To Whom Shall We Go?

The 2st Sunday in Ordinary Time

Gospel

John 6:60-69

Many of Jesus' disciples who were listening said, "This saying is hard; who can accept it and take it seriously?" Since Jesus knew that his disciples were murmuring about this, he asked them, "Is this a stumbling block to you? What, then, if you were to see the Chosen One ascending to where he came from? It is the spirit that gives life; while the flesh in itself is useless. The words I have spoken to you are Spirit and life. Yet among you, there are some of you who do not believe." Jesus knew from the beginning, of course, those who would refuse to believe, and the one who would betray him.
So he went on to say: "For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me unless it is granted them by my Father and Mother God." As a result of this, many of Jesus' disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied him. Jesus then said to the Twelve, "Do you also want to leave?" Simon Peter answered, "Master, to whom would we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God!"

The drama of decision stands in the forefront of today’s gospel. The desertion of Jesus by some of his disciples illustrates the difficulty of discipleship, which is just too challenging for the faint-hearted or the merely curious. Peter's later denial of Jesus during His Passion illustrates just how challenging it is to follow Jesus, but for now Peter voices a Faith in Jesus that springs from the powerful first-hand relationship he has had with him. Peter has seen Jesus with the lepers, with the Samaritan Woman, with little children and prisoners, with the poor and pleading, with the sick and sinful, and Peter has seen Jesus in glory with Moses and Elijah on the Mountain of Transfiguration. Peter has come to believe that Jesus who stands before him is the clearest, sharpest, most perfect picture mortals have of the face of God--compassionate, just, all-mighty, all-knowing, merciful, and loving. With God-given faith Peter confesses his loyal belief in Jesus... "Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of Eternal Life." After 3 years of being immersed in Jesus' teachings, of witnessing his peaceful ways, his dedicated prayer life and communion with his Father/Mother God, his incisive yet humble interactions with detractors, and his miracles for healing and good, Peter can say, "We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God!"

It is ONLY the spending of time with Jesus in community that enables the disciples to respond to the God-given gift of faith within them. And so it is with us--unless we have a regular prayer life centered on Jesus and have faith community involvement (worship, study of the word, & service) we will not be able to sustain our belief in Jesus as the Holy One of God! Even the greatest saints realized that prayer (this spending time with Jesus) is required to have faith which is a gift from God that must be developed. St Anselm (d. 1109), has given this classic prayer for faith--"My prayer is a cold little thing, Lord, because it burns with so faint a flame. But you are rich in mercy. Lord I am not trying to reach your height, for my poor mind can never approach it. I do not seek to understand so that I may believe, but I believe so that I may understand, and further, I believe that unless I believe, I shall never understand."...

Understand what? -- precisely what those disciples in today's gospel walked away from--that God is so loving as to have desired to become incarnate, to show us how much we are loved.

 St. Valentine Faith Community
Mass: 10AM Every Sunday
2670 Chandler Avenue
Suite 7 & 8
Las Vegas, NV 89120
702-523-8963 Rev Sue Provost, Pastor

"This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. " (1 John 4:9-10)

Jesus is Our Bread of LIfe

The 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Gospel

John 6:51-58

Jesus said to the crowds: "I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world."
The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying,
"How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" Jesus said to them, "Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats this bread will live forever."

