Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Dominica XVIII per Annum B
1 August 2021

We are currently in a tour through the sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, known as the Bread of Life discourse.  This chapter is a prime location of Jesus’ teaching and our faith in the Holy Eucharist, that ordinary bread and wine become his Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar.  This is a distinctively catholic belief, a matter of our identity as catholics, and a litmus test of sorts for the authentic faith, such that lesser notions that would render the Holy Eucharist as only a reminder or a symbol of Jesus, or as somehow still ordinary bread, must be clearly rejected as uncatholic opinions.  And yet we struggle to maintain this full and catholic faith when our eyes see only the outward appearance of bread but cannot see the substance of what the thing is.  Therefore, our affirmation of the clear scriptural teaching about bread and wine being the true and real Body and Blood of Jesus is something that requires from us an act of faith.

There is a tendency in our fallen human nature to see, but to fail to recognize.  There is a tendency to see and to focus almost exclusively on the things of this world while failing to elevate our mind and our thoughts to see higher realities.  Here at our parish we go to great lengths to avoid the pitfall of thinking of the Holy Eucharist in an impoverished or lower way.  Our primary experience of the Holy Eucharist is at Holy Mass.  And so, here we give great attention to reverence in how we observe the Mass, reverence in how we handle and in how we receive the Holy Eucharist.  We emphasize greater solemnity in how we conduct the Mass.  We know the value of sacred music that serves to lift the mind and the heart, to help it soar above the tendency to think in mundane ways about the Holy Eucharist.  We adopt that ancient posture by which we all gather around the altar yet face together a common focal point of the Lord in our midst on the altar, even as that posture reminds us we are in a procession to look for, and to await, and to move toward the Lord when he returns in glory.  And outside of the Holy Mass, we have the opportunity to elevate our minds about the truth of the Holy Eucharist by committing to spend time in our adoration chapel, coming to know more intimately the Lord who is truly present in the Blessed Sacrament there displayed.

 Why do we take such effort to keep our minds elevated and strengthened in what is the proper catholic faith about the Holy Eucharist?  Are we really susceptible to a lower theology, to thinking in a more mundane way and being weak in our faith?  The answer is yes.  We operate in a sense perceptible body, which means it is very easy and natural to us to focus on what we can touch, and see, and hear, and measure… to focus on material realities.  And in our fallen nature our human powers of the mind and of the strength to direct and control ourselves face defects and weakness.  When you couple our fallen nature with the tendency to trust that which we can perceive with our senses, the risk is that higher realities of the spiritual realm that are more difficult to measure are viewed as less reliable or suspect or even fantasy.  Do we live surrounded by mundane thoughts and tendencies?  Yes, we do.  We live in a highly individualistic age hijacked by the relativism that makes the self the arbiter of self-made truth that stands in contrast to plain matters of objective reality.  Consider some examples of lower, muddled thinking in our time: Cultural elites invoke “the science” to stop all debate about highly complicated variables that go into their regularly-wrong predictions about climate change and human extinction, yet the plainly obvious science about reproduction and the child in the womb escapes them.  Or does it really escape them?  Yes, they know a thing or two about human extinction.  We are constantly barraged by mundane slogans like “love is love,” that undermine the truth of the clear design of the complementarity of the sexes.  Marriage, designed by God and set in the natural law, is now anything man wants to make of it.  It is lower, muddled, and increasingly delusional thinking that trumpets that men can be women and women can be men and there isn’t any discernible, fixed, and physical distinction between them.  It seems clear to me that we religious-minded types have a much more serious and consistent respect for, and grasp of, the science whose origin is the same God we worship.  And the lower and muddled thinking of our age regularly tells us that “devout” and “catholic” go together even when that devout catholic supports positions, like the ones I just mentioned, that are contrary to the faith.

When we come upon John 6 I would normally focus my homily on expressing and explaining Catholic teaching on the Holy Eucharist.  I summarized that teaching at the very beginning of this homily.  But my attention this time in John 6 is drawn to a subtle lesson that underpins the Lord’s teaching and his awareness of our tendencies.  The Lord knows we tend to suffer from weak minds in our fallen nature and so we need to elevate our thinking.  In the Gospel passage the crowd comes looking for Jesus after they had been miraculously fed with bread (we heard this account last week).  Jesus notes their mundane motives when he says, “you are looking for me NOT because you saw signs but because you ate the loaves and were filled.”  In other words, you ate the bread I miraculously provided for you but you didn’t see the signs, you didn’t recognize what that means.  The Lord makes it still more clear in what St. John next records him saying, “Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.”  In other words, he’s saying, you are hungry again and are coming for physical or ordinary bread that perishes; you need to elevate your thinking and seek the bread that endures, that is above, that nourishes not just the body but nourishes you to eternal life.  But their minds are focused on lower things, mundane things, things that do not last.  The crowd may have been privileged to see Jesus miraculously multiply bread but they didn’t recognize it as a sign of God acting in their present moment.  Instead they are still looking for a sign from him and their main point of reference is not the present but the past.  For they say to the Lord, “Our ancestors ate manna in the desert.”  Jesus focuses them (and us) on the present moment and on what God is doing for them: “my Father gives you the true bread from heaven…. I am the bread of life.”

 Listening to John 6 today I suggest we renew our full and proper Catholic faith in what the Holy Eucharist is, because by it the Lord is inviting us to see, to recognize, and to trust that he is operating in our midst, in our present moment now, to nourish us for eternal life, if we will recognize the call to first live an authentic communion with him by prayer, good moral life, seeking absolution for our sins, and presenting ourselves in a worthy way for his total gift of self.  We need to recognize the dangers of that tendency to succumb to mundane and lower ways of thinking by which we focus mostly on the things that perish.  And for that reason we should seek all the more to know and to nourish our catholic faith, to elevate our minds, to “seek what is above where Christ is seated at the right hand of God” (Col. 3:1).  St. Paul seems to make a similar observation in today’s second reading: “you must no longer live as the Gentiles do, in the futility of their minds;… you should put away the old self of your former way of life, corrupted through deceitful desires, and be renewed in the spirit of your minds, and put on the new self, created in God’s way in righteousness and holiness of truth.”