Abbot Christopher Dillon: It is a safe enough observation, I think, to say that our number one consideration is life and the quality of our life. Well, we are celebrating today the feast of life as God’s most precious gift to us, God being absolute life and the source of all life. Experience tells us that essential to the maintenance of life, as we know it, is food; and the first reading recounts the Hebrews’ experience of receiving that food in the desert. Then, the words from the Gospel of John that we have heard just now have Jesus speaking of his body and blood as providing the essential food sustenance for life. And then, logically, St Paul’s words to the Corinthians speak of the bread and wine which form the matter of the eucharist which we are celebrating as a communion in the body and blood of Christ.
It is strange combination of simple images to convey the much more complex proposition which is Jesus’ teaching; for it is his words which are the bread of life, teaching us how to live as we should.
Behind it all is the enormous truth that God, the quintessence of life and source of all life, is self-giving love in action. This God, who gives himself to us in the person of Jesus Christ who is the very image of God, his and our Father, gives us further his life-giving, life-maintaining, presence in this ritual which we call the Mass.
Jesus, having spoken about all this to his followers, when he spoke of himself as “the living bread”, used the occasion of the Last Supper to make it all happen. As you remember, after the meal, he blessed and broke the bread and passed it around, saying, ‘Take this and eat it of it; this is my body, which is given for you”; and the same with the cup of wine, “Take this and drink of it , for this is the cup of my blood, the blood of the covenant which will be poured out for you.”
That this should have been Jesus’ parting gift to the disciples says much about its meaning for him and his intention for us. Two days after his first ritual sharing of his body and blood at the Last Supper, he repeated it with the two disciples in the inn at Emmaus, to demonstrate how the ritual made him present to them and so it is for us today, at every celebration of the Eucharist. Jesus wanted then and wants now not to leave us orphans but to nurture us by his presence; and it is by means of this particular sacramental ritual that he achieves this continuous miracle.
This remains Jesus’ ultimate gift to us, ultimate in every sense, in all its mysterious wonder, summing up all that has gone before, in his human life, his teaching, his suffering and his resurrection; all of it for us, as the pledge of his love and the promise of our future life with him, to mould us and to form us to be truly human, realising the divine image in which we were called into being.
Our task is to embrace all this in loving trust and to live our lives accordingly in self-giving love. In joyful love and gratitude, let us embrace this gift of his sacramental presence with ever deeper appreciation and live by it!