Dom Gregory at his diaconate Mass, with Bishop Thomas Tobin

As part of our series on the ongoing Eucharistic Renewal, we offer three small homilies by Fr. Gregory Havill that illuminate different aspects of this Mystery.

Bread and Wine. We equate food with life because food sustains our earthly existence. Our bodies are not self-sufficient. We must constantly sustain and feed them with nourishment that comes from without. Before birth we are fed via our mother’s circulatory system. After birth we are fed by her milk, and later by the food and drink that the earth provides. Of all creatures that inhabit the earth, we alone prepare food for eating, like the baking of bread and the production of wine. In fact, some form of bread and some type of wine represent the sustaining elements of life in virtually every human society. Consequently, bread and wine - distinctly human foods - have come to symbolize our mortal life. We eat to live, and we speak of life in terms of food. But we also speak of life in terms of “flesh and blood”. In fact, we can’t conceive of or know life except in terms of flesh and blood. A mother, for example, refers to her children as her flesh and blood.

It’s not hard therefore for us to recognize almost immediately the significant correlation between bread and wine and flesh and blood, the language that permeates the Eucharist. When we think of bread and wine or of flesh and blood we think of life. It is no accident, then, that bread and wine are central to the Eucharistic mystery. Nor is it accidental that Jesus, when referring to his life, spoke of it as His flesh and blood, and identified His life at the Last Supper with the distinctive human foods, bread and wine. When Jesus promises his disciples that soon His Father would send them the Holy Spirit (Jn 14: 23-29) he predicts that on that day they would realize that He is in the Father, and that they are in Him, and He in them. What we all need to become more and more aware of is that we are them. We really are the disciples to whom He speaks.

In the Eucharistic liturgy, the Holy Spirit comes upon our human gifts of bread and wine to change them into the divine gifts of the body and blood of Christ. We hear the priest celebrant pray these words to God the Father on behalf of us all:

You are indeed holy O Lord,
and all you have created rightly gives you praise,
for through your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ,
by the power and working of the Holy Spirit…
you never cease to gather a people to yourself…
Therefore, O Lord, we humbly implore you:
by the same Spirit graciously make holy
these gifts we have brought to you for consecration
that they may become the body and blood of your Son,
our Lord Jesus Christ.

God accepts the bread and wine of our offering. In return He gives us His own Son, who nourishes us and in so doing makes us into members of his own body, his mystical Body, the Church. He has taken on our humanity so that we may share in His divinity. May he open our eyes to see that His promise, celebrated two millennia ago is still being fulfilled, right now, among us, in this church of Portsmouth Abbey.

The Real Presence. Jesus said, “the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world” (Jn 6:51-59). He says that we are to eat his flesh and drink his blood. These words caused a great stir among his hearers. But rather than try to relax them with facile explanations, Jesus simply repeated himself clearly, again and again. Six times in the next six verses he tells them, and us, we must feed on this bread if we want to enter into eternal life. Jesus experienced serious rejection – and it continues to this day. Many Catholics do not even know the Church teaching that the bread and wine used in Holy Communion do not merely symbolize but actually become the real presence, the actual body and blood of Christ. It’s not that they disagree; they don’t even know about it. Aside from inadequate catechesis and poor theology, I wonder if a part of the difficulty is because many have little experience of what we might call the “real presence” of others with whom they live and work. With little experience of any authentic, meaningful relationships, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist must remain little more than an abstract idea, a symbol.

“Real presence”, both human and divine may be seen in three different aspects. One element of real presence in commitment. For us it often entails simply being and remaining present to another through good times and bad, as with the Eucharist, Christ’s promise to us is of a total and never-failing and authentic presence – the real presence. Secondly, it is not a coincidence that receiving the Eucharist is often called “communicating”. A person who receives communion on a daily basis is referred to as a “daily communicant”, for instance. Communication is indeed a second key aspect of real presence. Pope Benedict has written that dialog becomes communication when we cease working to express things and begin to express ourselves. Jesus offers himself – completely: his flesh and blood –in the Eucharist. He does not give us what he has. He gives us what he is, or better, who he is. He communicates himself. Our communication, or communion, is a response to his. This communion, indeed, is a third mark of real presence. What differentiates real presence among ourselves, rather than just being with others, is belonging: being accepted as part of a community of persons. The Church is our divine community, the Body of Christ. In the Eucharist we receive the body of Christ in order to become the Body of Christ.

Jesus repeated this so many times because he was adamant about being taken seriously. He was not speaking figuratively or in symbols. Those who insist that Jesus was speaking figuratively would also insist that he did the same at the Last Supper when he said “take, eat, this is my body…drink…this is my blood.” (Mt 26: 26-28). If he was speaking in symbols, it would be like someone inviting you to dinner but serving you bread and water and telling you this is a symbol for steak and fine wine. Our Eucharist is no symbol. It really is the One who was sent into our world because the Father so loved the world. We too are sent, called to go out from the Eucharist into the world to proclaim joyfully the victory of hope over fear, the victory of communion over separation, and the victory of life over death.

