20th Sunday in Ordinary Time – 18 August 2024
In the late 20th century, there was a famous Catholic writer in the United States named Flannery O’Connor. In one of her short novels, The Violent Bear It Away, an eccentric old man catechises a young boy, his great nephew, about the Eucharist:
“You were born into bondage and baptised into freedom, into the death of the Lord, into the death of the Lord Jesus Christ.” Then the child would feel a sulliness creeping over him, a slow warm rising resentment that his freedom had to be connected with Jesus, and that Jesus had to be the Lord.
“Jesus is the bread of life,” the old man said. The boy disconcerted, would look off into the distance over the dark blue tree-line where the world stretched out, hidden, and at its ease. In the darkest, most private part of his soul, hanging upside down like a sleeping bat, was the certain, undeniable knowledge that he was not hungry for the bread of life . . .
The boy sensed that this was the heart of his great-uncle’s madness, this hunger, and what he was secretly afraid of was that it might be passed down, might be hidden in the blood and might strike some day in him and then he would be torn by hunger like the old man, the bottom split out of his stomach so that nothing would heal or fill it but the bread of life.”
For the past several weeks, as today, the gospel speaks a good deal about Jesus as the bread of life. But, like the boy in Flannery O’Connor’s story, many are not hungry for the bread of life. Perhaps we, too, are sometimes not quite sure that we are hungry for the bread of life. In each of us, perhaps, there is a spark of selfishness, of narrowness, of resentment – as in the boy in Flannery O’Conner’s story – a part of us that is not hungry for the bread of life – in other words, that considers ourselves to be self-sufficient, not in need, in control of our lives. How hungry are we? When Jesus encounters us, he brings us to the recognition, though, that we are hungry – hungry for a truly fulfilled life, hungry for a life in communion with others not inhibited by all the distortions in love that we know so well. And he says to us, I alone am the bread that can satisfy your deepest hunger.
Over the past Sunday gospels, this bread is presented as a metaphor for the teachings of Jesus. However, today’s gospel goes a good deal further. This bread is his own flesh. We are given the flesh of Jesus to eat. These words would have created a great commotion amongst Jesus’ first hearers. The phrase, “to eat someone’s flesh” for the Jews spoke of a hostile act. The drinking of blood was forbidden by the Law and the idea of drinking human blood would have been simply appalling, as it would be for us. Yet, taken together, the words, “flesh and blood” indicate the whole life of a creature. Thus, to eat the flesh of Jesus and to drink his blood, is to make his very life our own. We are not simply given a teaching by Jesus; we are given his very life. In the Eucharist we take his very life into our own bodies. How could Jesus have given this greater stress than to say, “Eat my flesh, and drink my blood”? It confronts any complacency in us to think that Jesus is simply saying, “Follow my teaching.” Something much, much more dramatic is being conveyed to us. This is the extraordinary and most remarkable mystery of the Eucharist. Our life and the life of Jesus become one. Then eternity itself lives within us.
But there is also a great irony in the Eucharist. Because if in our hunger we respond to Jesus’ invitation to eat and drink, there is a sense, in fact, that we become hungrier. We increasingly become more hungry: more hungry for a whole life, not less so. In the Eucharis, Jesus nourishes us with his very life, but that very life makes us more restless, not less so. And, further, we are given an unmistakable responsibility – because it is true that we become what we eat. We are given the Body of Christ, so that we might become the Body of Christ, his living presence in the world. To receive the Eucharist, to become Eucharist, means taking into ourselves Jesus’ life of sacrificial love: we are to find our true existence not in living for ourselves but in living for others.
