The Eucharist, Heart Of The Church: Part Five

10-07-2016 FIFTEENTH SUNDAY OF ORDINARY TIME YEAR C

SCRIPTURAL READING:

Deut. 30:10-14c.
Ps 69:13-16.29-30.32-33.35ab.36. (R. 32).
2 Col. 1:15-20; Accl; Jn 6:63c. 68c;
Gospel Luke 10:25-37.

Preamble:

Dear friends please repeat these words after me;
Stay with me Lord Jesus as I give you my mind; help me understand your word.
Stay with me Lord Jesus as I give you my ears; help me hear your voice.
Stay with me Lord Jesus as I give you my heart; help me welcome you.
Holy Spirit, rekindle in me the fire of your love. Amen.

THE EUCHARIST THE HEART OF THE CHURCH: PART FIVE
THEME: THE LORD’S BODY IS GIVEN UP FOR YOU-MEDITATION TWO.

Beloved in Christ, last week we reflected on the theme-the Lord’s presence is close to us using the book of Deuteronomy 4:7 “what great nation is there that has a god so near to it as the Lord our God is to us?” as a basis for our reflection with a special reference to the gospel of John 6: 48-59. In that meditation we highlighted several points which is of great importance we remind ourselves of before we move into the topic of today-“the lord’s body is given up for you.”

God’s closeness to us is the cause of our joy for it speaks to us about God who has allowed himself to become a man among men and has remained that he places himself in the mystery of transubstantiated bread to be held in our hands and received into our hearts. It the joy of the people of God which gives us a new identity and the living presence of the Lord.

But this joy is also the cause of division amongst many simply because we don’t want God so small, humbling himself as he has allowed himself to be. We want him great and distant. It has raised so many questions which is necessary to address in order for us to learn anew and more profoundly the yes of faith, so as to receive anew its joy and thus to learn anew once more to pray and to know the Eucharist itself.

We cited three questions of which we treated question one. The 3 questions include;

(A.) The first question is; does the Bible actually say anything like that? Does it present us with this, or is it just the position of the Catholic Church?

(B.) The second question is: is it truly possible for a body to share itself out into all places and all times? Does this not simply contradict the limitations that are of the essence of a body?

(C.) The third question is: Hasn’t modern science, with everything it says about “substance” and material being, so obviously rendered meaningless the dogmas of the church that relate to this that in the world of science we just finally have to throw them on the scrap heap, since we are unable to reconcile them with contemporary thought?

Our thoughts on question was that the dispute revolved around one word ‘is’: this is my body, this is my blood. Does this ‘is’ really signify full force of bodily presence or does it merely indicate an image so that it should be understood: this stands for my body and my blood? This argument has been endless and pointless because the word of Jesus was very clear in John 6:53, 55 “unless you eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you…my flesh is food indeed.”

Jesus did not dance to the tune of the murmuring of the crowd rather he was very emphatic that the bread has to be literally, physically eaten. He says that faith in God who became man is believing in a God with a body and that this faith is real and fulfilled; it brings full union only if it is itself corporeal, if it is a sacramental event in which the corporeal lord seizes hold of our bodily existence.

In order to express and fully understand the intensity and reality of this fusion, Paul compares what happens in Holy Communion with the physical union between man and woman. He uses the creation story contained in Gen. 2:24; the two [=man and wife] shall become one. He adds using 1 Cor. 6:17 “He who is united to the Lord becomes one spirit [that is, shares a single new existence in the Holy Spirit] with him.”

This means for us that the presence of Jesus Christ is not something at rest but is a power that catches us up and works to draw us within itself. Shortly before the conversion of St. Augustine who was struggling with the incarnational aspect of Christian belief, he found it impossible to approach it from a philosophical point of view (i.e. platonic idealism). He had a sort of vision, in which he heard a voice saying to him: ‘I am the bread of the strong, eat me! But you will not transform me and make me part of you; rather, I will transform you and make you part of me.’

You know beloved in Christ, in the normal process of eating, the human is the stronger being. He takes things in, and they are assimilated into him, so that they become part of his own substance. They are transformed within him and go to build up his bodily life. But in the mutual relation with Christ, it is the other way round; he is the heart, the truly existent being. When we truly communicate, this means that we are taken out ourselves, that we are assimilated into him, that we become one with him and, through him, with the fwllowship of our brethren.

Today beloved we address the second question which is; “Is it really possible for a body to share itself out so that it is many hosts, so that beyond the limits of place and time this body is always there?”

The first thing we must keep in mind in answering this question as the emeritus pontiff Pope benedict XVI tells us is that we will never wholly understand something like that since what is happening is part of God’s realm, the realm of resurrection. We do not live in the realm of the Resurrection.

We live on the other side of death’s boundary. And since we live in the sphere of death, we can reach out in thought into the sphere of the resurrection and try to make approximations. But it remains something different that we never quite understand. This is because of the boundary of death, which closes us in and within which we live.

One approximation we can make is as we reflect on the language of the Bible the word “Body”-“This is my Body”-does not mean just a body, in separation to the spirit, for instance. Body, in the language of the Bible, means rather the whole person, in whom body and spirit are indivisibly one.

“This is my Body” therefore means: this is my whole person, existent in bodily form. What the nature of this person is, however we learn from what is said next: “which is given up for you.” That means: This person is: existing-for-others. It is in its most intimate being a sharing with others. But that is why, since it is a matter of this person and because it is from its heart an opening up, a self-giving person, it can then be shared out.

This means something to us if we reflect on our own bodily existence. When we reflect on what the body means for us, we will notice that it carries within it a certain contradiction. On the one hand, the body is the boundary that separates us from others. Where this body is, no other body can be. When I am in this place, I am not at the same time elsewhere. Thus the body is the boundary that separates us from each other; and it thus involves our being somehow strangers to each other.

