Friday in the Third Week of Easter, April 19, 2024

John 6, 52-59

The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his Flesh to eat?” Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the Flesh of the Son of Man and drink his Blood, you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my Flesh and drinks my Blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day. For my Flesh is true food, and my Blood is true drink. Whoever eats my Flesh and drinks my Blood remains in me and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats this bread will live forever.” These things he said while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum.

The Gospel reading for today’s Mass carries on from the readings of the last few days.  The Lord is speaking to the crowd in Capernaum about himself as the Bread of Life, and the necessity of eating this Bread for eternal life.

“The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying, ‘How can this man give us his Flesh to eat?’ ”  While this is a perfectly legitimate question, the Jews go about answering it only by asking it of themselves.  This is a way of avoiding the answer that the Lord would give them.  Here, we see the terrible predicament of fallen man: unable to help himself to rise above his state, he turns to his fellow, who, in the same situation, cannot provide any but illusory aid.  This is shown graphically in the attempt to build the Tower of Babel: unable to look beyond the physical world, people attempt to attain a spiritual heaven through physical means.  Only God can help us, and yet we ignore him or fear to ask him or our pride forbids us to ask him.

The Lord watches them and listens to them struggle with each other as he also watches the struggle going on in their hearts.  He would help, but he is not asked.  After a time, he speaks again very loudly so that the crowd might hear him above their bickering.  “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the Flesh of the Son of Man and drink his Blood, you do not have life within you.”  Notice what he says here: “Unless you eat . . . you do not have.”  He does not say, You will not have.  He speaks in the present tense.  While he makes it clear that eating his Flesh and drinking his Blood will lead them to eternal life, there is no life within them in the present without this.  He is speaking of grace.  Grace makes us truly alive, especially in regards to the soul.  The person who has received grace is a very different kind of person from one who has not.  This person can think, understand, and act and live in ways an ungraced person cannot.  

“For my Flesh is true food, and my Blood is true drink.”  The Lord insists on what he has already taught them, but he still does not answer their question because they have not asked him.  These words, then, are for those whose faith is already strong enough that they will accept them as true even though they do not fully understand what they mean.  They do this on the basis of their own experience of the Lord’s works.  Now, when the Lord says that his Flesh is “true food” and his Blood is “true drink”, he is not saying, My Flesh is truly food, and my Blood truly drink.  The latter statement simply means that his Flesh is edible and his Blood drinkable.  In fact, what he is saying is that his Flesh is the Food, that is, the model  or form for any other kind of food.  An apple, say, shares in some of the properties of the Lord’s Flesh: it is edible, it provides a certain nourishment, it leads to a certain level of health, and so on.  To the extent that it shares in the properties of the True Food of the Flesh of the Lord, we can call it food.  But it is not True Food because it only provides temporary benefits to the human body.  The True Food of the Fresh of Jesus Christ provides eternal benefits to both the human body and soul.  Nourished with this Bread from heaven, the human body becomes capable of rising on the last day, and of becoming spiritualized — capable of heaven.  In creating things that could be used as food by humans, God used the Flesh and Blood he knew his Son would possess as his model.  Everything that we eat and drink is in some way like this divine reality.  Just as the Father is the Father and all other fatherhood is based upon him, and all those who are fathers are to a certain degree like him, so the Flesh and Blood of the Lord is the Food and Drink, and all other foods and drinks are merely like them to some degree.

“Whoever eats my Flesh and drinks my Blood remains in me and I in him.”  We consume him so that we might be consumed by him.  We receive him so that we might be received by him.  “Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me.”  All life, human and divine, originates from the Father.  By consuming the Flesh and Blood of the Lord, we become like him and so we receive a share in the divine life the Father gives his Son.  “Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats this Bread will live forever.”  Now, in speaking in this way, the Lord minimizes the death that all in this world must undergo.  For the one who has eaten his Flesh and drunk his Blood, the death of the body is merely a means to an end, that end being eternal life in the ecstatic bliss of heaven.  The knowledge of this is what provides strength of will to those suffering martyrdom, it is what fuels the zeal of the missionary, what fires the love of priests and religious, and what makes life in a fracturing world within a bitter and despairing society possible for all who believe.

The Prayers Before the Preface

After the priest washes his hands, asking Almighty God for the purity necessary to offer this most sacred Sacrifice, he turns to the congregation and says, “Pray, brethren, that my Sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God the Almighty Father.”  The Latin more precisely says, “may be made acceptable”: we are asking God to make the bread and wine acceptable to him through their change into the Body and Blood of his Son, who is most acceptable as a Sacrifice.  Now, the priest specifically asks the congregation to pray for his Sacrifice to be made acceptable, as distinct from theirs.  That is because the offering of the Body and Blood of Jesus is offered as atonement for our sins and for the salvation of the world at the hands of the priest.  He makes this offering as an official of the Church on the Church’s behalf.  This is separate from any personal prayers he may be offering.  The people in the congregation offer the sacrifices of their prayers in the Sacrifice offered by the priest by virtue of their being made “priest prophet, and king” through their baptism.  The congregation answers, “May the Lord accept the Sacrifice at your hands, for the praise and glory of his name, for our good and for the good of all his Holy Church.”  The people pray for the worthiness of the priest to make the Sacrifice.  

If we really thought about what was about to happen we would tremble and hide in fear because the Son of the Most High God is about to come down upon our altar and be broken for us sinners.  The priest, fainting, would have to be held up by the angels at the altar in order to do what Jesus himself commands him to do: “Do this in memory of me.”

The priest, encouraged by the prayers of the congregation and strengthened by Almighty God now prays what is now called “the offertory prayer” or “the prayer over the offerings”.  Here is the text from the offertory prayer for today’s Mass: “Graciously sanctify these gifts, O Lord, we pray, and, accepting the oblation of this spiritual sacrifice, make of us an eternal offering to you. Through Christ our Lord.”  The prayer asks God to sanctify and to accept the gifts we bring, the bread and wine which will changed into the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.  God will give us what we need in order to please him but we must ask for it, admitting our total dependence on him for all things.  

For nearly two millennia the offertory prayer has been called “the secret” (In Latin, secretum) because the priest, out of caution, said this prayer quietly: superstitious people in the congregation, knowing the power of the words of the Mass, used to take certain words and phrases and use them to practice magic and to cast spells or deliver curses.  In this most sacred part of the Mass, then, only the words “This is my Body” and “This is my Blood” were spoken aloud, for the benefit of the congregation, and these became vulgarized into “hocus-pocus”.

With the “amen” of the people signifying their desire also for the accomplishment of that which the priest asked in the prayer, the priest begins the words of the Preface, which we will consider tomorrow.