Today’s readings: Genesis 14:18-20; Psalm 110:1, 2, 3, 4; 1 Corinthians 11:23-26; John 6:51; Luke 9:11B-17
“Disciples of Jesus must learn to perceive the suffering of their master as unavoidable.” This is what Franz Jägerstätter wrote to his wife in one of his letters from prison. Here we have someone who deeply understood that communing at the Eucharist is embracing death: death in Christ; death with Christ. And no, this is not some morbid obsessive fascination with death; instead, it is a profound realisation of Jesus’s understanding in sharing his body and blood given to us as bread and wine in the Last Supper: “Do this in remembrance of me.”
Today’s second reading of the mass specifies: “For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes.” Jägerstätter was given the grace to understand this deeply as he frequently approached the Lord’s table.
This realisation fortified him in his objecting – albeit alone – in conscience to immoral laws passed on by the Nazi government and binding on all citizens. Due to his conscientious objection and adamant refusal to be subordinate to the unethical demands of the state, he was imprisoned, tried and executed for treason.
Handcuffed in his prison cell, he writes: “We should prepare ourselves when we are approaching the table of the Lord as we would if we were preparing ourselves for death.”
Christ’s life flourished abundantly in Jägerstätter, who communed daily at the Lord’s table, gradually dying to himself, to ultimately arrive at perfect conformity to his Lord, as it is written: “for you died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God” (Col 3:3). The last words uttered before his execution on August 9, 1943, were: “I am completely bound in inner union with the Lord.”
One should strive for this type of active participation when participating in the Lord’s Supper. To quote Thomas Aquinas’s words from today’s liturgy, this is the “endless death, or endless life” issue for each Christian and the entire Church. It is indeed a question of embracing Jesus’s logic of a life that “will be given up for you”. This is the Eucharist!
Jägerstätter was beatified by the Church on October 26, 2007, as a martyr of the faith and objector of conscience in the presence of his wife and four daughters, as if wanting to acknowledge that he was on the right side of history. Franz’s writings, mainly letters and short essays on the Eucharist and tenets of the faith, were published in Letters and Writings from Prison (2009). Also, two films, The Refusal (1971) and A Hidden Life (2019), and a documentary, Franz: A Man of Conscience (2011), have been released.
Today’s gospel gives us St Luke’s version of the “feeding the multitude” story. The context is that of Jesus speaking “to the crowds about the reign of God”, bringing healing to the needy. It is the disciples who, empowered by Jesus, feed the multitude, thus becoming themselves actively engaged in bringing change to a crowd in distress. To partake in the Lord’s Supper implies sharing the commitment for the coming of God’s reign “on earth as it is in heaven”. Here lies the commitment to social engagement for participants in the Eucharist, as pope Paul VI teaches in the encyclical Mysterium fidei (MF 70). While partisan conflicts and eucharistic politicisation should be set aside, one cannot simply dismiss the political dimension of the Eucharist and one’s conscientious participation in it. The Eucharist calls for integrity in how we conduct our moral and political existence.
charlo.camilleri@um.edu.mt