our Lord continues, ‘Anyone who does eat my flesh and drink my blood has eternal life, and I shall raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.’ It is for this that He has been preparing the crowds ever since the miracle, and now He opens to them the fullness of His heart and teaching. He is promising to give them His own flesh and blood as food and drink, not for this life only, but for eternal life. In eating and drinking Him, we draw life from Him. Indeed, He says, if we do not eat and drink Him, we shall not have life in us.

Eating and drinking Him. Put like that, it still has the power to shock. Of course, at the Last Supper He will give Himself as food and drink not in the visible forms of flesh meat and blood, but rather under the appearances of bread and wine. This is also fitting, not only to avoid the horror of literal cannibalism, but to show us that He is true to His word: ‘I am the bread of life’. In this way He will enable us to draw life from Him just as He draws life from God the Father. That Last Supper is still some way ahead at the time of this teaching in the synagogue at Capernaum, but we should bear all this in mind when we hear those now very familiar words in every Mass: ‘Take this, all of you, and eat of it, for this is my Body, which will be given up for you’ and ‘Take this all of you and drink from it, for this is the Chalice of my Blood…’

Practical Issues

What can we learn from this? First of all, there is the important matter of receiving Communion under both kinds. Our Lord speaks today of both eating His Body and of drinking His Blood. Yet often, as here, when we receive Communion we seem to be only eating His Body. If we do not receive directly from the chalice, are we then disobeying Christ’s command? And if so, are we actually receiving the Sacrament of Holy Communion properly, or even at all? There have been some people in the past who have indeed believed that it was not only wrong not to receive from the chalice, but that if anyone received only the Body without the Blood, then they had not received the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper at all.

In reply, (and briefly because this is a big subject), the custom of receiving the chalice at Mass was for many centuries allowed only to the priest who celebrated the Mass. It is essential that the priest should do so because it is intrinsic to his role in offering the sacrifice of Christ’s Body and Blood, but it can be practically problematic. I think everyone here will at some point have received from the chalice at Communion. Here it was common until the pandemic and the fear of infection brought a stop to sharing the same chalice and Precious Blood. But it was only ever allowed for the sake of the completion of the sign of eating and drinking. And for this reason, although it is desirable in principle, it is difficult in practice. But thinking of the many centuries when nobody received from the chalice but the priest, does that mean that all those people did not receive the entire Body and Blood of Christ? As here today, will you only receive the Body in the form of the host, the consecrated bread, and not the Blood, because you will not be receiving the consecrated wine? No, not at all. For the truth is that in Holy Communion we are not receiving the Body and Blood of Christ separated as they were at His death. Remember, we are receiving not the dead Christ, but the risen Christ, in whom Body and Blood are reunited completely and indivisibly. So, therefore, when we receive either the host, or the chalice, or both, we always quite simply receive everything that the living Christ is. Hence the phrase we use, that we receive the ‘Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity’ of Christ whenever we receive Communion, whether in a large or small portion, or whether we receive under the appearance of bread only or under the appearance of wine only. Either way it is totally Himself that we receive.

Our Lord gave this Sacrament under two forms to represent to us the human desire to eat and to drink for nourishment and for enjoyment. We consume Him as our nourishment and from Him we draw both life and joy. This is the foretaste of what the heavenly banquet will be. Every Mass, every Holy Communion is just that: a foretaste of heaven.

But how can we draw life from Him in Communion? How do we avoid simply thinking of Him as giving us mere bread and wine as a memorial? We do so by faith in His words. For when He said: ‘This is my Body’ and ‘This is my Blood’, He meant those words; by saying them He changed the bread and wine into Himself. And He wants something from us, just as He wanted it from the crowd in Capernaum, He wants our faith in Him. This is why we make an Act of Faith in every Mass. In fact, we make two. We solemnly proclaim the word ‘Amen’ twice in order to proclaim our faith. It is worth reflecting on this little Hebrew word, Amen. It means: ‘let it be so!’ or ‘I give my complete assent to this.’ The first time we do this in this particular way is at the end of the Eucharistic Prayer, when we all proclaim the so-called ‘Great Amen’, not to validate the Eucharistic Prayer the Celebrant has just prayed at some length, but to express our faith that Jesus has now offered Himself on this altar as a sacrifice to the Father for us. Then, secondly, at the Communion rail, as the priest holds before our eyes the sacred host and proclaims, ‘The Body of Christ’, we answer ‘Amen’, to express our faith that this living Lord, under the appearances of bread, is now coming into us as nourishment and joy, to prepare us for the banquet of heaven. And so this food is both bodily and spiritual, not only one or the other. It feeds our bodies and our souls. It sanctifies us body and soul because it is the Body, Blood. Soul and Divinity of the Saviour in Person.

