Today’s readings: Deuteronomy 8, 2-3.14-16; 1 Corinthians 10, 16-17; John 6, 51-58.
The reading from Deuteronomy today highlights the need to remember. There is so much happening that distorts humanity’s face and about which the world and we ourselves are in denial. The global pandemic we’ve just experienced should open our eyes to so many other pandemics that have always been with us and are here to stay. The present diffused unrest about racism and the lack of political will to remedy for the tragic dislocation of so many peoples are clear signs.
The Eucharist we are celebrating today is meant to be the presence powerful enough to uncover what we are forgetful about. Unless, of course, we transform it in a devotional potion and just feel comfortable and complacent in its presence. The test of our belief in the Eucharist lies precisely in its power to make of us signs of redemption and healing for a wounded world. St Augustine, distinguishing the Eucharistic bread from any other food, writes that it is not the eucharistic food that is changed into us but rather we are mysteriously transformed by it. We are changed into what we receive. And he adds that receiving the body and blood shed for us, we become that body, we are joined in the close union of the mystical body that is the Church.
These are the two aspects of our faith in the Eucharist that need to be mostly highlighted and which impact on the quality of our living and of the communities that make up the Church we belong to in times when people tend to be sceptical about belonging.
In the recent document ‘Beloved Amazon’, Pope Francis beautifully emphasises these two aspects. “In the Eucharist, God chose to reach our intimate depths through a fragment of matter. The Eucharist joins heaven and earth; it embraces and penetrates all creation.” And further: “The Eucharist is celebrated so that, from being strangers, dispersed and indifferent to each other, we may become united, equals and friends”.
In mainstream theology, for too long, faith in the Eucharist focussed mainly on the miraculous transformation of the bread and wine and on the real presence of Jesus in the tabernacle, emphasising more the Eucharist as object of our adoration. The biblical outlook goes much deeper than this.
What we celebrate in the Eucharist, besides of course the transformation of the bread and wine and the Lord’s presence, is our own transformation, or passage from death to life, from being in the wilderness to a homecoming. This emerges forcefully from Deuteronomy, where Moses asks the people to “remember how the Lord God led you for 40 years in the wilderness”.
In the gospel text from St John, the Jews were right to find difficulty with what Jesus was demanding, “eating his flesh and drinking his blood”. In their place we would have had exactly the same problem. Unlike the other gospels which talk about the Eucharist in the context of the Passion and death of Jesus, John brings up the subject when faced with crowds comfortable and secure with their religion and who in no way wanted to be disturbed or challenged to dream of God’s real life.
For the early Christian communities, the real significance of the Eucharist was that Jesus, who was crucified and died, was actually alive. When Jesus gave out the bread and the cup of wine to the apostles and asked them to do it “in memory of me”, he was referring to himself as risen and glorious, no longer the flesh and blood man they knew. The memorial he was asking them to relive was not the Jewish ritual but the passage from death to life meant to perpetuate redemption engaging the world at large.