The promise of the Eucharist

Continuing with Fouard's Life of Christ:

II: The promise of the Eucharist

John vi.22-71

Collecting Manna. J-J Tissot.

The crowds they had left behind them on the other side of the lake, in the neighbourhood of Bethsaïda, had watched the ship of the Apostles making off from the shore, and knew that Jesus had not embarked with them.  Somehow in the night they had lost all trace of the Master, but at dawn seeing that no other ship had quitted its moorings they made sure of finding Him speedily.  So although morning they surged over feels and plain, but of course in vain; then they concluded that He had proceeded by land, intending to rejoin His companions by some unfrequented road.  In the meantime several other craft hailing from Tiberias, but now flying before the storm, had put into this harbour; and many of the Jews availed themselves of this opportunity to reach Capharnaum.

On their arrival they found the Lord seated in the synagogue, instructing the people.

"Master!" they exclaimed, "when did you come here?"

Jesus looking deep down into those hearts that yearned so after earthly goods, now plainly told them the nature of their longings.

"Of a truth, yea, of a truth," He said to them, "you are seeking Me because of the loaves with which you were fed.  Do not toil for the food which perishes, but for that which endures in the life of Eternity.  This the Son of Man will give you, for on Him the heavenly Father hath set His seal."

By these last words Jesus quickened and ennobled the hopes of the Jews, by lifting them from thoughts of earthly refreshment, setting before them that immaterial nourishment which is of the spirit.  Hence He declared that it was not His design to establish a temporal kingdom, but rather to reign in the souls of men; it was to this end that God had imprinted a divine character upon His Holy One, the Christ, confirming His Mission by miracles without number.  And therefore this food of which He spoke was a certain spiritual food, which He alone would impart. This the Jews comprehended, though they were too stubborn and settled in their own notions of their Law to believe that God Himself could confer upon it any more perfect dignity.

"What shall we do," they said in their amazement, "in order to labour for the works of God?"

"This is the work of God," replied Jesus, "to believe in Him Whom He had sent."

Nor does this faith, to which the master here reduces His precepts, imply merely a belief on our part in the words of the Christ; it means that we must likewise give ourselves to Him without a shadow of reserve. It is Faith, quickened by Charity, fastening mightily upon the object of this love and diffusing through all human-kind the gracious gifts of God.

It is evident that the Saviour repeated this explanation more than once, and that in even clearer and simpler terms than would appear from this short summary of Saint John; for we know that His listeners understood well enough that He demanded of them a devotion and self-sacrifice which was unlimited and well-nigh unparalleled; He would have them follow Him as blindly as of old Israel followed Moses, leaving Egypt and its pleasures behind them.

"Our fathers," they began to say, "ate Manna in the desert, as it is written: (He hath given them bread from Heaven for them to eat.) But what Miracle will you work, so that we may see and believe in you?  What will you do?"

Had not all the traditions asserted that the second Redeemer would renew the wondrous deeds of the first?  And besides, how could anybody compare those loaves of barley-bread multiplied so simply under their very eyes, with that nourishment which long ago fell about the plains of Sinaï?  If He would prove himself in deed and in truth the Messiah, it when needful that He too, — the Christ of the Lord, — should bring down from the skies that Manna which David had called "the Bread of Heaven and the Food of Angels."

These objections Jesus accepted very graciously; only He explained to His listeners that he was not Moses, but God Himself who had rained down Manna in the desert; telling them, too, how those perishable meats were called in a figure the bread of Heaven.  While yet again today God, by the hands of His Christ, tendered them the very Bread come down from Heaven; and so divinely did He speak of the celestial Food, and of the life which it would diffuse throughout the world that the Jews cried out in their delight, —

"Lord, give us this bread always!"

"It is I," continue Jesus; "I am the very Bread of Life.  He who comes to Me shall never hunger, and he who believes in Me shall never thirst."

Certainly this answer was not so mystical but that the Jews might have easily grasped its inner meaning; indeed they had often read in their sacred Books that "man lives not alone by bread, but by every word which proceedeth from the mouth of god;" often they had heard the voice of Wisdom calling to their souls in words like these: "Come, eat the bread which I will give you; drink the wine which I have prepared for you." Thus to eat and drink the Truth, to sate one's heart with the taste and fullness of holy words, and by study to assimilate and digest the teaching of the Master, this was a figure as familiar to their way of thinking as it is foreign to ours.

The First Holy Communion of the Apostles. J-J Tissot.

So they at once comprehended that by calling Himself the Bread of life Jesus offered them His heavenly Doctrine as the garner wherein is stored every good gift that they could desire; and this promise once more made their hearts beat high with brave hopes.  But what was still to follow did not accord with their preconceived ideas.  Proceeding at once to develop His thought, Jesus declared that hitherto they had only beheld Him with their eyes, without understanding Who He was.  Because He had descended from Heaven, He can have no other will except that of His Father, and therefore He receives only such as come to Him from God.  Now the will of the Father is that all those who believe in the Divinity of His Son should partake of that Bread of Life (which is the Christ Himself), and thereby have part in the life everlasting.

At this new revelation of His Godhead the synagogue broke out into murmurs of stern disapprobation; more than all else those words, "I am the living Bread which is descended from Heaven," aroused the deepest antagonism and discgust of which they were capable.

"Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph?" The townsfolk of Capharnaum exclaimed.  "Have we not known his father and his mother?  Then how does he dare to say that he has descended from Heaven?"

Jesus did not stop to answer these malcontents; as was His wont, He deemed it enough to reiterate what He had communicated to them already, only with a more luminous simplicity, leaving it for the indwelling Truth itself to quicken and enlighten their souls.  Again He told them that faith is a gift of grace; He repeated that no one can come to Him who is not prompted by the heavenly Father, "taught of God, using the language of the Prophets," the which means that they must be touched from on high, their souls drawn by his secret influence inherent in the truth of His Word.