Now, finally for today, there is something else to remember. If we are to receive this Living Flesh and Blood into our flesh and Blood, and this living soul and divinity into our souls, then we must prepare ourselves duly. We do this in various ways, but principally by two: first, we must strive to be in a state of grace. We must go to confession so that we are fit to receive the all-holy One into our bodies and souls. Secondly, we must fast from all earthly food and drink for an hour before receiving Him. For most of history, Christians fasted from midnight until they received Communion, and then more recently for three hours before, but now the Church asks us to fast only one hour. It is a small price but one that helps us to concentrate on this unearthly food that, whilst nourishing us here, prepares us for eternity.

St John, in a state of rapture, beheld a great vision consisting of a series of scenes shown to him by the Holy Spirit, which he recorded for us in the Book of the Apocalypse, including this one described for us in the first reading of today’s Mass: ‘A great sign appeared in the heavens, a woman clothed with the sun, standing on the moon, and a crown of twelve stars upon her head.’ The vision of the unnamed woman is understood by the Church to be a sign of the Mother of God, for even though there are clearly some discrepancies between, on the one hand, the figure of the woman here and her son, and on the other hand, the Mother of God and her divine Son, the prophetic nature of the vision allows different applications to be made. The Church has no hesitation in seeing this woman as in some sense symbolic of the Mother of God for a very important reason.

The first of those reasons lies in the place the woman occupies here: she is a sign in heaven, and a sign points to some other, greater reality than itself. She is the sign of victory, of God’s victory, and of mankind’s sharing in it. Yet the image of the woman also stands for Eve, whom we first encountered at the opposite end of the Scriptures, in the beginning of the Book of Genesis, where she was described as both the Mother of all the living, and the victim of Satan’s deceit, for she was drawn by him into the rebellion against God which has marked him from his creation and will see him eternally damned. His hatred was the motive that brought him to seek the destruction of mankind, made in God’s image. And he was successful, as we learn in Genesis, or so he thought. For God was not prepared to leave the matter there. He promised Eve that her offspring would succeed where she had failed, and that a descendant of hers would crush Satan’s head even though Satan, the serpent, would bruise that descendant’s heel. Hence in Eve’s motherhood lay hidden the promise of her future salvation.

This is why the figure of the woman in the Apocalypse is seen to be about to give birth to a male child. This is why Satan, no longer the serpent but a huge red dragon, seeks to destroy that child in whom is based the entire hope of Eve’s progeny that they will defeat their ancient hateful foe.

When we are told that the woman is in birth pangs, again we understand that this does not refer directly to the Mother of God, as she brought forth her divine Son without the pangs of childbirth due to sin, but rather it refers to her in her role as Mother of the Church and her children in baptism for whom she feel the spiritual pangs of childbirth. For until that time when the entire race has passed through its time of travail, until the Second Coming of her Son and the bringing together of all creation in Him, Blessed Mary will continue to be a Mother full of solicitude and care for us and all her offspring, constantly and relentlessly under attack from the dragon who is Satan.

Eve and Mary: the two women who are both called ‘mothers of all that live’. Yet as Eve’s fall to the devil’s malice was devastating, it is also finite. For her descendant, Mary’s Son Jesus, has won a greater destiny for mankind, which is infinite. St Paul tells us that ‘where sin abounded, grace abounded even more’, and nowhere is this more truly seen than in the contrast between Eve and Mary. For Mary has undone by her obedience all that Eve lost by her disobedience. Mary’s triumph is infinitely greater than Eve’s fall, and as Eve has passed on the effects of her fall to us, so Mary passes on the effects of the triumph she shares with her Son to all of us who accept Him, to whom Jesus gave power to become the children of God.