Today we are in nearing the end of four weeks of reflections on the Eucharist, the Body and Blood of Christ. The Gospels the last two weeks, this week and next are all a continuation of John’s chapter on the meaning of the Eucharist. This is very unusual in terms of Church liturgy and doesn’t happen very often – usually the themes change every week. To devote four weeks to the Eucharist indeed stresses the importance that it must be in our lives. Then for the third week in a row we are asked to think about Jesus as the living bread that came down from heaven. The Gospel of St. John was very different from the other three Gospels because it was written later, and a theology of Jesus had had time to develop more fully, we can see the constant stress on Jesus as the one who came down from heaven.
In the very first chapter we hear that the Word became flesh. The Incarnation of Jesus that we profess in our Creed each week is very simply that God became one of us. What follows throughout the Gospel of John is a theological presentation of Jesus as this God-man, and an attempt to make sense out of it, an attempt to see the Wisdom in it. For what could seem more foolish than Jesus’ statement: Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you shall not have life within you”? Certainly anyone in their right mind would find these words ridiculous and foolish, as did his Jewish audience. Because of these statements, it was rumored for years that Christians were a bunch of cannibals! Where is the Wisdom in all of this?
Jesus gives us the ultimate food and drink in order that we can be close to our God – so close that he is within us. If we have really loved someone, we know that one of the qualities that love comes with is that we want to be with that person all the time. This is the closeness we are talking about and the closeness that Jesus is talking about: “Whoever eats my flesh remains in me and I in him.” But there is something more about this closeness – we don’t just get close to God when we take the Eucharist but we get close to each other, too. Because God comes into all of us, we are all united by that fact and we can truly say that we are one body.
The words that we have been hearing from Jesus about his body and blood come from a section of John’s Gospel, not at the last Supper, when you might think he would have said these things, but an earlier section where Jesus is teaching his followers. As we read them today we cannot help but pick up on the Eucharistic foreshadowing here. The question we might ask is that how could Jesus have spoken these words in the middle of his Ministry and expected them to be understood. Yet, everyone who reads John’s Gospel knows that there are 5 chapters devoted to the Last Supper without a mention of the institution of the eucharist.
Jesus tells us that through eating His flesh and drinking His blood: we are nourished and kept alive in faith; we are in communion with one another in the One Body of Christ; we are in union with God when we are in Communion with Jesus; and we are partaking of eternal food. Jesus is saying that all we have to do is believe in Him and we can have this miraculous sustenance.....but his listeners couldn't find it in themselves to trust Jesus' Divine Gift, and instead tried to analyze his words with human knowledge ("they quarreled amongst themselves, saying, "How can he give us his flesh to eat?")...........and that's precisely where they failed, for while knowledge is complex (and its debates will go on forever), wisdom is simple and for the simple......Jesus' Jewish audience listening to him as they were during this last week before his Passion, just couldn't yield to Jesus' Divine Wisdom.
So Jesus probably did not say these words at that particular time, but John uses this time to develop the Eucharistic concept. The listeners of Jesus ask: How can this man give us his flesh to eat? It is a question that could be asked today. And it was certainly still being asked when John was writing, 60 years after Christ’s death. The drinking of blood was forbidden to Jews, yet “eating the flesh of Jesus” and “drinking” his blood became a common way of describing the way we partake of the Eucharist.
Scholars believe that the language developed as a way to show the intimacy, the close relationship, the closeness of Jesus to those who choose to believe in him. So again, the Eucharist is all about closeness, our being close to our God, and our being close to each other. It is the food and drink that sustains us and brings us life. And not just life till we die, but life beyond this life. John sees the Eucharist not so much as a memorial of Christ’s death nor a continuation of the last supper, but as an extension of Jesus’ incarnation – God becoming man, God becoming close to us and then continuing to be close to us by this food and drink.
Let us this week meditate on the Wisdom of God and his ability to make him or herself part of our lives through his closeness to us – and how much closer can we be than partaking of our God and being the vessel for him.

Valentine Faith Community
Mass: 10AM Every Sunday
2670 Chandler Avenue
Suite 7 & 8
Las Vegas, NV 89120
702-523-8963 Rev Sue Provost, Pastor



"This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. " (1 John 4:9-10)

Jesus is the Bread of Life!

The 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time

Gospel

John 6:51-58

Jesus said to the crowds:
"I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever;
and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world."
The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying,
"How can this man give us his flesh to eat?"
Jesus said to them, "Amen, amen, I say to you,
unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats this bread will live forever."
Nourishment provides strength and the ability to survive and thrive. In the ancient Jewish and Christian biblical traditions, bread along with water, wine, and olive oil were the actual and metaphorical images for sustenance for a thriving life. Twice in the Elijah narrative (including today’s), and frequently in the four Gospel narratives, bread becomes the metaphorical image for the source of life.Jesus had been using the metaphor of bread in the earlier verses in the narrative of John 6.
He had provoked some in his audience both by claiming an unusual closeness to God and because they perceived him as behaving (by preaching) above his station. They believed their familiarity with him (“Do we not know his father and mother?”) was a sort of cultural power over him, a power by which they could keep him humble, and at their religious level. Jesus, however, described himself as having come from Heaven, which really meant, from God.
This chapter is very Eucharistic in a very sophisticated manner. It does not lend itself to a literalist interpretation. The first principle employed here is the very Mystery of God, including the distinction of divine Persons, and the intimacy among them. The early Church evolved and grew in its understanding and appreciation of God’s Mysterious Reality. John’s 6th Chapter is a magnificent, even if somewhat obscure, literary articulation of the mystery of God’s Presence. It also harkens to the future in Jesus’ words about “...the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.”
Our modern Eucharistic Theology demands that we appreciate the Real Presence of God as much more than a simplistic use of the Risen Christ “in” the bread and wine. Rather, Christ’s presence is first in the Assembly of the Baptized Believers (“whoever believes has eternal life”). Second, the Real Presence of Christ is in the proclaimed Word of God in the actions of the lectors, deacon and priest at liturgy. The complementary action of the Assembly’s hearing the proclaimed Word is another aspect of Christ being effectively present in the liturgical assembly. Finally, of course, Christ’s Real Presence is in the sacred elements of the consecrated bread and wine (and in each of the other Sacraments).
But, the reception of Christ in holy communion is meaningful in healthy and balanced manner only in relation to the Gospel fellowship of the liturgical assembly and with the proclamation of Sacred Scripture. “Full, conscious, and active participation” are essential and necessary disposition for each believer who “listens to my Father and learns from him.
We must remember that we become the real presence of Christ in the world to the others that we come into contact with.

Valentine Faith Community
Mass: 10AM Every Sunday
2670 Chandler Avenue
Suite 7 & 8
Las Vegas, NV 89120
702-523-8963 Rev Sue Provost, Pastor


"This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. " (1 John 4:9-10)