"Get up and eat, else the journey will be too long for you!"

Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time. August 12th, 2012

For the last couple of weeks we have been reading from the sixth Chapter of St. John on the Holy Eucharist. These readings should have moved us to beg our Lord for a deeper faith in the great mystery of the Holy Eucharist, a mystery that sadly most of Jesus disciples denied in his day, and most Christians deny today. The Eucharist is however, THE MYSTERY OF OUR FAITH. Let’s do a short recap of what we heard thus far.

We started this Chapter a few weeks ago with the miracle of multiplication of the loaves and fishes. We learned that Jesus gave them bread to eat as a sign of a greater miracle to come. But the crowd misunderstood and instead wanted to make him an earthly King-president, a political leader, in order to fill only their earthly bellies, only their earthly desires.

And so Jesus confronts them for their lack of faith, for not looking for Him in faith. He wants to give them so much more than they want for themselves, so he tells not to look just for earthly food but for the bread that will sastify their deepest desires-the Bread of eternal life. But, instead of believing Jesus in faith, they appeal to Moses as the one who gave them bread from heaven. Jesus conters by telling them it was not Moses who gave you bread from heaven but my Father you gives you the real bread from heaven.

And then Jesus gives them a real shock by telling them that He, Himself is the true bread come down from heaven-the Bread of Life sent by his Father for the life of the world and that all who believe in Him will have life and have it to the full, including eternal life.

This brings us to today’s Gospel. Today, we hear the Jews murmuring amongst themselves, refusing to believe that Jesus Himself is the true bread that satisfies our deepest hunger, which is for love. Here is God Himself teaching them the truth, He who is Truth Itself, speaking to the them and yet they refused to believe.

Our day is really no different, there are still those who murmur amongst themselves and deny Jesus’, that is, God’s teaching on the Holy Eucharist—the truth that Holy Eucharist is God Himself, Truth Himself. As well, many deny the Holy Mass is that extraordinatry event by which the power of the Holy Spirit-God working through the gift of the ordained priesthood, makes sacramentally, but really and truly physical, bodily present the true Bread of Life, which is Jesus in Person, He who alone is the One we seek.

Sadly, there are those even within the Church herself who murmur and deny this teaching today, trying to make the Holy Mass into a ordinary event where we build merely a human community (not a supernatural one) by gathering together around a table sharing ordinary bread and wine as we remember what Jesus did for us—a special action, but only in meaning not in reality, a mere human action, something we do, not something that God does for us.

These present day murmerers too, like the Jews, really only want an earthly messiah who is only an earthly king. And so, they deny the sacrificial nature of the Mass, deny any supernatural action in the Holy Mass, that it makes present in reality to us Calvary and the once and for all sacrifice of Jesus for our Salvation. And so they deny that the bread and the wine are literally transformed through the miracle of transubstantiation into the physical Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Jesus, his whole self in order to become our heavnly food; thus they close off their hearts and minds to Jesus’ desire to come truly and deeply into their hearts.

IN today’s Gospel, Jesus said they will all be taught by God. This is what happened during the Second Vatican Council, when God Himself taught, through the bishops of the world united to the pope, that the Eucharistic Sacrifice is “the source and summit of the Christian life.” And again, when through Blessed John Paul’s Encyclical on the Holy Eucharist, God Himself taught us again the truth that, “the most Holy Eucharist contains the Church’s entire spiritual wealth: Christ Himself, our Passover and living bread. Through his own flesh, now made living and life-giving by the Holy Spirit, God continues to offer the fullness of life to men."(God’s own Life). Consequently, blessed John Paul said, "the gaze of the Church is constantly turned to her Lord, present in the Sacrament of the Altar, in which the Church discovers the full manifestation of his boundless love.”

Today more than ever, in our great hour of need, we need to beg our Lord to increase our faith in the great and awesome gift of the Holy Eucharist. We need to have a firmer and deeper faith in order to open ourselves to the grace of the Holy Eucharist which is the gift of the Holy Spirit. When we receive Jesus in the Holy Eucharist He stays within us sacramentally for just a few moments; but if our hearts and souls are open to Him, He leaves us the gift of the Holy Spirit to empower our lives and to transform us into His other-selves. We open ourselves up only by our faith, adoration, hope and trust and love for Jesus in the Holy Eucharist; we open ourselves up only by being made pure by fequent reception of the Sacrament of Confession; and we open ourselves up only by accepting with our intellects and striving to live with all our strength and will all of the Teachings of the Catholic Church as we continue to be taught by God through the Pope and the bishops in union with Him.

If however on the contrary, we receive the Holy Eucharist without all these necessary dispositions we grieve the Holy Spirit with which we were sealed for the day of redemption. However open to the Holy Spirit, this divine Guest that Jesus leaves with us after receiving Him in Holy Communion, we can with His divine light and power remove from our lives, our families and our parish family all bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, and reviling along with all malice. We will be able to be kind to one another, compassionate, forgiving one another as God has forgiven you in Christ. We will then truly be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love.

Faith in the Holy Eucharist is what we need most in the present life to sustain us. As the angel of Lord in our first reading stated, "Get up and eat, else the journey will be too long for you!" that is rise up from your unbelief and receive faithfuly and worthily the Bread of Life, Jesus Himself, or else the journey of your life will be too hard for you…when the cross comes for you, whether in the struggles of ordinary life or in the pain of suffering of the illness or death of someone you love or in your own illness and impending death, you will not have the strength to bear it all; when the current world is punished by God because of its madness in turning away from Him and His laws you will lose hope, thus failing to see these earth shaking events as an all loving Father intervening in His Divine mercy and Justice to save us from destroying ourselves. And if we fail to faithfully and worthily receive the Holy Eucharist we will become the murmurers and grumblers as were the people of today’s gospel and we will lose the gift of eternal life promised only to those who believe that Jesus Christ is still bodily on earth for us to adore and to receive as our heavenly food in oder to fulfill the deepest desires of our heart and soul and gives us the fulless of life, here on earth in the eternity to come.

With a true and living faith in Jesus in the Holy Eucharist that is lived by adoring before Him on our knees when ever we can, we will be able to turn to the Lord with great confidence in His mercy and submit ourselves to His Holy Will which is love and mercy itself.

And so, Let us in this Mass truly open our hearts to the gift of Jesus in the Eucharist. We don’t have to be perfect in order to do this, we just need to become like little Children trusting in God for what we lack. We can come to the Mass in our brokenness and sinfulness in order to receive what we need to change, to be able grow in love. Jesus will make us worthy and He will increase our love, by taking our human hearts and uniting them with His Sacred Heart, so we can love with His love, a divine love and so be truly fulfilled and happy, blessed. But we must repent of our sinfulness and our stubbornness and we must freely and with great trust give him our whole heart and all of our wills. Impossible? No, with God all things are possible….

Let us ask the Blessed Virgin Mary to help us lift up our hearts in adoration to the Lord. To adore ultimately means to give ourselve totally in a loving sacrifice to the God who gives Himself to us totally and sacrifically in the Holy Eucharist. What an awesome God we have who love us us so much that He comes to us as our daily bread in order to become one with us in a Holy Communion of love now earth and forever in the world to come. How can we not respond to such love, by believing, adore, hoping, loving and begging pardon for those who don’t believe, don’t adore, don’t hope and don’t love?

Let us pray: Eternal God in Who Mercy is endless and the treasure of compassion inexhaustible, look kindly upon us and increase your mercy in us, so that in difficult moment we might not despair or become despondent by with great confidence submit ourselves to Thy Holy Will which is love and mercy itself. Amen.