Over a century ago, Our Blessed Lady appeared to three little children in Fatima over the course of several months. But in the last of these appearances she manifested her power and glory in a ‘signum magnum’, a great sign, seen by a great host of witnesses, many of whom had previously been totally sceptical. It is highly significant for us that that great sign in the heavens was the miracle of the sun. For in the Apocalypse, as we heard in the first reading, St John tells us that the woman he saw was clothed with the sun. The golden sun is her vesture, just as we have also just heard described in the Responsorial Psalm, which in the words of ps. 44 said that ‘the daughter of the king, exceedingly beautiful, is bedecked with golden robes’, and we can hear the amazement of the angels as they gaze in wonder, crying out, ‘who can this be, who sets forth like the sun itself?’ At Fatima the sun did her bidding, at the will of her divine Son, the Lord of creation, and its extraordinary motion, seen by thousands, was described by them as a kind of ‘dance’. Whatever this sign means, it is truly a sign both of power and of joy. For who is this woman, ‘who comes forth like the dawn, resplendent as the sun, and terrible as an army in battle array?’ (Cant. 6:10)

It is to greet her that, as today’s Alleluia verse before the Gospel so ecstatically proclaims, that ‘the angels rejoice’, and there is a text from St Andrew of Crete which adds, ‘let the angels rejoice and let them dance!’ at the triumphal entry to heaven of the sinless Mother of God, the Mother of Grace, the Mother of all that live in Christ, the Mother of eternal life. And as Mary’s grace abounded far more than Eve’s sin, then Mary’s triumph becomes also the promise of Eve’s triumph too, and of all her progeny. So then, if the angels rejoice at this, and sing and dance like the sun at Fatima, how can we, who are Mary’s children and destined to follow her, not also sing and dance with joy on this wonderful festival, the triumph of Mary, and her entry into eternal light and glory? For Mary is our mother, and her triumph is our triumph, for which may God her Son be eternally thanked and praised. Amen.

Today in our continued reading from the 6th chapter of St John’s Gospel, following the miracle of the Feeding of the 5,000, we hear the first indications of unbelief towards Jesus’s teaching on the crowd’s part. They know Him as Joseph’s son. How can he now say He has come down from heaven? Far from backtracking, Christ insists that the real meaning of the bread to which He has been referring already is nothing less than His own flesh. What an astonishing claim! Yet furthermore, this flesh is not dead, like the meat that we eat, but living. To the people in the synagogue who are hearing this it is shocking. It sounds like cannibalism. Yet we know that it is not so, because it is Christ’s flesh given sacramentally. A sacrament is a sacred sign of a sacred reality. In this case the sign is not bread, but rather the outward form and appearance of bread. The inner reality, which is not seen or touched or tasted, is Christ’s flesh and blood. I will say more about this.

But first, what Christ teaches here is that, whereas we eat meat to draw life from that which is dead, He offers us Himself so that we may eat Him who is alive, in order to receive life itself. When we eat any ordinary food, whether flesh or vegetable matter, including ordinary bread, we turn that dead matter into our energy or into our own flesh. It is dead when we consume it, yet, without such food and drink we would starve. In a sense, we give life to the food we eat precisely by digesting it and turning it into ourselves. Yet Christ’s flesh, hidden under the form of bread, is by no means dead at all. It is truly living. He says in the Gospel, I am the living bread. It is this bread which is alive that we consume in Holy Communion. And it is more than merely ‘living bread’. As St Augustine teaches, the Eucharistic bread is Christ’s flesh and blood, and both because it is alive and also because it is Jesus in person who is God and man, we don’t turn Him into us, rather it is He who actually turns those who receive Him into Himself.

He gives us Himself as food, in order to keep us alive on our journey through life. In the first reading we heard how the prophet Elijah was given miraculous bread from heaven to strengthen him for a journey of forty days and nights which would bring him into God’s presence at Mount Horeb. This bread Elijah was given we can call ‘waybread’ or ‘bread for the journey’, which is in Latin viaticum. That also is the special name which we give to Holy Communion when it is given particularly to those who are about to depart on the greatest and most important journey of their lives – the leaving of this world for the next. Hence the last rites of the Church for the faithful Catholic is principally Holy Communion as viaticum, ‘food for the journey’ that will take this soul first through the experience of death, then through that momentous way that leads us to see God face to face, when we will be judged and shown our eternal destiny.

