Get Up and Eat, Lest the Journey Be Too Long, 19th Sunday (B), August 8, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Church of the Holy Family, Manhattan
Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
August 8, 2021
1 Kings 19:4-8, Ps 34, Eph 4:30-5:2, Jn 6:41-51

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided today’s homily: 

• In today’s first reading, we have a dramatic scene of Elijah praying for death. The evil queen Jezebel had made a vow, sending a messenger to Elijah and saying, “May the gods do thus to me and more if by this time tomorrow I have not done with your life what was done to” the prophets of Ba’al whom Elijah and humiliated and had slain. So Elijah fled for his life and after a day’s journey into the desert and prayed despairingly, “This is enough, Lord! Take my life for I am not better than my fathers.” Out of exhaustion, he fell asleep under a tree but was awakened by an angel who woke him up and got him to eat drink twice, who told him, “Get up and eat, else the journey will be too long your you!” Elijah did as the angel had commanded and strengthened by the food, was able to journey through the desert for 40 days and nights to Mount Horeb on the Sinai Peninsula.
• “Get up and eat, else the journey will be too long for you!” Those words that the angel said to Elijah Jesus himself effectively says to all of us. We are now in the third week of Jesus’ five-week course on the mysterious reality of his body and blood in the Eucharist, which Jesus taught for the first time in the Synagogue of Capernaum and renews for us live every third summer. Two weeks ago we had the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fish, which was a foreshadowing of the multiplication of the meal of the Last Supper throughout every land and time in order to feed the spiritually famished human race. Last Sunday Jesus urged us not to work for food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life that he will give us, lest the journey of life be too much for us.
• Last week, in response to the crowds’ asking him to one-up Moses in the desert who gave them manna from heaven every day for 40 years, he told them that it wasn’t Moses who gave them Manna but God the Father who gives them the true manna. In today’s continuation of that scene, Jesus emphasizes more deeply how he is the true manna, the nourishment God the Father provides for us in the desert of life until we reach the eternal Promised Land. “I am the bread that came down from heaven,” he tells us, and then adds, “I am the bread of life.” It’s a basic truth that we become what we eat and Jesus is foretelling that when we consume him, we become one with his life; since he is eternal, to consume him is to receive everlasting life. He tells us, “Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert but they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die.” Then he specified even more: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever, and the bread I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.”
• These are extraordinary words, which we shouldn’t water down and or pass over. First, they sound cannibalistic, as if Jesus is saying that we need to eat him the way we consume animals or animals consume carcasses. And once we let those works sink in, we get to Jesus’ mind-blowing promise: that when we eat him, we will not die but live forever. He goes on to connect this eating and this promise in the following verses, which we would have considered next Sunday if we didn’t have the Solemnity of the Assumption, but nevertheless they indicate the path for us one day ourselves to be assumed. Jesus swears an oath and says, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day” and tells us why: because “whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him.” He tries to explain this mystery by analogy to his own relationship to God the Father: “Just as the Father who has life sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me.” The upshot of this mystery is that by receiving Holy Communion, by eating Jesus’ body and drinking his blood, his life becomes the principle of our life, and since his life is eternal, death for us will be just a passage into a new and permanent form of life in communion with him who has triumphed over death.
• There are two responses to Jesus’ words. One is doubt. We see it first in the passage this Sunday, when the crowds murmured, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph? Do we not know his father and mother? Then how can he say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” To them, he was basically a preaching carpenter from Nazareth, and they questioned his credentials. Afterward, in what would have been next Sunday’s section of the Bread of Life discourse, the crowds question the substance of his remarks, quarreling, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” Finally, in a passage we will consider in two weeks, they say, “This saying is hard; who can accept it?” We shouldn’t dismiss these objections, because many today will raise the same ones. Jesus makes huge claims, both about his origin as well as our destiny through the gift of the Eucharist he gives. The only way either of them could make sense is if Jesus were truly far more than a man, if he were God who had come down from heaven, and if through consuming his flesh and blood, we would be doing more than eating cells with 46 chromosomes, but coming into contact with divine life.
• That’s why we need to pass to the second response to Jesus’ words, precisely faith. Jesus said to the doubting crowds, “Stop murmuring among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him, and I will raise him on the last day.” To believe in his words, Jesus says, we must be drawn by God the Father. It’s already a gift. He continues, “It is written in the prophets: ‘They shall all be taught by God.’ Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me.” God the Father wants to teach us, but we need to listen to him and learn from him. That’s the fundamental openness of faith, that we’re docile to God and his teaching, that we allow him to stretch us beyond our human categories, that we trust in his ability to do what by human experience is simply impossible and therefore miraculous. Jesus’ listeners at the time did not realize that God the Father had drawn them to his Son there in the Capernaum synagogue and that he was attempting to teach them right then through Jesus. But they needed to trust in Jesus enough to trust in his words, words that would only make sense a year later, when, during the next Passover, Jesus would take bread and wine into his hands and totally transform them into his body and blood under the appearances of human food and say, “Take and eat. This is my body.” And “Take and drink. This is the chalice of my blood.”
• We will have a chance to enter more deeply into Jesus’ challenging words again in two weeks, in the conclusion of the Bread of Life Discourse, but for now, we need to ensure that this conversation with Jesus is truly consequential. Today Jesus says to us, like the Angel said to Elijah, “Get up and eat, else the journey will be too long your you!” He wants to help us have his own life inside, his own strength, each day as we journey through life, the strength we need to journey with him all the way to the Mountain of God, the Heavenly Jerusalem.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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