When we recite the Creed on Sundays and solemnities, we profess that God the Son is “eternally begotten of the Father.” This statement is a profession of the divinity of Jesus Christ, which relates to Jesus’ assertion in yesterday’s Gospel passage that “The Father and I are one.”
Meditate on this truth that the Father and the Son are one in light of another phrase from the Creed: that is, that the Son is “Light from Light” . How is God light? This is a metaphor, of course, but a very pregnant one. Jesus proclaims in today’s Gospel passage, “I came into the world as light….” He is talking, of course, about His mission in this world having the same effect as light.
Jesus’ earthly mission is continued through time by His Mystical Body, the Church. Within the Church, your vocation bears—in some way—a share in the meaning of this metaphor: “that everyone who believes in me might not remain in darkness.” We might reflect on today’s Gospel in conjunction with Jesus’ words during the Sermon on the Mount: “You are the light of the world.” Our mission as the light of the world leads others, and ourselves, into the light of the Beatific Vision.
Today’s Gospel passage ends with an odd turn “off course”. As a whole, the passage seems to be about Jesus dispelling the Jews’ suspense by identifying Himself as the Good Shepherd. He then describes His relationship with His sheep, and the fact that by following His voice, His sheep have eternal life. So far, we’re in familiar territory, with Jesus’ metaphors echoing imagery from the Old Testament.
But then an important shift occurs. Jesus speaks about the relationships between Himself, His Father, and His sheep. The last two sentences of today’s Gospel passage present a challenge.
From speaking about Himself and His Sheep, Jesus moves to speak about Himself and His Father. “The Father and I are one.” This is not distraction on Jesus’ part. This assertion relates to what He has just said about His sheep, and about Himself as the Good Shepherd.
How is unity one of the most important themes of the Easter Season? How is the mark of unity—one of the four marks of Christ’s Bride, the Church—a call from Jesus to the love that the Father and the Son have for each other? How is the Mystical Body of Christ the means by which our human love for our neighbor raises us into the love of the Triune God?
“I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly.”
Often when we picture the Good Shepherd, we imagine him carrying a single stray sheep on His shoulders. That’s consoling when we’re preparing for Confession, or praying at night during our examination of conscience. But when Jesus the Good Shepherd takes us upon His shoulders, where does He carry us back to? When Jesus returns us “home” through the gate that He Himself is, what exactly is this “home”?
In fact, the Good Shepherd carries us back into the midst of the flock. Jesus returns the stray to its flock so that all one hundred can graze and dwell together. Here we have an image of the Church. Being a Christian is never just about “me and Jesus”. As soon as we try to separate love of God from love of neighbor, we will love neither God nor neighbor as He wants, or as He does. Within the flock of the Church is where God teaches us to mingle love of Him with love of neighbor.
Here we start to see the importance of the gate. The gate is an entrance into the life of God’s flock, not just into divine life. The Church as God’s flock is a chief theme of the Easter Season, and our preparation for Pentecost. That’s why our First Reading throughout Easter is from the Acts of the Apostles: the book of Acts is all about the life of the early Church. That is to say, Acts teaches us how the first Christians lived a common life as God’s flock, with the Apostles as their earthly shepherds. God’s flock on earth is His Church, whose life we experience both within our parish family and at home within the domestic church.
The difference between the divine food of the Bread of Life and any ordinary human food is that human food strengthens the human body only according to the nature of the food: which is to say, according to whatever vitamins and minerals and so on are within it. If you eat an apple, it doesn’t matter if you’re a sinner or a saint: your body will be nourished in just the same way. Likewise, if you eat a steak, it doesn’t matter if you’re a scoundrel or a nobleman: your body will be nourished in just the same way. When you then leave the dinner table, regardless of your moral and spiritual character, you can use the physical strength from that ordinary human food to commit good deeds or bad deeds: virtuous actions or vicious actions, as you will.
But divine food is different. Divine food cannot strengthen you to accomplish whatever you wish. It can only strengthen you to accomplish what God wills, as God designs. The divine food of the Most Holy Eucharist strengthens Christians for their vocations, so that the grace of the other sacraments might flowers as those sacraments are designed by God. Baptismal grace strengthens you to conform your life according to the pattern of Jesus’ Death and Resurrection. The Sacrament of Holy Matrimony conforms spouse’s lives that they might, according to God’s particular will, beget and rear children in the Faith, in additional to themselves—husband and wife—grow in unity as persons. Likewise, the Sacrament of Holy Orders conforms a man’s life to preach, to offer sacrifice, and to offer the charity of God through the other sacraments.
The divine food of the Most Holy Eucharist, then, only gives you the strength to accomplish what God wants to accomplish through you. Divine food is for divine purposes. In a similar way, prayer teaches us what God wants us to do with our lives, not how to get what we’re wanting from God.
