A reading of the holy gospel according to Saint John. And Jesus said to the crowds, no one can come to me unless the father who sent me draws him. I will raise him up on the last day. It is written in the prophets, they shall all be taught by god. Everyone who has heard the father and learned from him comes to me.
Not that anyone has seen the father, only the one who is from god has seen the father. Let me firmly assure you, he who believes has eternal life. I am the bread of life. Your ancestors ate manna in the desert, but they all died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven for a man to eat and never die.
I myself am the living bread Come down from heaven. If anyone eats this bread, he shall live forever. The bread I will give you is my flesh for the life of the world, and this is the gospel of the lord. Praise to you, lord Jesus Christ. In the name of the father and of the son and of the holy spirit, amen.
I would earnestly urge you, as I have, of course, never done, to go back and read this section of Saint John in total. That is chapters five, six, and parts of seven. It isn't often that you hear a discussion today about the real presence. It isn't often that you hear a discussion about dogma at all because we have become so ecumenical that we have taken the attitude that we must shy away from what may divide us and cultivate exclusively what may unite us. But remember, there is no union of God except the union in truth.
Just keep that in mind. Now I do ask you to do this because it's the only way you will get the impact of this passage. Because this is only the beginning of the passage of our blessed lord statement about the the promise that he's going to give us his flesh to eat and his blood to drink. And it will be completely lost on you if you take it by dribs and drabs, little splinters that we shoot out every morning. It's the impact of the whole text which will impress you.
It's bound to impress you. And if is there anything more essential to our faith than to have as good a basis as we can for this tremendous act of faith when we look upon a a transparent piece of bread and adore it as god almighty, and more than that, as being the physical reality of Jesus Christ, human and divine. Folks, this is a tremendous thing we do. It is beyond thinking. What sensible person could imagine doing such a thing?
Yet we do it all the time. We do it so nonchalantly. We do it without thinking about it. Because if we think about it, we'll say this is terrible, terebulous. This is frightening.
This is awesome. How can it be? And my friends, that was precisely the reaction of those who heard Jesus Christ when he said this. That's precisely their react. How can this be that you give us your flesh to eat and your blood to drink?
And remember, he was speaking to Jews who the very the very thought of cannibalism was absolutely horrifying. Horrifying. Now you will get the impact of this only if you go back and with the multiplication of the loaves and fishes because it's a continuous narrative in Saint John. It begins with that with the multitude seeking Jesus out and he feeds them. Then you have him walking on the water.
Then you have other miracles of curing of curing. They come one after the other. Bang. Bang. Bang.
Until you come to this part where our blessed lord lays it on the line about the his promise of giving us his flesh to eat and his blood to drink. And unless we do it, we are lost, he says. Now when when there may be a discussion of what did Christ mean at the last supper when he took bread and blessed and gave and said, this is my body and this is my blood. What did he mean? Well, usually, when there has been a discussion about this matter, usually it's been restricted to that particular passage or that particular incident in our lord's life.
And that's a grievous mistake. How can you overlook this passage in Saint John? This must be considered. This is part of the New Testament. This is just as real and authentic as the text of the of the narrative text of what happened at the Last Supper.
Just as authentic. It it demands just as much attention. And then while we're at it, there's a third point that must be brought in here, and that's the testimony of Saint Paul. Remember, his only he's writing just a generation after Christ's death, and he's speaking to people who already believe, already believe that this bread and wine is truly the body and blood of Jesus Christ. Because Paul argues when he's just trying to convince them of the of of their erroneous and sinful ways, the the severest thing he can say to them is, you look what you're doing.
You are betraying the body and blood of Christ. So these three the promise, we have it in Saint John. The actuality of the fulfilling of that promise at the last supper. And then thirdly, here we have the testimony of the most primitive years of the church. Now this does not constitute faith.
No. No. I'm not saying that. You don't you don't bend a knee to that wafer and say, my lord and my god, without it being a gift of god. On the other hand, we cannot divorce ourselves.
We cannot separate ourselves. We cannot take a passive attitude and say, well, what difference does it make? I believe that's all that matters. That's not the way it is. We have our role to play.
We're intelligent, rational beings, and let's go back and act that role. Show our intelligence and our reason. Our blessed lord did it. And so the heart and the soul of the Catholic religion is the real presence in the Eucharist. And when you read the history of this English martyrs of the sixteenth and the seventeenth century, and not only of those martyrs, because remember, they're the ones we know about, like Edmund Campion, John Fisher, and so on, father Parsons.
He was not a martyr, but he was he came close to being one. There were several 100 of them. But when what what impresses me when I read the the the lives of those men is this. Of course, their heroism impresses me, and it shames me. But what impresses me more is the is the utter the utter surrender, the willingness of those faithful Catholics in England to lay everything they had, I mean everything, their possessions, their estates, their their their freedom, and their very lives.
This is no hyperbole. This is the literal truth. They were willing to give all of that just to have a priest say mass for them and that they could go to holy communions. Are we willing to do anything like that? Supposing we were put to that test, I hate to think it.
I'm I'm scared to death to think about it. These are the anonymous ones. We know the names of some, but there were hundreds and hundreds. We'll never know their names in this world. But what they thought the the whole essence of their religion was to have a priest offer the holy sacrifice of the mass.
They didn't talk about a celebration. They talked about the sacrifice of the mass. They talked about the real body of their lord and their god. And this text of Saint John, go back and read it in its entirety. Begin at you'll read it in just I mean, it's a matter of a few minutes.
That's all. Just a few minutes. Then you will see how it begins. It's as if Saint John is I I don't know whether he was doing it intentionally or not, but how that thing builds up to this in to this text beyond all texts. Christ said, I am the bread of life.
I have come to give you my flesh to eat and my blood to drink. In the name of the father and of the son and the holy spirit. Amen.