20th Sunday 2024
Proverbs 9:1-6; Psalm 33 (34); Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6: 51-58
Once again, the Letter to the Ephesians has a message for us: “This may be a wicked age, but your lives should redeem it”. Ours may be considered a wicked age: war, violence of many kinds, abuse, persecution, extremism, demagoguery, tyranny, racism, and many other -isms and phobias abound. In these respects it probably differs very little, if at all, from every other age; the main differences being that technology has enabled the wickedness to become more sophisticated, while mass communications have spread awareness of it.
This thought set me off on a consideration of the opening of Charles Dickens’ “A Tale of two Cities”: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. It was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness. It was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity. It was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness. It was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair. We had everything before us, we had nothing before us. We were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way. In short, the period was so like the present period….” Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose, as they say in Yealand.
If then we agree that this age, like any other, has its share of wickedness, can our lives indeed redeem it? We would say, of course, that Christ has redeemed it, but to what extent can we play our part by co-operating with His grace? We can claim to have seen an example of this over the past week, as thousands of our fellow citizens have turned out to support, with practical help and by peaceful marches, the victims of neo-Nazi violence.
All of us need, in our daily lives, to resist any temptation to fall in with wickedness, to choose the good always, to demonstrate that a better way is invariably possible. Further than that, these recent events have shown that there may be times when we are called to be more active in support of the good, that we should be prepared to step outside our comfort zone.
As was the case last week, though, the main focus of the Liturgy of the Word is on Jesus’ claim to be the Bread of Life. Bread has long been regarded as THE staple food, “the staff of life” as it has been called. Thus when personified Wisdom, in the Book of Proverbs, calls the fool to amend his ways, she invites him to eat her bread. Consequently when Jesus speaks of Himself as the Bread of Life, and as Living Bread, He is identifying Himself as essential to life.
His reference to bread might, at first sight, appear to be a metaphor for giving life, but the statements which He adds do not allow us to remain at that level of interpretation. Jesus insists, not once but repeatedly, on our eating and drinking. What are we to eat and drink? His flesh and blood, we are told. “My flesh is real food, and my blood is real drink”, is as bald, as plain, and as categorical a statement as we could wish.
“Eat and drink…..eat and drink….my flesh and my blood….real food and real drink”: Our Lord hammers the message home and reinforces it by his comparison with the manna, a thoroughly literal form of bread. Until the Last Supper, where John left it to St. Paul and to the writers of the Synoptic Gospels to describe the transformation of bread and wine into that flesh and blood, Jesus’ words would remain mysterious and puzzling. We are privileged to be granted understanding through our knowledge of the Last Supper, in conjunction with the words reported by John. We are more privileged still to be able to eat that flesh and drink that blood, repeatedly and, indeed, frequently.
