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.
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