Lectio
Divina:*
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Meditatio:
‘..hose
who eat my flesh and drink my blood have eternal life, and I will raise them up
on the last day.’ (John 6:54)
Commentary:
In the 1986 film The Mission, set in South America in
the 1750s, the Jesuit priest Fr Gabriel leads the people forward, carrying the
monstrance with the Blessed Sacrament as a joint Portuguese–Spanish force opens
fire. The brutal destruction of the people – and the falling of the monstrance –
becomes a powerful cinematic image of Christ’s Body suffering in the poor and
the oppressed. After Fr Gabriel is cut down, a small child picks up the
monstrance and continues the procession. Only a handful escape into the jungle.
Witness, community, persecution, violence, death, scattering, remnant, and new life: flesh, bread, life.
Shock therapy applied today…
One way to apply a kind of ‘shock therapy’ in modern times
is to explore the Eucharistic teaching of John 6 within concrete social
reality. Bishop Frank Weston, an Anglican Bishop of Zanzibar in the early
decades of the 20th century, declared at an Anglo-Catholic gathering in 1923:
The one thing England needs to learn is that Christ is in and amid matter, God in flesh, God in sacrament.
Weston went on to say the following:
But I say to you, and I say it with all the earnestness that I have, if you are prepared to fight for the right of adoring Jesus in His Blessed Sacrament, then, when you come out from before your tabernacles, you must walk with Christ, mystically present in you through the streets of this country, and find the same Christ in the peoples of your cities and villages. You cannot claim to worship Jesus in the tabernacle, if you do not pity Jesus in the slums … It is folly – it is madness – to suppose that you can worship Jesus in the Sacraments and Jesus on the throne of glory, when you are sweating him in the souls and bodies of his children.
Such a challenge is not new. Saint Ignatius of Antioch,
writing in the early second century, declared in his letter to the Smyrnaeans:
They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins and which the Father, in His goodness, raised up.
He also emphasises that failure in charity – towards the
widow, the orphan, the prisoner, the hungry – reveals a deeper failure in
faith.
Two centuries later, Saint Basil the Great expressed the
same truth in stark moral terms:
The bread which you do not use is the bread of the hungry; the garment hanging in your wardrobe is the garment of him who is naked … the acts of charity that you do not perform are so many injustices that you commit.
(I am grateful for these sources, drawn together here
by Rev Patrick Comerford.)
In short, we do not have the luxury of worshipping a God
detached from the struggles and sufferings of the world. We move from sacrament
to world and back again, because the world is the arena in which the grace we
receive sacramentally is lived out in action.
DorothyDay, founder of the Catholic Workers Movement wrote in 1935:
It is because we forget the humanity of Christ - present with us in the Blessed Sacrament just as truly as when he walked with His apostles - that we have ignored the material claims of our fellow human beings… We have allowed our brothers and sisters, members of the Mystical Body, to be degraded… This neglect… gives rise to the aversion to religion seen in many.
Because Christianity is a ‘materialist’ religion…
Christianity affirms the goodness of matter because the Son
of God truly became flesh. In the Incarnation, God did not merely appear human
but entered fully into human life, raising our humanity to share in divine
life. The sacraments are not just reminders but effective signs of grace - outward,
tangible means through which God communicates His life to us.
Thus, we are not saved as isolated individuals, but as
members of a body. In the Eucharist, we are drawn into communion with Christ
and with one another. This lies at the heart of John 6. The Church’s reading of
this chapter - especially within the liturgical year - draws out the central
Eucharistic mystery: that Christ gives Himself as true food for the life of the
world.
Back to the reality of bread…
To live ‘eucharistically’, then, is to live in communion - with
God as Father, and with all His children as our brothers and sisters. It means
allowing what we receive on the altar to shape how we live in the world, so
that the life of Christ becomes visible in us for the sake of all.
Some
extras:
Collect prayer (Roman Catholic missal of 1970)
May we offer to our Father in heaven a solemn pledge of
undivided love. May we offer to our
brothers and sisters a life poured out in loving service of that kingdom where
you live with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
Post-Communion prayer (Roman Catholic missal of 1970)
Lord Jesus Christ, you give us your body and blood in the
eucharist as a sign that even now we share your life. May we come to possess it completely in the
kingdom where you live for ever and ever.
Private prayer after Holy Communion
(from The Family Missal and Prayer Book of the Church of
the Holy Spirit, Ballyroan, Dublin, 1976)
Lord Jesus, you are the living bread that has come down from
heaven. You have called me to the Supper of the Last Supper. I have received
your flesh to eat and your blood to drink in Communion. Stay with me; strengthen me with this bread
from heaven that I may walk in your paths.
Keep me in union with you all my days on earth so that I may live with
you for ever in heaven. O sacred
banquet, in which Christ is received, and the memory of his passion is renewed;
where the soul is filled with grace and a pledge of future glory is given to
us.
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