This destiny looks forward to the resurrection at the end of time. That which He gives under the form of bread is not His dead body, but His living flesh, His risen Body. ‘Anyone who eats this bread will live forever’, means that we who eat Christ’s living Body are drawn into the life of that body. This is both here and now, as spiritual and bodily nourishment, and also as a pledge, a promise, of the resurrection to come. For though our bodies will one day die and be buried, they will rise again on the last day because they have been nourished in this life by the living Body of the Saviour.

Practical issues:

What can we learn from this? First, Christ uses the imagery of bread to describe Himself precisely as food. We should not make the mistake of thinking that He gives us bread as a mere sign of Himself, and nothing more. When we receive Him in Holy Communion we receive everything that He is: His humanity, consisting of His Body and Blood, and also His human soul; and we also receive His Godhead, His divine nature. So, when St Paul, for instance, speaks of Communion in this way: ‘when we eat this bread…’, he is not stating that what we receive is mere ‘bread’, but that Christ has given Himself to us as food and nourishment not as bread, but in the form of bread.’

This means that in every little host, every particle of the consecrated eucharistic bread which we receive in Holy Communion, whether small or large, we receive Him, all of Him. In the tiniest fragment He is entirely present. Take great care when receiving in the hand, therefore, not to lose any particle, however tiny. I would like you to reflect on this truth. If you took a piece of gold, and cut off a small piece of it, both the small piece and the larger piece left would be exactly the same thing: gold. It doesn’t change into something else just because there is a smaller of larger quantity of it. However, it would also be true that the value of the gold would be proportionate to the size of the piece. One ounce of gold is just as much the same substance as a ton of gold, but there is no doubt that a ton of gold is worth far, far more. However, where Communion is concerned, a tiny fragment is the same substance as the entire large host which I will soon be consecrating on this altar. Both the large host and the fragment you receive are identical as the same Body of Christ. If I receive a larger host in Communion than anyone else, I have received no more of the Body of Christ than anyone who receives a tiny fragment. Moreover, whereas the fragment of gold is less costly than a ton of gold, there is this to remember: a tiny fragment of the host, even a small particle left over after you have received in your hand, is worth exactly as much as the largest host, because of who they both are. I invite you to note, after Communion, the care with which I collect even the tiniest fragments of the sacred particles in the ciborium bowl, and having gathered them together I reverently consume them – with the same reverence, in fact, as when I consumed the large piece of the Eucharistic bread at the beginning of Communion. This must be a sign to all who receive Communion in the hand. I often notice that those who receive Communion in the hand, after receiving, fail to check their hands to see if any particle, however tiny, is still there, because as St Thomas Aquinas so beautifully put it: ‘Think not the whole doth more contain/ than in the fragment doth reside’ – though of course he said it in Latin: tantum esse sub fragmento quantum toto tegitur. So please, do check with great care to see if there is any such fragment on your hands.

For even were we to receive only a tiny fragment of a host, it would still be all of Him. No one who receives a tiny particle receives any less of the person of Christ, Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity – all that He is! This is also why we receive all of Him even when we receive under one kind alone. No one should ever fear that by not receiving from the chalice they are not receiving the whole person of Christ. He is totally present under both forms, just as He is totally present in a tiny piece and in an entire ciborium full of particles as is kept in the tabernacle near the altar.

Incidentally, it is because the Body of Christ, preserved after Mass in the tabernacle, and exposed for our adoration before Benediction, is alive and not dead, that we keep the beautiful custom of maintaining a small light by the side of the tabernacle as a sign that He is truly alive and present in this place, actually within this very tabernacle.

Finally, there are two prayers we are yet to hear and pray at this Mass which we can pray all the more fervently: the first is at the end of the Offertory as we prepare for the consecration of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ: ‘…O Lord…by your power you transform [these offerings] into the mystery of our salvation’ and after both the consecration and when we will have received the consecrated Body and Blood: ‘May the communion in your Sacrament that we have consumed, save us, O Lord, and confirm us in the light of your truth.’ Amen.

Last week the Feeding of the 5,000. A miracle, a sign. The enthusiasm of the crowds. Their desire to make Jesus king. His escape.

This week they come to find Him. He begins to teach them not to long for food that will satisfy only briefly, like the bread they ate, however miraculously given. They see it as a sign of the Messiah, following Moses ‘who gave them bread from heaven.’ This is what we heard in the first reading, how Moses prayed God to provide food for the hungry people in the desert. They received this truly miraculous bread, not knowing what it was. Man hu? They asked, meaning ‘what is that?’ Man hu is the origin of the name ‘Manna’.