Too often in our modern day, we Christians approach God from the perspective of a consumer culture, where God offers us bargains and deals. We can be tempted to consider His grace to be a cash-back program for participating in the sacraments. By contrast, John 6 is about Jesus sub-ordinating His whole Self—Flesh and Blood, soul and divinity—to His Spouse, the Church. That Church includes you as one of her members. These passages from the Word of God in John 6 become Flesh in the Holy Eucharist. The strength of that Word made Flesh can helps each of us to nurture the spousal, nuptial bond with Christ. This bond is unbreakable because the one Who has called us to that union with Him is Himself divine. Yet we have to share wholeheartedly in it according to our own will. That’s why each of us has to sacrifice her own will to the Will of God.
“For my Flesh is true food, and my Blood is true drink.”
Jesus, like any good teacher, responds to the ignorance of those to whom he’s speaking. The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying, “How can he give us his flesh to eat?” Jesus replies not by saying that “eating his flesh” is just a figure of speech.
Instead, Jesus replies by saying, “if you do not eat the Flesh of the Son of Man and drink His Blood, you have no life in you. … For my Flesh is true food and my Blood is true drink.”
Jesus, at this point in the Gospel, does not offer this real bread and drink just yet. He does not speak in the present tense, saying, “The bread I am giving you is my flesh.” Instead, He speaks of the future: “The bread I will give is my flesh, for the life of the world.”
Jesus gave His Flesh and Blood for us on the Cross on Good Friday. But He established the Sacrifice of the Mass on the night before He died. We know the truth that we must be like Christ to truly live. But we cannot imitate Christ through sheer will-power. We must be nourished by God Himself. Only when He dwells within you can you live your life as He led His: or more accurately, can He live His life in you.
At the Last Supper, with His apostles, He prepared a banquet for those who would follow Him to the Cross. We cannot separate the Eucharist and the Cross. The Eucharist is not for us and our plans. The Eucharist is to strengthen us for accomplishing God’s holy and providential Will.
The Fourth Sunday of Easter [B] Acts 4:8-12 + 1 John 3:1-2 + John 10:11-18
“A good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.”
The fourth Sunday of Easter is called “Good Shepherd Sunday.” Knowing this, you’re not likely to be surprised by Jesus’ first words in today’s Gospel Reading: “I am the good shepherd. A good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.”In other words, a good shepherd is one who serves others in a radically sacrificial manner.
Having noted that, you might wonder what the Responsorial Psalm is to go with this Gospel passage. Your thoughts might turn to the 23rd psalm: “The Lord is my Shepherd; there is nothing I shall want.” But instead, the refrain for today’s Psalm is from Psalm 118: “The stone rejected by the builders has become the cornerstone.” What does Psalm 118 have to do with being a good shepherd? To answer this, we need some perspective.
If you go back to the first words of Jesus from today’s Gospel Reading, they say something different from the images conjured by Psalm 23. The 23rd psalm, after all, is sung by one of the sheep. The 23rd psalm describes the comforts that come from the care of the Good Shepherd: green pastures, reposing near restful waters, and so on. This comfort is much like what a child enjoys under the care of his or her parents.
In the Second Reading, Saint John says that that, in fact, “that is what we are”: children of God. During the season of Easter, the Church celebrates the joy and glory of Jesus’ Resurrection. Hopefully, we can celebrate with the joy of little children, giving thanks for the Death and Resurrection of Jesus, through which God the Father has adopted us.
However, as soon as we realize that we should be giving thanks, things begin to change. Giving thanks, of course, is not something that children do easily. A child has to be taught to give thanks. Left to ourselves, we tend to believe that we deserve everything good thing that comes to us. As we learn to give thanks, we begin to realize that all the gifts that we enjoy—life itself, our relationships, our material and spiritual goods—ultimately come from someone else, someone who didn’t have to give them to us, and someone who had to make a sacrifice in order to give them to us. This is most especially true of the gift of Divine Mercy.
Once we thoroughly believe this, we see that we ought to be acting like the one who has given us these gifts. That is, our lives on earth ought to be given over less to the enjoying of gifts and more to the giving of sacrificial gifts. “We are God’s children now; what we shall later be has not yet come to light.” As Christians, we are all in the process of growing into this truth: becoming more like God the Father, not only the giver of all good gifts [see James 1:17], but someone who sacrifices what is most precious to Him in giving these good gifts.
As a child grows up to resemble his parents, so each Christian is meant to become like God the Father. That means that a Christian is defined by his or her own sacrifices. Those sacrifices will naturally differ from one person to the next. One Christian is called to sacrifices such as caring for a sick child, or loving a child by offering forgiveness when he or she does something seriously wrong. The sacrifices that strengthen another Christian might be caring for an elderly relative.
Whatever these sacrifices might be that an individual Christian is called to, we can surely say this of them: “The stone rejected by the builders has become the cornerstone.” The world more often than not rejects what is right and just. Those we serve may reject our sacrifices. Perhaps later on, those who reject our sacrifices will come to appreciate what was offered for them. But perhaps not. Regardless, God asks us to make them.
