| For fifteen years, I have preached about this Feast every June. As I turned to the scripture texts one more time a couple of weeks ago, I wondered what I would hear this year and how I could possibly say something I have not said in one way or another in the previous years. Father Mollan, who generously dispenses “fatherly advise” to me suggested about a month ago that a good reason for moving from parish to parish is that you only need a good set of three or four sermons for each Sunday of the year which you can polish up and use again place after place. I am taking that advise into consideration, but printing homilies and having them on the web page runs the risk of that plan being revealed, so for now, I am only thinking about it since I moved into a new understanding of these words this is time around by hearing one word I don’t think I had noticed in all the years before It’s strange how that happens – how one word can suddenly jump off the page at you and open your heart and mind to a new dimension of the message. The reason I heard it so clearly is that the translation has changed, and as soon as I heard the new word, the old one rang out. Let me show you, because to lead you into this thought, we used the older translation todayNew one: “For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.”Old one: “For my flesh is real food, and my blood is real drink.”Now getting into some serious study about why the change from “real” to “true” might be interesting, we would do better to simply sit and wonder about both of them, since there isn’t a lot of difference anyway John, who never misses a detail as an opportunity to teach and reveal is leading us somewhere, and it might be about time to go thereThe suggestion here is that we deal with what is real orwhat is true, and that calls us to make some distinction between what is fake or false, or what is symbolic as a substitute for the real thing.Our lives these days are filled wi h fake substitutes for the real thing. Whether it’s food, art, music, or sometimes even people, we are always running the risk of being satisfied with less than what is real. Sometimes the fake even looks better, having eliminated the unique touches of what is authentic by the perfection of technology The other, less troublesome substitute is the “symbolic” that mental “slight of hand trick” that uses a substitute or symbol for the real thing. It fools us into thinking or believing that the symbolic is just as good as the real thing. My favorite example of this is the dollar bill “symbolic offering” at Mass – as though the $1.00 bill was just as much a gift to God as the twenty dollar bill next to it.People who are going to use John’s Gospel to dig into the revelation God gives us in the Body and Blood teaching of Christ are going to be concerned with the real thing, nothing symbolic or fake It is going to make them real people, real disciples, who do real things because Jesus is real to them, no distant memory, or pious thought, nor a symbol of some religious experience.Those people will do real things, and those who long for justice will know a real response, those who are hungry will get some real food, not a program, a promise or a prayer Those who long for companionship will get real company and real compassion. What we receive here is not a symbol of Communion with God. It is the real thing. It is not just a remembrance of the saving work of Jesus. The salvation and redemption is real. Our communion here is not symbolic. It is concrete, committed, and lasting. We are one, not just faking it, acting like it, or wishing that we could be. This last time that I have to share with you the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ might be the best of them all if we can get real and be true. In our Eucharistic celebration, believers encounter the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ – the real Christ of this time and this age, not a symbolic Christ of the past. We are nourished with real food and real drink so as to be of real service and authentic, true, witness. There is nothing about is that simulated. There is no faux faith. This altar is the place where things get real, where the believer truly and really begins to experience eternal life and encounter in the broken flesh and poured-out blood of Jesus the very real life of God.Fed here, we are turned out to feed others. Healed and forgiven, we go out to heal and forgive others. Here, all our needs are met, and then the needs of others are our mandate. |