Jesus encourages His audience to look deeper and further. For the true bread which the Father sends from heaven gives life to the world, not merely taking away their hunger for food here and now.

As our Lord said to Satan at the end of the Temptations in the Wilderness: ‘Man does not live on bread alone’. Here He teaches that truth to His own followers, those who had been impressed by the miracle of the Feeding of the 5.000.

Then they show that they are ready to learn what Jesus has to say: ‘Lord, give us that bread always!’

He replies: ‘I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never be hungry; he who believes in me will never thirst.’

He has not yet given them this bread which is Himself. That miraculous feeding was only a preparatory sign, that they could trust in Him. If He could do that miracle, then He could give them the bread of life, and moreover, He tells them that He is that bread from heaven. That bread He will give on the night before He dies on the cross, when He took bread, blessed and broke it and gave it to the Apostles, saying: ‘Take this and eat it, for this is my Body, which will be given up for you.’

Note that Jesus speaks about the ‘Bread of life’ in this Gospel. He does not mention His presence in the other mode of the Blessed Sacrament, under the form of wine.

We talk about ‘the Real Presence’, but what does that mean? Christ does not make Himself into bread, but makes Bread into Himself. Communion is not something, but someone.

We must remember that He is completely present under the form of bread, not that He has turned into bread, or that He has given us bread as a mere ‘sign’ of Himself. So when we receive the Bread of Life, we are receiving Christ Himself. It is not as though there is bread here which has become in some way ‘holy’, or ‘blessed’. There was once a custom, common in France, in which the priest at the end of Mass would give everyone leaving the Church a piece of ‘blessed bread’. That is exactly what it was, a small piece of bread which he had blessed earlier in the Mass. It was simply a sign of fraternal union, that much and no more. It was not the Blessed Sacrament, it was not the Body of Christ.

Holy Communion is not like the manna we heard about in the first reading, which was a miraculous bread from heaven. Holy Communion is Jesus Himself under the form of bread. But what does that mean? This can easily be misunderstood. For instance, there are popular religious songs you may know, one of which says: ‘I am with you for all time, I am with you in this bread and wine’ and another which speaks of ‘the Bread of life, truth eternal, Broken now to set us free. The risen Christ, his saving power, Is here in Bread and Wine for me.’ This can easily lead to a misunderstanding. Because Jesus is not present in bread and wine: He is present in His own Body and Blood into which He has transformed what began as bread and wine. This is the meaning of those words our Lord says at the end of today’s Gospel: ‘I am the bread of life’. He does not give us what is just miraculous bread like the manna in the wilderness, but rather He gives us Himself.

For the Blessed Sacrament is the true Body of Christ not somehow present in bread; but rather by our Lord’s own words which the priest pronounces at the consecration, that bread which very soon will be brought up at the Offertory and placed on the Altar, will then be changed completely so that although it will continue to look and taste like bread, it is no longer that in reality, only in form or appearance.

The Real Presence and Devotion.

As the Communion antiphon says: ‘You have given us, O Lord, bread from heaven, endowed with all delights and sweetness in every taste.’ How can we come to experience the ‘sweetness and delight’ of this wonderful gift? We must shape ourselves to receive that experience. How? The need to express and foster devotion.

For Devotion is something that grows with doing it. You cannot expect devotion to come from nowhere. We need to foster it within us. We need to deepen our awareness that we are receiving not something, but someone, and that someone is Jesus – God made man. All that He is He gives us in that small but complete presence, the host.

Silence in His presence outside of Mass time, especially immediately before and immediately after Mass. No place or time to chat! Receiving Communion with great care and recollection, if possible not in a hurry to move on. If you do have to move quickly, then when you return to your place, try hard to keep still and fan your devotion into a flame.

There is another way we can increase our devotion to our Lord truly present in the Blessed Sacrament: Adoration. We will appreciate this wonderful gift of the Body and Blood of Christ if we adore Him more often outside Mass time. When did you last spend time before the Blessed Sacrament in silent prayer of adoration?

And Benediction? When did you last come to adore Him as a preparation for receiving His blessing, and so learn more of the wonderful consolation of his presence in our midst? That, too, makes the experience of receiving Him so much more powerful and enriching.