Saturday 3rd Week of Easter 12th April 2016“”Many of his disciples who heard him cried out ’What he’s saying here is intolerable, we can’t keep listening to him like this!’ Jesus was aware that his followers were complaining about it and said ’Does this disturb you? What if you should see the Son of man ascend to where he was before?…It is the spirit that gives life, the flesh has nothing to offer.The words I have spoken to you are spirit and they are life."
The Truth of Jesus is that ’the Spirit gives Life’. Jesus opens up a new daily life for us where we can understand that man does not live from bread alone but from every Word that comes out of the mouth of God.
Life is given to us, it is given so that we encounter faith in life and faith in God. Faith is a letting go, it is a birth to another person.
Jesus’ Word is of an amazing reality that has us adhere to the mystery of the Incarnation. Jesus, born of the Virgin Mary, comes from the Father. He took on human flesh and he lives from the Holy Spirit, God’s Infinite Love.
Jesus goes right to the end of the Incarnation both through practicalities of human life and through the Gift of Himself, He is the Bread of the Father, the Bread of Life.
’It is the Spirit who vivifies, the flesh can’t do anything’.
The Eucharist really does offer us the Body of Christ born of the Virgin Mary ; the cup of wine really is the Blood of Christ, given, so we may have Life. Jesus already knows who the one is who does not believe. Mysteriously, Jesus points to Judas’ betrayal!
“But there are some of you who do not believe”. For Jesus knew from the outset who did not believe and who was to betray him. He went on , ’This is why I told you that no one could come to me except by the gift of the Father.’ After this, many of his disciples went away and accompanied him no more."
The mystery of life cannot come without the other whom we accept to receive ’It is given by the Father’ Jesus tells us. And so I recognise myself as a son,
existing through him, nothing is possible without this, without surrendering to the Father.
Whatever our temperament may be like, we must go through this dispossession of ourselves, in the hope that God gives us in the future. It is an opening that is something poor, a waiting for someone, an acceptation not to live alone, not to do things alone, but with someone else, out of another.
Jesus insisted on this realism of faith right to the end and it is so important. It is a question of the reality of Jesus come in human flesh. It is about the reality of Jesus at the Cross who makes the gift of his Body and Blood, the gift of his Life.
The apostle John who brought Mary into his home announces it to us. Eucharistic faith will not be opened up with Peter who in his denial lacked hope. After having denied Jesus, Peter will look at him and will start to cry. Peter, whose Eucharistic faith is unshakeable, was nourished at the Last supper by the Body and Blood of Jesus. He won’t stop referring to what Jesus did in his life : his words : “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of Eternal Life” are as true as ever.
“Then Jesus said to the Twelve : ’What about you? Do you want to go away too?’ Simon Peter answered ’Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the Words of Eternal Life, and we believe and have come to know that you are the Holy One of God.”
Peter brings the response to the afterwards, he is without determination but he is in this place of faith; he receives, he has nothing, but he hopes everything from Christ, he enters into a new universe.
The only certitude he has is the opening to the Mystery of God who lets himself be welcomed in a poor way. On the morning of the Resurrection, on the evening of Emmaus ,it is with the shared bread where everything is there in a powerful way, that we are called to thanksgiving.
The power of God’s infinite Love at work in Jesus Christ is from now on at the heart of the Church, in the heart of the Apostles.
The power of the Holy Spirit acts from now on in the Church that continues Jesus’ work. This is how we want to give ourselves over to God with our whole being so as to enter into the mystery of the Eucharist, in the gift of ourselves as we follow Jesus.