Feeding on Christ, Third Friday of Easter, April 19, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Friday of the Third Week in Ordinary Time
Anniversary of My Baptism
April 19, 2024
Acts 9:1-20, Ps 117, Jn 6:52-59

To listen to a recording of this homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in this homily: 

• Today and tomorrow Jesus gets to the climax of his Bread of Life discourse in the Capernaum Synagogue that the Church has us ponder as a mystagogical catechesis every Easter season so that we may experience the “newness of life” that Jesus died and rose to give us. Today we get to the doctrinal climax; tomorrow to the moral climax. After speaking to us about how he is the True Manna given to us every day as our supersubstantial nourishment, how the Father draws us to this gift, and how we’re supposed to respond to this gift by faith — listening to, learning and lovingly doing what Jesus says — today Jesus summarizes everything in words that would have sounded almost brutally raw and somewhat sickening to his original listeners.
• After Jesus stated at the end of yesterday’s Gospel that the bread he would give for the life of the world “is my flesh,” the Jews quarreled among themselves, asking a totally understandable question, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” At first glance it would seem almost as if he were calling them to cannibalism. None of what Jesus was asking would make sense until a year later when Jesus would take bread and wine during the Last Supper, totally change it into his Body and Blood and give it to them to eat and drink. But Jesus was here stressing anew the essential aspect of faith, that trusting in him means to trust in what he was saying. They might have legitimate questions about how they would eat his flesh and drink his blood, but they shouldn’t doubt the reality of what he was saying. And Jesus would say that whether or not they ate and drank his body and blood worthily was something of tremendous consequences.
• Swearing an oath, he said, “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.” The Greek word for “eat” is actually “gnaw,” the way an animal rips every last ounce of meat off of a bone. Jesus assures us that we’re lifeless unless we enter into communion with him through his Body and Blood. We’re lifeless unless we’re living off of him. But if we live off of him we will live forever: “Whoever eats my Flesh and drinks my Blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day.” Then he gives two analogies as to how this works, the first of food and the second of filiation. “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.” We simply become what we eat and if we eat Jesus’ living flesh and blood, we will be transformed into him: we will remain in him and his irrepressible life will remain in us. The second analogy is filiation: “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.” Jesus in the Eucharist will become the source of our regeneration, our rebirth, our remaking through our entering into his own eternal sonship. That’s the essence of the Christian life. In baptism, we die in Christ and are raised from the dead in him, but we grow in that new life day-by-day through Eucharistic communion with Jesus. Today as I celebrate the anniversary of my baptism (and my twin brother’s), I think about how that filiation first experienced in Baptism leads to its intensification at the altar. The Church symbolizes this in the Baptismal Rite when, after the Baptism itself, the anointing with Sacred Chrism in preparation for Confirmation, the blessing of the baptismal garment, the lighting of the Baptismal candle, and the prayer over the newly baptized’s ears and mouth, the Church processes to the altar to pray the Our Father, showing that the logical consequence of the bath of baptism is the feeding at the altar. In the Eucharist, we continue to draw our very life from the one who gave us that supernatural life in the baptismal womb of the Church.
• This lesson about living off of Jesus in Holy Communion each day and thereby becoming one with him is illustrated in today’s memorable first reading that details the conversion of St. Paul. When Saul was “breathing murderous threats against the disciples of the Lord” and had gone 117 miles to Damascus to try to arrest Christians and drag them back to Jerusalem in chains — just as he had been terrorizing the Christians in and around Jerusalem and ripping them from their homes — he was met outside the gates of the Syrian city by Jesus himself. Jesus came like a bolt of lightning that flashed all around and blinded Saul. He heard a voice saying to him, not, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting my Church?” Not “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting those who believe in me.” Instead he said, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me.” When Saul asked, “Who are you, Sir?” The reply came, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.” So great is Jesus’ identification with the members of his Body through Holy Communion that what Saul was doing to Christians Jesus was receiving personally. The rest of the reading shows how Jesus wanted to lead Saul to his Risen life. His conversion itself, as Pope Benedict emphasized, was ultimately a death and a resurrection, a death to the old man and his old ways of pursuing holiness by works of the law, and a rising to live in Christ by means of faith in response to grace. His blindness was a sign of how he had been acting blindly and how he needed to learn how to see with the eyes of faith. His fasting was a sign of his need for repentance, a Lent before Easter. And his baptism was the means by which he began to experience Jesus’ own Risen Life, a life-changing encounter for which he would spend his entire life trying to bring to others. He would sum up his apostolic life in a Eucharistic key in his earliest letter, writing to the Corinthians, “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night he was handed over, took bread,  and, after he had given thanks, broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’”  Later in the same letter he would introduce the kerygma (1 Cor 15) by the same expression, that he handed on to us what he himself had received, a link that points to the fact that in the Eucharist we encounter Jesus and enter into the kerygma, his death, resurrection and appearances. And from that Eucharistic reality and his experience on the road to Damascus, he would develop his theology of the Mystical Body of Christ, that we are all members of Christ’s body and that therefore anyone who persecutes a member persecutes Christ and anyone who loves and honors a member, loves and honors Christ. So great was Paul’s personal identification with his Eucharistic Lord that he would be able to write to the Galatians, “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.” That’s the type of new, risen life, begun in baptism and nourished through Holy Communion, that is meant to characterize any believer. And it leads to Christ-like love, as we enter into communion with Jesus’ total self-giving, his giving his body, blood and earthly life out of love for the Father and for us. That’s why Paul courageously was willing to suffer so much as he was poured out like a libation.
• Today we ask the Lord through St. Paul’s intercession for the grace so that we might learn to live off of Christ just like Paul did, and just like Jesus lives because of the Father, so that we might experience even in this world a foretaste of the eternal life to which our Eucharistic communion with Jesus and with each other through Jesus is meant to lead.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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