Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Theme: Jesus invites us to feast on the banquet he has prepared, as we continue to explore and enter ever more deeply into the mystery of faith, we proclaim every time we participate in the Mass.

1^st R. Wisdom, personified, invites all to leave their foolish ways and eat the bread of wisdom and drink the wine of truth.

2^nd R. St Paul tells us that though this may be a wicked age, our lives should redeem it and our hearts give joyful praise.

Including next Sunday, five Sunday Gospels in succession take us through the entire Chapt.6 of John. Chapter 6 begins by telling us it was the season of Passover for the Jews and then describes the feeding of the 5,000 and a few verses later recounts how Jesus walks on the water. Passover celebrates how God sent Moses to lead enslaved Israelites to freedom walking dry shod through the waters of the Red Sea and then how they are fed with manna in the desert journey to the Promised Land. After the feeding of the 5K, the crowd go looking for Jesus for more of the same. They also ask how he had reached the place where they’d tracked him down. Jesus chooses rather to answer how he had come on earth and how the crowd had failed to read the sign he had provided in feeding them miraculously and assures them he himself is the true manna from heaven, the Bread of Life, the Bread that had come down from Heaven. They must then listen to him. God is teaching his people in and through his Son, whom he sent from heaven.

Today we move on to a 2^nd stage of Jesus’ message in this amazing chapter. We have heard how we must receive Jesus by listening to his teaching with an obedient heart. Now Jesus introduces some startling language. He tells the Jews they must eat his flesh and drink his blood. For a start, Jews were forbidden to eat flesh with blood remaining within. Moreover, flesh and blood were the terms associated with sacrifice.

John’s Gospel, written as a dramatic narrative by John’s own disciples, was the last of the four Gospels to be written. Decades had passed since Jesus had risen from the dead and ascended to heaven. This Chapter 6 of John’s Gospel is a composite sermon of what indeed Jesus himself taught, but it is brought together in this format to reflect the early Church’s understanding of what is happening at the celebration of what we know as the Eucharist or the Mass.

‍Eucharist means thanksgiving. In Matt/Mk/Lk. Jesus says a blessing in their account of the feeding of the 5K. In John alone we see Jesus gives thanks. The words Jesus uses point towards the Mass, celebrated by the Church from the beginning. Christians celebrated what we refer to as Mass and Acts of the Apostles and St Paul refer to as the Breaking of Bread and the Lord’s Supper.

In his preaching, Jesus was leading his disciples towards a later insight, after his resurrection, that the celebration of the Eucharist is sacrificial, in which we offer a Thanksgiving Sacrifice (as well as being atonement) and a Banquet to which we are invited so as to eat and drink.

Let us reflect in amazement: We heard in the 2nd Reading St Paul’s rather striking admonishment: “that though this may be a wicked age, our lives should redeem it!” At every Mass and again, adoring before the Blessed Sacrament, we can make reparation for the world’s rejection of God and offer God gratitude, and our everlasting amazement!

Last Thursday, we celebrated the Solemnity of the Assumption. Pope St John-Paul ll concluded his encyclical, Ecclesia de Eucharistia, with a chapter “At the School of Mary, Woman of the Eucharist”. In this he said that “there is a profound analogy between the Fiat (acceptance) which Mary said in reply to the angel at the Annunciation, and the Amen, which every believer says when receiving the body of the Lord. Yes, we believe the same Jesus Christ, Son of God and Son of Mary, becomes present in his full humanity and divinity under the signs of bread and wine.[1]

[1] Ecclesia de Eucharistia, p.55, par.55

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