Benediction

Faith and the Bread of Life. When Jesus spoke of the Bread of Life, which was his own flesh and blood, and which would open for all people eternal life, his followers began to balk at his words (Jn 6: 60-69). If anyone doubts if Jesus expected to be taken literally when he said, “This is my body,” what happened next should remove all doubts. As he heard their objections and watched them prepare to leave, he didn’t call them back saying something like: “But wait! You might have misunderstood me. What I said was only symbolic.” Rather he further challenged them with the statement that “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day.” He knew they heard him clearly and understood him perfectly. Having made their own decision, he let them go their way, freely and without restraint. We hear their reservations escalate into desertion. Saying to each other: “This is a hard saying, who can accept it?” they abandon him – in droves. Here already, early in his public ministry, Jesus’ very first announcement of the Eucharist profoundly repelled many of his followers, a tragic and persistent pattern we see repeated for centuries down to our own day.

The Eucharist has always been the occasion for division. This is supremely ironic, because the Eucharist is the sacrament of unity, unity with Christ and through him the one bread, with his whole body the Church, the one body. Yet the whole idea offended people from the beginning. Like his Cross, it has never ceased to be a stumbling block for the faithless. Seeing them depart, Jesus turns to those few remaining, his Apostles, and asks: “Will you also go away?” This is a question that has echoed through the ages. Peter answers for the group: “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.” This is the most memorable confession of faith ever made. We do well to make it our own. Other people present that day may have been unbelieving, but the Apostles were not scandalized by our Lord’s words. They already had a deep-rooted confidence in him and they didn’t intend to leave him. What St. Peter said is not just a statement of human belief, but an expression of genuine supernatural faith – as yet imperfect – which was the result of the influence of divine grace on his soul.

Let’s look at faith more deeply. Faith includes belief, but it is more than belief. Belief is an act of the mind. Its object is an idea. But faith is an act of the will. The object of faith is a person, in this case a divine Person, Jesus Christ who is God himself. When we believe something we don’t understand or can’t prove, we believe it because we trust its source, usually someone’s word. “We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God,” Peter says. He and the Apostles didn’t understand Jesus’ words any better than those who decided to forsake him. But Peter made it clear that Jesus, the Holy One of God, was someone they had come to trust so deeply that they were willing to stay near him and move with him into a risky and unknown future.

None of us can honestly say, “I want to believe but God just hasn’t given me the gift of faith yet”. That’s blaming God for something that’s not his fault. Such a person misunderstands what faith is, perhaps thinking of it as some irresistible mystical experience, or some sudden undeniable light of certainty. Instead faith is more like pledging our loyalty to a friend or to a spouse. It’s a choice. It’s nothing less than our “Yes” to God’s offer of salvation by becoming conformed to his Divine Nature: spiritual marriage. Likewise, no one “loses” his faith, the way we might lose our car keys. It depends on a decision. We choose to believe and we choose to stop believing. Faith is never lost by accident or against our will, any more than it’s something we stumble upon or are forced into. God created us with a free will with which he doesn’t mess. In his love for us, God leaves us free to decide for ourselves whether to accept or to refuse his offer, exactly as we saw in today’s gospel.

It’s good to remember that the crisis of faith described here didn’t come about among the Jewish people in general. It appeared among those who had become Christ’s followers. Put bluntly, the many people who left and returned to their former ways of life are among the earliest examples we have of those who believed in Christ and then decided to stop, Christians who stopped being Christians. Belief alone is not something to die for. But faith is. Faith is also something to live for; something that is lived every moment. That means an effort that lasts as long as life itself, commitment to hard work, and faithful participation in the sacraments, especially the Eucharist.

As we know, the Eucharist is at the same time a sacrifice and a meal. It’s the re-enactment of the sacrifice of the Cross and a sacred banquet of the Lord’s body and blood. “If anyone eats this bread, he will live forever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh.” It’s a banquet because it’s a sacrifice. Any natural food, whether animal or vegetable, first dies and is then “offered” for food. Its life ends in order to support the life of the one who consumes it. “My life for yours”: this is a law both of nature and of grace. It’s even the life of glory. “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends” (Jn 15: 13).

As we offer the Father Christ’s body and blood in the Eucharist we offer ourselves in faith as well. We receive him in communion, in the hope that he will receive us into himself, making us with himself the bread of life for others, feeding many more than five thousand. This breath-taking prospect is our self-donation, the giving of ourselves in love. It’s the essence of our eternal life in heaven, begun already here on earth as we bring the graces of the Mass into our daily lives.