The strength to make such sacrifices selflessly comes from the Sacrifice of the Mass, offered for us by those called to the ordained priesthood. Among other reasons, then, we ought to pray for vocations to the ordained priesthood in order to ensure that Christians everywhere might be able to receive the spiritual strength that God offers in Holy Communion.
“… the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.”
Jesus first declares, “I am the Bread of Life.” Then He describes Himself as “the bread that comes down from Heaven so that one may eat it and not die.” Third, Jesus calls Himself “the living bread”. In all three of these statements, Jesus explains that He is not just nourishment. Jesus is a bread that offers a life stronger than death.
“Life” is what Jesus is as God, in His divine nature. “Bread” is what Jesus is for us, in His human nature. So it’s through Jesus’ human nature that He reveals His love for us, and allows us to share in His love.
This Bread, in other words, is for you, but not about you. Through the Bread of Life you grow in the likeness of the divine person of Jesus Christ. Through the Bread of Life you participate in divine life.
Then Jesus reveals this awesome Mystery even further. In the very last phrase of today’s Gospel passage, Jesus stakes the claim that makes or breaks His disciples: not just that He is bread, and not just that as bread He gives life that’s stronger than death.
Jesus declares: “the bread that I will give is my Flesh for the life of the world.” Jesus is not just “bread”. He is not just “food for the hungry”. Jesus is not just bread that offers life. He is not just bread that strengthens you to survive death. Jesus is the divine Word made Flesh, and His Flesh is the bread that He “will give for the life of the world.”
“… whoever comes to Me will never hunger, and whoever believes in Me will never thirst.”
One benefit of attending weekday Mass is how the experience of Sunday Mass is more enriching. During Easter this is even more true. The Scripture readings of weekday Masses especially tend to dovetail with those of Sunday Masses.
Starting last Friday and continuing through this Saturday, the Gospel passage at weekday Mass is from John Chapter Six. This chapter culminates in Jesus’ teaching about His Real Presence in the Eucharist. In this coming Sunday’s Gospel passage, Jesus describes Himself as the Good Shepherd. Through these Scripture passages, we can deepen our faith in Christ by understanding more deeply who He is for us.
In today’s Gospel passage, Jesus first states, “I am the bread of life”, emphasizing His Eucharistic doctrine. But about two-thirds of the way through the passage, He focuses upon the sort of action a shepherd carries out. He states: “this is the will of the one who sent me, that I should not lose anything of what he gave me”.
As we read, and re-read John Chapter Six, we become aware of how Our Lord is weaving together several different truths about Himself. He does this in order to deepen our love for Him, and faith in Him. In these two truths—Jesus as the Bread of Life, and Jesus as the Shepherd who sacrifices Himself for us—we see why Holy Mother Church calls us to see Jesus as “our All”. The Church, in one of the prefaces at Mass for Easter, likewise chants the following to God the Father: “By the oblation of His Body, / [Jesus] brought the sacrifices of old to fulfillment / in the reality of the Cross / and, by commending Himself to You for our salvation, / showed Himself the Priest, the Altar, and the Lamb of sacrifice.”
Tuesday of the Third Week of Easter Acts 7:51—8:1 + John 6:30-35
“… my Father gives you the true bread from heaven.”
When the crowd asks Jesus, “What sign can you do, that we may see and believe in you?”, they’re asking a loaded question. To appreciate both the crowd’s question, and Jesus’ reply, we have to back up to the end of yesterday’s passage.
The crowd had asked Jesus, “What can we do to accomplish the works of God?” Jesus’ reply might have seemed to some in the crowd a non sequitur: “This is the work of God, that you believe in the one He sent.”
This statement of Our Lord brings the whole of John Chapter Six into focus. The focus is not the satisfaction of physical hunger. Nor is the focus the performance of works. The focus is “the one He sent”: the one whom God the Father sent to become Flesh and dwell among us. The focus is the divine Person of Jesus.
Jesus calls the crowd to turn themselves away from their prior concerns. Instead, He draws them to belief in Himself. They must believe, and they must believe in Him. “This is the work of God, that you believe in the one He sent.”
In response to Jesus’ call to believe in Him in a profoundly personal way, the crowds respond, “What sign can you do, that we may see and believe in you?” It’s likely that Jesus shook His head in disgust at this reply. He had called them to personal belief in Him, and they ask for signs. They want Jesus to prove Himself by performing signs. But Jesus wants them to believe in Him Himself, not in any signs that He might work, no matter how powerful.
This distinction between belief in the divine Person of Jesus on the one hand, and the performance of signs on the other, continues to play out throughout the rest of John 6, and throughout the rest of John’s Gospel account. So for ourselves today, in our own examinations of conscience, we might ask the Lord to help us be honest about how often and in how many ways we prefer signs from God to personal belief in Him.
Reflections on the Sacred Liturgy 