You have the Words of Eternal Life (Jn 6: 60-69)
Twenty First Sunday of Ordinary Time B Boarbank Hall
Today’s reading coming from St. John’s Gospel reflects a major problem definitively splitting the Johannine Community. Basically it is about the realism of the incarnation. This sixth chapter of John’s gospel is about the realism of the incarnation. Jesus is really God’s Son. He is really a human being. He is not a parable or a phantom. He exists in history, in time and in place. And the eternal Son and the human being whose name is Jesus of Nazareth, are the same; God is really and truly living as a human among us – the family of whom was known to those in Nazareth and the surrounding area. But many of those in the Johannine community who could accept that he was God, could not accept that he was truly man. They refused to think of him as food and drink if it meant identifying totally with his real humanity; they could only give that a meaning which had them walk away. Why was this realism so intolerable for some? Why were they not accepting the realism of the incarnation, God made man? This question is raised acutely and answered in John’s First Epistle: That which from the beginning we heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon and touched with our hands…we proclaim. This is the realism that was questioned by some in John’s community because they questioned the impossibility of humanity being so worthy of God. Those new converts had made one fundamental step in faith, accepting that Jesus was God; they had refused to make the equally fundamental commitment, that he was totally human as well.
If we Christians here in Boarbank Hall chapel this morning had not been introduced to the living, credal and sacramental system of our faith, we too could find this language quite intolerable, if not meaningless. Had we not been carefully instructed in the meaning of the real and true presence of Jesus in the Eucharist we would not have access to its meaning and the part it plays in the daily life of the Catholic and Orthodox churches. How important it is also to find in our Gospel text today that it is Peter who makes the absolute declaration of faith: To whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. It took some time in the history of the early Church to explicitate the secure system of authority still in it once the apostles were dead. Who could speak securely for and of Jesus? Who had the mind and heart of Christ Jesus, which Paul claimed to have in his letter to the Corinthians. (1 Cor 2:16)? The answer was: the Church with its institutions.
For Catholics the Church is believers and truly the presence of Christ in the world, despite all its warts and pimples, despite the sinfulness of all of us. We believe that Christ is with us still. The incarnation was not a sudden coming of the Son of God from heaven, and then his immediate withdrawal. I am with you always to the close of the age. Yes. But how? The Church is the living answer to this question: Christ is continually with us in our everyday historical existence, as he was with the disciples long ago in Palestine. The Church has been described as the incarnation writ large. It belongs to God, so close to him that there is great nervousness about calling the church sinful, even though every one of its members -O.Lady alone excepted- is sinful. The Catholic has great confidence in the Church. And in the institutions that guide it. So we pray for the pope and the bishops with all God’s holy people. Because the guidance that Christ promised is assured through the institutions that came from him. He is present in word and sacrament. We listen to the Scripture readings with prayerful believing attention; we receive him in the sacraments, and adore him in the Eucharist. We make holy hours and have Eucharistic congresses. We are near him because he is near us. The Church is not separated from Christ. Its essential institutions are not alien to his human and divine nature. The institutions for guidance in it are his gift. And this guidance covers the whole of life. It covers what we call doctrine and morals. The incarnation was and is God living totally with us. He has not left the world. He is with us to the close of the age. That is what we believe; that is what Peter was confessing in today’s reading. That was what Paul was telling his sophisticated Corinthians.
But how does it remain real for you and for me every day? How do we live the incarnation with all its realism? Well we take humanity seriously. We are all human beings. We respect each other whatever our condition from the beginning to the end of our earthly pilgrimage. We believe that all are made in the image and likeness of God. We accept that human beings are God’s agents in bringing us into contact with him. We go to confession to the priest as we would to Christ himself. We do not think of humanity as a fiction. The total marital love between spouses is sacramental; God is dwelling there- our reading from Ephesians today says so. We believe that the pope and bishops are his instruments on earth for keeping us in the truth that is his on earth.
To live and love as members of the Church is to love humanity and to love God. In the Johannine community those who walked away from the realism of the incarnation and the Eucharist walked away also from the Church’s understanding of humanity. Many deceivers have gone out into the world, men who will not acknowledge the coming of Jesus Christ in the flesh (2 Jn 7).
But we know and believe that Christ plays in ten thousand places, lovely in the features of men’s faces. Gathered at Mass on Sundays believers will want to hope together that God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world, despite so much that is so wrong in it. That is our act of faith.
Rev. Richard J. Taylor
