Friends
Peace be with you.
In college, some friends asked me if I would remain a Christian if they found the body of Jesus. I hadn’t thought about it but I told them I would. After all, they’re constantly doing archaeology in the Holy Land. There’s a chance they’ll find a tomb or a burial box purported to be the burial box of Jesus, right? I remember going to my spiritual director, Fr. Doug Wathier, and telling him about his conversation and kind of being proud that, even if they found the remains of Jesus, I would stay a Christian. I remember asking him if it would affect his faith and being shocked that he was quite adamant that it would. He said that, if Jesus hadn’t been raised bodily, there’s no reason for us to believe. Further, if Jesus still died after the resurrection and wasn’t taken up body and soul into heaven, then it wasn’t really a resurrection but merely a resuscitation. People are resuscitated every day using CPR and defibrillators. There’s nothing really miraculous about getting the heart to start pumping blood again. Even people who seem to be dead but who are more in a comatose state who awake after days or weeks because of ventilators and other modern medicine isn’t an example of a miracle in the same way that Jesus, who really died and never died again, is.
As we conclude the Bread of Life Discourse from John chapter six, we hear that the people who came to Jesus because he gave them free bread and fish start to walk away from him when he explains that the bread they ate wasn’t just simply food, but was food from heaven and that, unless they eat the Eucharist, they cannot have hope for eternal life. The reaction that the crowd has is, once again, to question the reality of eternal life. Who can accept that they have to eat the Eucharist to have eternal life, they ask. Jesus’ response is, basically, if you’re not going to believe that he became incarnate, how are you going to believe that he resurrected? Think about it like this, these people could see his flesh and touch his body. The incarnation of Jesus wasn’t an issue for them. I think that’s partly why the flesh is of no avail for them, because he’s right there. It’s a challenge for us but not for them. If they can’t believe that the bread they are eating, the true food they are eating, is his flesh when they can see that he has flesh and blood, then how are they or anyone else going to believe in the resurrection when no one will see him any longer? For some of them it’s just a step too far so they walk away. Actually, not just some of them but the text says that many of them walked away and returned to their former lives. For the first time in the Gospel of John, Jesus refers to the twelve apostles at this point, and asks if they’re going to abandon him too. In a typical way, it is Simon Peter who makes the strong statement of faith, “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”
In every generation, there’s a tendency to water down the gospel, to make Christian teachings more in line with society or more palatable with other religions or religious movements. And, while sometimes we can use connections to other religions as a bridge to true the religion, like St. Paul did at the Areopagus in the Acts of the Apostles or Pope Francis was trying to do with the Pachamama statue a few years ago, we have to be careful not to water down the faith in the process. Joshua, in the first reading, made it clear to the people of the Old Testament that we have to choose to follow the one true God and not the false gods of our neighbors, especially the false gods that we or others create to make the gospel more palatable to a skeptical generation. Jesus was willing to let people walk away in freedom back to their old lives.
The beginning of our second reading told us that we need to be subordinate to one another out of reverence to Christ before going on to talk about the type of subordination particular to married life. In a previous homily, I talked about how the word subordinate would be better translated as submissive, or under the mission. We all need to be under Christ’s mission, which demands an informed faith. There’s a reason the remains of Jesus have never been found. It’s because they’re not here. The only place you will find the body of Christ is in our tabernacles because it is our food for the journey, his real presence in this bread from heaven. If we can’t believe Jesus has come down in the true bread we eat, how are we going to follow him to heaven?
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