All Souls Day 2nd November
"I am the Living Bread come down from heaven. if someone eats of this bread he will live for ever; and the bread that I shall give is my flesh, for the life of the world.’
We celebrate the faithful departed, and six times in the Gospel these words come back : ’Eat my flesh, drink my Blood’, so that we come to understand that it is a question of essential bead, which will have us live from the very Life of God given out of Love. ’Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my Blood dwells in me.’ ! This boldness Jesus had claiming the very role of Wisdom had already caused murmurings in the crowd : ’Isn’t this man Jesus , son of Joseph? We know his mother and father well. so how can he say ’I have come down from Heaven?’ n the synagogue murmurings had started again : ’How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’ We need to be saved, to dwell in the Joy of the Resurrection of Jesus. Mary had given all she had to Jesus : her body and blood. Jesus joins humanity by the gift of his own Body and his Blood. ’For them, ’he said ’I consecrate myself.’ That doesn’t make us forget the hungry people who make us think about this essential hunger in mankind : hunger to love, hunger to give oneself, hunger to know God. This is why the Gospel joins every man and without any prejudice. In his flesh offered up, in his Blood poured out, Jesus creates a new humanity. This consecration ’blossoms ’in an astonishing way on Calvary. ’ God will take away the veil of mourning that enveloped all peoples and the veil that covered all nations.“”As the Father, who is Living, sent me, and as I live through the Father, thus the one who eats me will live through me. This is the Bread come down from heaven. It is not like the one that the fathers ate : they are dead. The one who eats this bread will live for ever."
On Maundy Thursday, the night before he dies, Jesus will give us the most beautiful hope that was ever to be. Taking the bread and the cup he will say ’Take and eat ; this is my Body given up for you. Drink all of you, this is my Blood.’ Jesus is about to confront the Passion.
The dynamic of every life is to learn to love, in all events and in every reaction to daily life. The inner fire of a life is this love, every person has a feeling about
this , one day or another, and Jesus will give his agreement within himself. Jesus gives us this endless patience which brings to birth the best of oneself in each person : ’If someone eats this bread, he will live for ever.’ Jesus has us get rid of anything that closes us in on ourselves, under the pretext of being right or of defending our own rights. The Eucharist is necessary to encourage and develop a Divine Life beginning here on earth, this is what Jesus calls Eternal Life. One day it will be the hour of our Passage. God looks at us in His Son and in Christ we are already victorious.
“Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my Blood has Eternal Life and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is true food and my blood true drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my Blood dwells in me and I in him’, says Jesus in Capernaum.”
To dwell in Christ is to find Light, peace and forgiveness in Him; it means to draw from his Life the strength to live, even when we are faced with an ordeal and we can’t envisage a way out of it; it means trying to see things, events and each person as he sees them and to start off again each morning on a path of Hope ; it means to be impregnated with his own reflexes of Mercy : ’Whoever eats me will live through me.’ Every communion to his Body and Blood will therefore be a communion to his Life as Son of God, and even a communion to his mission of the One who is sent from th Father. We will live through Him, for the Eucharist is for us a certitude of victory over the forces of refusal, agressivity, and isolation, and even over he forces of sickness and of death. Lived in Jesus, death is not an end, but rather it is a beginning. The existential far of death , that is at the roots of our anguishes, can be transfigured. We ask for the Grace to enter into an attitude of offering, on apath of total consecration of life for God. Ad so progressively God’s Love will take all the place in us. The loveliest offering we can make of our life is contained in the Consecration that Jesus makes : ’Likewise, the Living Father sent me, and I live through the Father, likewise it is that the one who will eat me will live through me.’