Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, August 10, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
August 10, 2024

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, in which we enter into the third week of Jesus’ five-week course on the mystery of his body and blood in the Eucharist, which Jesus taught for the first time in the Synagogue of Capernaum and renews for us every third Summer. The timing this year is particularly appropriate, as we seek to profit more deeply from, and share in, the ongoing Eucharistic Revival renewing the Church in the United States.
• 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, to feed the spiritually famished human race. Last Sunday Jesus told us not to work for food that perishes, but for the food that endures to eternal life that he will give us and, 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.
• This Sunday Jesus continues the consequential conversation, which gets into the heart of his teaching on his self-gift to us in the Holy Eucharist, on the faith we need to believe in his Eucharistic presence, and on the opposition his teaching on the Eucharist has received from the beginning. Let’s take each part in turn.
• First, 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. Of course, that’s not what his words mean. We’re not killing Jesus in order to consume his flesh; he’s giving us under the miraculous appearances of bread and wine his entire Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity. Second, 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 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 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.” 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. We draw our life from him just as he draws his life from the Father. And since his life is eternal, death for us will just be a passage into a new and permanent form of life, in communion with him who has triumphed over death and holds all life in existence.
• 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, as we’ll hear next Sunday, the crowds question the substance of his remarks, quarreling, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?,” and later, in a passage we will consider in two weeks, they will say, “This saying is hard; who can accept it?” We shouldn’t dismiss these objections, because many of our contemporaries 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. We need the gift of divine grace. Jesus 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 right there in the Capernaum synagogue and that he was attempting to teach them right then and there through Jesus. But they were resistant to listening and to learning. They needed to trust in Jesus enough to trust in his words, words that would only make better 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.” Faith, however, involves this trust. As St. Thomas Aquinas wrote for us in his famous Eucharistic Hymn Adoro Te Devote for the first Corpus Christi celebration 760 years ago, “I believe whatever the Son of God has said, because nothing is truer than the word of truth.” Drawn by the Father, listening and learning as he sought to teach us through Jesus, we trust in what Jesus says because we trust in him, the one sent by God the Father.
• We will have a chance to enter more deeply into Jesus’ challenging words again over the two weeks, but for now, we need to ensure that this conversation with Jesus is truly consequential. Consequential in allowing God the Father to draw us toward his Son in the Holy Eucharist. Consequential in having us truly listen to him and learn from him as he seeks to draw us into the greatest mystery of salvation history of all. It wasn’t enough for God’s love that he took on our humanity at the incarnation. It wasn’t enough that he died for us on Calvary and rose on the third day. He wanted to make it possible for us to draw our life from him by means of the Eucharist, by eating his flesh and drinking his blood, which he has given for the life of the world and for your life and for mine. Therefore, we need to ensure that this Sunday’s conversation is consequential in getting us to eat Jesus’ flesh and drink his blood in a life-giving way, seeking to become whom we eat, and draw our life from him — in all aspects of our existence — just as he draws his life from the Father. And consequential in getting us to stake our whole life on what he affirms: that through this act, Jesus will give us eternal life by raising us up on the last day. May this Sunday’s Gospel be consequential in all of these ways!

The Gospel passage on which the homily was based was: 

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