The Eucharistic Path of Life, Third Friday of Easter, April 28, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Friday of the Third Week in Ordinary Time
Memorial of St. Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort, St. Peter Chanel and St. Gianna Molla
April 28, 2023
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 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 said 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 the 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 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.
• 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 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 the Church celebrates three great witnesses to the power of the Eucharist and to the ecclesial communion that flows from it. .
• The first witness is St. Peter Chanel (1803-1841), who became a Missionary in the newly formed Society of Mary (Marists) and was sent from his native France to New Hebrides in the South Pacific to bring the light of Christ to Oceania. At first, after a ten-month journey, he and his fellow missionaries were well received on the island of Futuna by the people and by King Niuliki, but the King’s fears and envy were aroused when they learned the local language and gained the people’s confidence, thinking that his prerogatives as sovereign and high priest might be abrogated. When his son asked for baptism, the King sent warriors to club him to death. But St. Peter’s witness of God’s love, traveling so far, immersing himself in their lives, wasn’t forgotten by the people. Within five months, the radiance of the light he gave, his willingness to suffer for Christ and for them, helped bring the entire island to conversion. His light remains still. I rejoiced to have a chance to celebrate Mass at his tomb in New Zealand a few years ago.
• The second witness is St. Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort (1673-1716), who was a great missionary preacher in France at the beginning of the 1700s, but he really wasn’t appreciated during his lifetime. He suffered so much from people who thought he was making a fool of himself, being a showman, in preaching missions and trying to bring people to conversion, to salvation, to hear God’s words and live by them rather than seek to please human beings. He suffered persecution not only from those who were resisting a basic conversion but also from those clerics and good people from whom he has asking total conversion. But he was able to persevere through his devotion to the one who showed him how to live off of Christ: the Blessed Virgin Mary. He sought to help everyone become truly devout to our Lady so that she would bring us to the blessed Fruit of her womb and live off of him. After he had died, his writings were discovered and since have become the greatest preparation for consecration to Our Lady. He would be urging us to find in Mary the true paradigm of a Eucharistic life, because it was in her God’s word became flesh for the first time. She shows us how to live because of him. She shows us, and prays for us, to learn how to relive her mystery in Christ.
• The third great witness is St. Gianna Beretta Molla, who died on this day in 1962 in imitation of Christ’s own Eucharistic sacrifice. Born 40 years earlier, she became a pediatrician and planned to dedicate her life to sick children, but at 33, she met and fell in love with a good Catholic engineer named Pietro Molla, whom she married after a year’s courtship. They sought to live the life of an ordinary Christian couple, combining their careers with their duties to their family. In the first five years of their marriage, God blessed them with three children. During the summer of 1961, they discovered that God had blessed them with a fourth. Two months into her pregnancy, however, Dr. Molla started to feel abdominal pain. She went to see her brother who was an obstetrician, who with his colleagues discovered she had large malignant fibroma in her uterus that was risking her life and the life of her child. One of her brother’s colleagues presented her the options: The first was a complete hysterectomy, which would save her own life but take the life of her child; the second was to abort the child and then try to excise the tumor while saving the uterus, so that she could have other children; the third was by far the riskiest: to try to extract the tumor alone, conscious that the post-surgical sutures could rupture the uterus later and lead to the death both of mother and child. Without hesitation, Gianna resolutely chose the third option, which was the only one that had any chance of saving her child’s life. While she was being prepared for surgery, she insisted with her surgeon to do whatever he needed to do to save the baby’s life, even at the loss of her own. The surgery was as successful as it could be. They got the tumor and the child didn’t miscarry, but both were still at risk. Gianna went on with her life joyfully trusting in the Lord. She kept repeating to worried family members, “Whatever God wants.” On Good Friday, April 20, 1962, she entered the hospital to deliver her child. She told the medical team, many of whom knew and loved her as a colleague: “If you must choose between me and the baby, have no hesitation: choose — and I demand it — the baby, save him!” A healthy little girl was delivered, whom she and Pietro named Giannina, or “little Gianna.” Giannina was placed in her delighted mother’s arms. But very soon Gianna’s post-partum pains and temperature increased. She was diagnosed with septic peritonitis. The doctors did everything they could do — antibiotics, blood transfusions, injections — but nothing helped. Throughout her agony, she kept saying, “Jesus, I love you. Jesus I love you,” until she fell into a coma. A week later, on April 28th, she died. “No one has any greater love,” Jesus said during the first Mass, “than to lay down his life for his friends.” Dr. Gianna Molla has become an image of that Christ-like love in human, very modern terms. When it came to saving her life or saving her child’s, she chose her child’s. She was willing to sacrifice everything — her career, her family, her very life — for the sake of the gift growing within her. She was able to find joy in suffering, even death, out of love. Her witness reminds us of how Christ said to the Father that if it were a choice between saving his life and ours, to choose us! And she was strengthened to live this way by Christ on the inside.
• Today we ask the intercession of St. Paul, St. Peter Chanel, St. Louis de Montfort and St. Gianna Molla so that we, like them, might learn to live off of Christ just like he 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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