We cannot look inside the other person; corporeal existence hides his inner self; he remains hidden from us; on that account, indeed, we are strangers even to ourselves. We cannot even see into ourselves, into our own depths. That is one thing, then: The body is a boundary that makes us opaque, impermeable for each other, which sets us beside each other and prevents our being able to see or to touch each other’s intimate selves.

This is what we notice in the attitude of the priest, and the Levite in the Gospel reading of today. They were so concerned in their respective duties and business of the day rather than offer a helping hand to the man who was in dire need of help.

But there is a second thing: the body is also a bridge. For we meet each other through the body; through it we communicate in the common material of creation; through it we can see ourselves, feel ourselves, come close to one another. In the gestures of the body are revealed who and what the other person is. We see ourselves in the way the body sees, looks, acts, offers itself; it leads us to each other: it is both boundary and means of communion in one. A typical example of this is found in the good Samaritan who reached out to offer a helping hand.

That is why anyone can live out his bodily existence in different ways: we can live it out more inclined toward shutting off, toward selfishness, that it becomes hardly more than a boundary and no longer opens up meetings with others. Then comes about what Albert Camus once depicted as the tragic situation of men in relation to each other: it is as if two people are separated by the glass wall of a telephone box.

They can see each other; they are quite close; and yet there is this wall that keeps them apart. Indeed, it seems like frosted glass, which only allows us to see outlines. Man can therefore live in the direction of “body;” he can shut himself up in selfishness that the body is nothing more than a division, a limit, preventing any communion, and he no longer really encounters anyone in it, let’s no one touch his closed-up inner self.

But bodily existence can be more inclined toward communion. That is, opening oneself up, as the developing freedom of a person who shares himself to others where heart connects to others even when at a distance as in the case of telepathy.

Resurrection means that the body ceases to be a limit and that its capacity for communion remains. Jesus rose from the dead in order to bring about being communion; it signifies being the one who is open, who gives himself. And on that basis we can understand that Jesus, in the speech about the Eucharist that John has handed down to us, puts the resurrection and the Eucharist together and that the fathers say that the Eucharist is the medicine of immortality.

Receiving communion means entering into communion with Jesus Christ; it signifies moving into the open through him who alone could overcome the limits and thus, with him and on the basis of his existence, becoming capable of resurrection oneself.

What is given to us at communion is not a piece of a body, not a thing, but him, the resurrected one himself-the person who shares himself with us in his love, which runs right through the cross. This means that receiving communion is always a personal act. It is never merely a ritual performed in common, which we can just pass off as we do with other social routines.

In communion I enter into the lord, who is communicating himself to me. Sacramental communion must therefore always be also spiritual communion. That is why the Liturgy changes over, before communion, from the liturgical “we” to “I.” This makes demands on me personally. At this point I have to move out, go toward him, call to him. The Eucharistic fellowship of the church is not a collectivity, in which fellowship is achieved by levelling down to the lowest common denominator, but fellowship is created precisely by our each being ourself.

It does not rest on the suppression of the self, on collectivization, but arises through our truly setting out, with our whole self, and entering into this new fellowship of the lord. That is the only way that something other than collectivization can come about; the only way that a true attitude of turning toward each other, one that reaches down to the roots and into the heart and up to the highest level of a person, can develop. Because this is so, the personal approach to Christ, the “I” prayer, is the first part of communion; that is why we need a time of silence afterward, in which we converse quite personally with the lord, who is with us.

In recent decades, perhaps, we have all far too much the habit of this. We have discovered anew the congregation, liturgy as a communal celebration, and this is a great thing. But we also have to discover anew that fellowship requires the person. We must learn anew this quiet prayer before communion and the silent time at one with the lord, abandoning ourselves to him.

And finally what we receive is-as we were just saying-a person. But this person is the Lord Jesus Christ, both God and man. The previous devotional understanding of communion, in earlier centuries, perhaps forgot the man Jesus too much and thought too much about God. But we are in danger of the opposite, of only seeing the man jesus and forgetting that in him, as he gives himself to us in bodily form, we are at the same time coming into contact with the living God. Yet because this is so, communion is therefore always simultaneously adoration.

In any genuine human love there is an element of bowing down before the God-given dignity of the other person, who is in the image of God. Even genuine human love cannot mean that we have the other person all to ourselves and possess him; it includes our reverential recognition of something great and unique in this other person, whom we can never entirely possess, our bowing down and thus becoming one with him.

In our communion with Jesus Christ this attains a new level, since it inevitably goes beyond any human partnership. The word of the Lord as our ‘partner’ explains a great deal but leaves much else undisclosed. We are not on the same footing. He is the wholly other; it is the majesty of the living God that comes to us with him. Uniting ourselves with him means submitting and opening ourselves up to his greatness.

St. Augustine says ‘no one can receive communion without first adoring.’ Theodore of Mopsuestia, a contemporary of his who was active in Syria, tells us that every communicant, before receiving the holy spirit, tells us that every communicant, before receiving the Holy gift, spoke a word of adoration. The monks of Cluny had a very striking culture when receiving the body of the Lord, they took their shoes off. They knew that the burning bush as here, the mystery before which Moses, in the desert, sank to his knees.

The form may change, but what has to remain is the spirit of adoration, communication, freeing ourselves from our ownselves and thereby in fact discovering human fellowship.

It is only when we have truly communed with Lord can we learn anew the meaning of keeping God’s commandment the first reading talks about and also learn to be charitable to others as the good Samaritan in today’s gospel passage.

We pray the lord may lead us daily to discover him anew each day through Christ our Lord. Amen.