Dear Parish Family,
The readings of this week-end deal with the theme of our very human lives as an adventure with the transcendent God. The prophet Elijah, in his dramatic confrontation with the prophets of Baal challenged them have their bull offering burned up by a fire from heaven. With this daring act, he staked his life on his faith in Yahweh as the one creator of all. This arouses the ire of Jezebel, sponsor of those now-deceased prophets, who is bent on murdering Elijah. Elijah flees for his life by heading toward the sacred mountain Horeb (Sinai). Like his ancestor Moses, he is sustained by divinely given food and drink for forty days in his desert journey. This will end in God's communication in a “still, small voice,” which will send him back into political engagement with the anointing of Jehu as king. The quest for the transcendent God typically sends people back into the nitty gritty of involvement in life around them, just as we will be send back at the end of every Mass, “Go in peace to love and serve God in one another.”
In the Gospel reading, when Jesus announces himself as “bread from heaven” to the seekers after signs, he is presenting himself as the divine food that will satisfy their deeper hunger, the hunger for a life involved with the transcendent God of all. Jesus is the revelation of the invisible Father, providing access to eternal life here and now. It is the Eucharistic sign of Jesus. “This is the bread that comes down from heaven, for you to eat and never die. I myself am the living bread. ... If you eat this bread, you shall live forever; the bread I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.” A mighty claim. God would be our food, our ultimate provision. God actually wants to inhabit our flesh, make us tabernacles. And think what a powerful profession of faith it is to believe this. Our “Amen” when we receive Holy Communion, is a radical assertion of dependence and desire - “You are my food and drink. You are my sustenance. You are what nourishes me.”
The people around Jesus knew just how radical the matter was: “How can he claim to have come down from heaven?” The appearances confound them. How can it be? He is familiar, he is just one of us. How can he be from heaven? He is flesh and blood like us! The Eucharist, like the Incarnation, is a scandal to empirical observation and technical reasoning. If that is our bottom line, we may as well forget all matters of faith. Forget the matters of hope and love as well. Even the exhortation of Paul, we read from the letter to the Ephesians—that we be forgiving, compassionate, and imitators of God in our love—is sheer mindlessness if only seeing is believing.
Our contemporary struggle with belief in the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist is a quarrel over transcendence. Only the here is real. Only the now is actual. Only the observable is knowable. Only perishables can sustain us. Our problem is not just believing that God could inhabit bread. It is believing that God could inhabit us. We have trouble believing anything transcendent about ourselves. “Can anyone ever say ‘forever,’ anyway? Is there anything possible left of us after our body decays? Is there anything more to us than satisfactions of power, fame and money?” Though tragically misguided, the lives and deaths of cultists and terrorists are a clear testimony to one thing: the hunger of the human heart for something more, something beyond themselves, for the transcendent, for God. If somehow we have become locked in a state of mind in which the “real presence” is impossible to accept as a gift of God, nothing wondrous will be possible for us. There is no point to the journey, no answer to the quest of our minds, no final satisfaction for the hunger of our hearts!
Fr. Tom Kunnel. C.O.