Proper 16 Year B 2024

In Inquirer’s Class, our class for people who are interested in becoming Episcopalians, we always have one class devoted to the meaning of the Holy Eucharist.  Just one class isn’t a lot of time to deal with such a huge subject, but all of the subjects we cover in Inquirer’s Class are huge, so we’re only able to touch on the most important elements of whatever it is we’re talking about. 

In one such class, after I had talked about the Real Presence of Christ in the Mass, how the bread and wine actually become the Body and Blood of Christ, after class, one of the participants came up to me and said, “Fr. Fred, I really have trouble with the idea that the bread and wine become the Body and Blood of Christ.  I have problems with the whole idea that Jesus himself is really present in the bread and the wine.”

I responded to him, “So you believe that Jesus is really absent in the bread and wine? You believe in the real absence of Christ.”   He thought about that for a moment, and then he said, “Well, that’s really not what I mean either.”

I said, “Well, Jesus is either really present or really absent.   It’s one or the other.”

The whole subject of the body and blood of Christ has a complex history, beginning with when our Lord Jesus Christ taught his disciples about his body and blood.   Jesus said, “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him.… So he who eats me will live because of me.“

“Many of his disciples, when they heard it, said, ‘This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?’”   St. John tells us that “after this, many of his disciples drew back and no longer went about with him.”

If you’ve been in church every Sunday since 28 July, you may have noticed that we’ve read through the entire 6th chapter of the Gospel according to St. John, Sunday after Sunday, until we have completed the whole thing with today’s Gospel, with the exception of the final two verses, which don’t go thematically with the rest of the chapter.

On 28 July, we started out with the miracle of the feeding of the 5000.  John makes a point of saying that the feast of Passover was at hand, which is an important detail in understanding the rest of the chapter.  You know the story.  Beginning with only five barley loaves and two fish, Jesus was able to feed the crowd of 5000 men, plus the women and children who were present.  Out of very little, the Lord Jesus was able to make a great feast, and at the end 12 baskets were filled with what was left over.

This miracle was a sign that Jesus was the Messiah, who would save his people.  The people of that day expected the Messiah to be a savior in the worldly sense of the word   In other words, they expected the Messiah to free Israel from Rome and make it a great nation again.  They expected the savior to be a human being, but a human being with great charisma and skill who would be even greater than the greatest king in their history, King David.

We know, however, that Jesus is God incarnate and that he is the Savior of the world by saving us from our sins.  He would suffer, die on the cross, and on the third day be raised.  Just as a lamb was sacrificed every year at Passover to recall God saving Israel from their bondage in Egypt, Jesus would be sacrificed for our sins by the shedding of his blood on the cross.  That sin that separates us from God and one another would be washed away by his blood.

Earlier I said that an important detail in the feeding of the 5000 was that the Feast of Passover was at hand.  Remember how God saved the firstborn of Israel from death when he killed the firstborn of Egypt?  The Hebrews were to sacrifice a lamb, putting some of the blood of the lamb on the door posts and the lintels of their houses.  By the blood of the lamb, God would know to pass over those homes to spare the firstborn of Israel. 
 
The firstborn of Israel were therefore saved by the blood of the lamb.  Every year thereafter, on the anniversary of that first Passover, the people of Israel were to remember that salvific event, but in a very special way — not as a past event, but as an event that they would participate in anew, each year, as if they were there at that very first Passover. Passover to this day is celebrated by the Jews as if they are at that first Passover.

When our Lord Jesus celebrated that first Eucharist, as he and his disciples were celebrating the Passover, Jesus gave them this particular way to remember his sacrifice, a remembrance that would be similar to the remembrance of the Passover. Every time they would eat his body and drink his blood in remembrance of his sacrifice, it would be as if they were present at his very sacrifice on the cross. 
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Our Lord Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross never has to be repeated because every Christian in every age in every place can access that sacrifice by being present at Mass.  Every time we receive his body and blood, we are present at the Cross, receiving anew the benefits of his sacrifice. That’s why we never say we take communion, but instead we say we receive communion because we are receiving these benefits from God in Christ.

Every three years at this time of year, we read through this sixth chapter of John. Today is the last day and next week we’ll be into a different topic. These last five Sundays have been rich with Eucharistic teaching, which is so important because the Church is not just a place where communion is celebrated; the Church is first and foremost a Eucharistic community through which we meet the risen Christ in his body, the Church, in the word read and proclaimed, and in the Sacrament of his body and blood.