21st Sunday of the Year B

For the fifth week in a row today we heard from chapter six of John’s Gospel, a section where Jesus makes the most astonishing statements about himself. His body is real food and his blood real drink. If we eat his body and drink his blood we will have life in us. He is, he says, the living bread which has come down from heaven and anyone who eats this bread, which is his body, will live for ever. These are truly astonishing claims, and many of Jesus’ own followers, the Gospel tells us, found them completely unacceptable. ‘This is intolerable language,’ they said. ‘How could anyone accept it?’..words which find an echo in the hearts and minds of millions today for whom traditional Christian beliefs, like the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, and many others, seem to belong to another age and to be totally out of tune with the way we think today. It might have been OK for people in the Middle Ages to have believed all that stuff, the argument goes, but you can’t seriously expect people today to believe it, an attitude which, if we are serious about our faith, we must respond to. And if our response to it is to be genuine and effective it must begin with understanding, not least because, like most things, the argument has an element of truth in it.

Fundamentally, you see, there are two things at work here. The way we think about truth has indeed changed radically over the last three hundred years or so. What historians call The Enlightenment was a movement in history which marked the beginning of our modern scientific age. It represented a real break with the past and a rejection of a way of thinking about the world which had dominated the world for centuries, the problem for the Church being that many of its doctrines and believes had been formulated during that now rejected, and, in the eyes of many, discredited past and were expressed in its language. And so, in classic fashion, the baby was thrown out with the bath water, leaving the Church with the task of expressing ancient truths in a new language, a task it has not completed yet and which many would say it has hardly begun. And it’s important that we understand this and not keep blaming the world for its lack of belief when part of the responsibility is ours.

But there is, undoubtedly, another element to all this, and it is the relativism of our age, so strongly attacked over and over again by both the present Pope and his predecessor John Paul II. And we ourselves have reflected on it often. It’s that tendency to reduce truth to what we think it is. To reject as nonsense anything we don’t understand or disagree with. To create our own personal version of the truth which fits in with what we think, suits us, doesn’t challenge us, confirms our prejudices and enables us to justify more or less anything we want to. We ourselves become the source of truth. We define what truth is and so it is inevitably limited and constrained by the narrowness of our thinking and the limits of our understanding. And when that happens, when we become god in our own lives, we have effectively lost touch with genuine truth which, if there is a God, can only come from him. The fullness of truth is always greater than we are, always far beyond the limits of our understanding and until we open ourselves up to the truth that comes from God, which we call Revelation, we are doomed to live trapped in our own ignorance. As Jesus says in that same Gospel passage: ‘It is the spirit who gives life, the flesh has nothing to offer. The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life.’

So how do we open ourselves up to this revealed truth, this truth which comes from God and goes far beyond the limits of human understanding? Well, the simple answer to that is that we do it through faith. St Ignatius speaks about a deep interior knowledge which does not come from ourselves but from the Spirit living in us and which, since it is a gift to each individual, cannot really be communicated to others. Like the bridesmaids in the parable, we all have to buy our own oil. We cannot live of what belongs to others. Or, as in the story of the Marriage Feast at Cana, we all have to draw the water for ourselves. But what I would like to do in the short time that remains today is remind you again of some of things we ought to look out for in ourselves if we want to be open to the truth that comes from God and not put too many obstacles in its way.

And the first of these is to be very wary of too much certainty. Certainty tends to be the refuge of those who cannot live with truths greater than themselves and generally speaking the degree of certainty we have on any matter is in inverse proportion to the amount we know about it. I know one person who, the less he knows about any subject,the more he waxes lyrical about it. And as I have said to you so often, the number of things I personally am certian about diminishes all the time. Beware, too, of gods who agree with you all the time, share your prejudices and never challenge you in any way. You can be absolutely sure that these gods are gods you have created in your own image and likeness and not the other way round. And beware of finding the views and opinions of others ‘intolerable.’ Usually this is because they are a threat to the comfortable little world we have created for ourselves and at some level we are afraid that if we acknowledge the truth in them we will have to change in some way. And on this point I recommend to you the spiritual reading on the back of this week’s bulletin.

But most of all, we need to learn again what it is to believe. To believe is to soar beyond the limits of our own understanding and enter a world which would be unknown and unknowable without the gift of faith. There are many things about the Church which do not fall into this category and are in need of radical change. But there are others which do. These are the great truths of our faith. They are about God, Jesus, Resurrection, Eucharist and the teaching of Jesus in the Gospels. Only through the Spirit can we accept such things and I invite you to let that Spirit move in you today.

BIDDING PRAYERS


In the first reading this week from the book of Joshua, the people of Israel vow that they will serve the Lord. They have no intention, they say, of deserting the God who brought them and their ancestors out of the land of Egypt. The whole history of the Old Testament is littered with such promises and yet the reality was that the people, over and over again, did what they said they would not. And so we pray for the wisdom to see a reflection of ourselves in this ...Lord hear us

In the Gospel story today Jesus’ own disciples find what he is saying to them intolerable. They cannot understand it and so are unable or unwilling to accept it. And yet what Jesus is telling them is the most wonderful truth imaginable. He is the bread of life. His body is real food and his blood real drink, a mystery we celebrate each week when we come together for Mass and receive Jesus in Holy Communion. And so we ask God to deepen our faith in what we do...Lord hear us

Finding what he says about the Eucharist intolerable, many of those who heard Jesus walked away and did not go with him any longer. In our own day, too, of course, many have walked away from the celebration of the Eucharist and stopped receiving Jesus under the appearances of bread and wine. But we pray that, in God’s infinite providence, this will prove to be no more than a stage in a much longer journey and will lead to deeper faith fit for the age in which we live.... Lord hear us

As his disciples walk away and leave him, unable to accept what he is saying, Jesus makes no attempt to water down his teaching or try to persuade them to stay. On the contrary, he asks the twelve if they would like to go too. In this we see the wonderful mystery of a God who offers us everything but forces nothing upon us. Having given us the gift of freedom he does not take back his gift. And so we pray for the wisdom we need to use that gift well and allow others to do the same......Lord hear us

In response to Jesus’ question, Peter answers for men and women of faith in every age. ‘Lord, who shall we go to? You have the message of eternal life and we believe. Peter, of course, is a symbol of the Church which, despite its many weaknesses and the weaknesses of its members, keeps the flame of faith alive in every age. And so we pray for the Church that it will rise to the challenges of the age we are living through and be all that it is called to be for the sake of the world.....Lord hear us

And we pray in a very special way that God will lead us to a mature and deep faith in the great mystery of the Real Presence of Jesus among us under the appearances of bread and wine. Pope Benedict has called us to a new and deeper appreciation of this doctrine and urged us to rediscover the ancient practice of prayer before the Blessed Sacrament. And so we pray that in this parish, which for years has had three periods of Exposition every week, this will finally happen.....Lord hear us.