Still more clearly did he disclose the mystery of His Incarnation, showing them that God is too High, too Holy an Object for our earth-bound senses to encompass through human wisdom; for truly "no one can see the Father save Him alone who live as in God;" yet this Divine Seer, this Holy Thing, Son of the Father, has become Man that He might unite Himself to mankind for love of humanity, His Divinity taking upon Itself a dwelling of mortal flesh in order to communicate His own life and more men.

This was the Master’s exposition of the Divine economy, whereby He sought to show us the way of Faith which leads us unto salvation.  And in order to engrave this lesson within the hearts of those who hearkened to Him, He condescended to put forth the same great thoughts over and over again, reproducing them under such manifold phrases that it would seem He did but hesitate in His speech, as though He was striving to utter the language of Paradise before this wondering throng of earth-bound mortals.  This is why the evangelical text contains so many repetitions, and hence arises the difficulty which we experience in tracing the connection between the various ideas.

Nevertheless the Master had one more Mystery to unveil on that same day.  When the Son of God was made Man the wonder was not wrought among us that He might dwell in a human body merely for the time of His earthly pilgrimage; rather it was His will to apply the fruits of His Incarnation unto all mankind, thus being made flesh for each one of us, by nourishing us with His Blessed Body.  It is, therefore, when we feast upon His Flesh that Jesus takes possession of these bodies of ours; it is by the mystic union of all that He is in His Humanity with all His Divinity that salvation is assured unto us of the faithful.  Jesus only asked these people of Capharnaum that they love Him enough to entrust themselves implicitly to His guidance, and then, through the thick clouds which must ever shroud this Divine Mystery, they should walk forward encompassed by the Presence of their Guide and Friend; and so, led onward by the Christ, they would surely find the life everlasting in Faith, — Faith which reveals the gracious fact of the Eucharist as being in a marvellous manner inherent in the Incarnation Itself.  "The Bread which I will give," He added, "is My flesh for the life of the world."

At this surprising announcement that they should eat the flesh of the Christ there was a louder murmur of dissent arising from all parts of the synagogue; on every hand the Jews began to dispute with each other, the majority arguing, "How can this man give us his flesh to eat?" Evidently they could only comprehend that they were bidden to take a human body and feast thereon, that they must shed human blood and drink thereof.

Yet, far from abating this interpretation by one whit, Jesus saw fit, on the contrary, to enforce it by a double oath:

"Amen, Amen, I say to you, If you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and do not drink His blood, you shall not have life in you.  Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has life everlasting, and I will raise him up on the last day."

He well knew what horror the Jews felt for any such idea of blood, and the strictly they were forbidden the use of any such food; and notwithstanding, he did not hesitate to assail and overturn every most cherished belief of their lives, if by so doing He might more surely establish the reality of His Body, which is eaten by the faithful, and His Blood which is their drink.

"My flesh is truly meat, my blood truly drink, and he who eats My flesh and drinks My blood dwells in Me and I in Him.  Whosoever eats Me shall live by Me."

And now, having so clearly set forth the meaning of the Eucharist, He spoke to them of its effects; for though an ardent faith could make eternal life certain for the soul of man, and for his body obtain a glorious resurrection, yet it is the Eucharist alone which unites Jesus with the Christian who receives Him; in one only Body and one only Soul commingles the lives of two under one form, and thereby in each one of us is consummated that Union of the Christ with Humanity, even as aforetime by the Incarnation "He dwelt amongst us."

The earnestness and consistency with which Jesus reaffirmed A Doctrine so shocking to the notions of His hearers resulted in open expressions of their impatience and dislike.  It was not long before the citizens of Capharnaum were joined by a the pilgrims and all the rest, while even the disciples themselves finally uttered strong protests. "This is a hard saying," they said; " who can hear it?"

And certainly, after the fashion in which they understood it, it would be an unbearable thought; for they imagined that they were bidden to tear the body of the Master limb from limb, and make a horrid feast of its members.

Jesus strove to drive away this unholy vision from their mind by adding that, though He was to give Himself to be their Bread of Life, yet would He nonetheless rise with Glory into Heaven, even in such wise has He had descended to our earth, clad in this His living tabernacle of flesh; He said, too, that "His flesh," broken and dispersed among us for our Food, "would have avail us nothing, if we do not partake at the same time of the Spirit" and the Godhead, which quickeneth the flesh and diffuses its life through our souls.  As to the manner and the mode which He would take in order to communicate this gift to us, being an Ordinance far beyond the ken of sensual man, He saw fit to await some future date for revealing it more fully.  So for the present, it was enough to prepare their minds by repeating that "His words were spirit and life," whereby He would teach them that His faithful followers must find the spirit of holiness and the life divine in the surpassing Mystery of the Communion, wherein His flesh is really eaten, though in a manner more spiritual than material.

These explanations did not dispel all disquiet you'd from the hearts of His disciples, and among those who rebelled against the this true Jesus must have marked one of the Twelve, Judas Iskarioth; for "from the beginning He knew those who did not believe in Him, and He knew him who was to betray Him." The sight of these obstinate mortals still muttering against Him, so easily shocked at His Word, and already prepared to declare their outspoken disbelief, was very grievous to the heart of Jesus.

"There are some among you who do not believe," He exclaimed, "and it was for this reason I said to you, And no one can come to Me, unless it be given Him by My Father."

And yet this last appeal to the noblest feelings was rejected; still they would not understand this urgent warning to ask their heavenly Father for the faith which comes from Him.  Humility and obedience for them were at an end.  "After this many of His disciples drew away from His company, and walked no more with Him."
However, the Apostles were still left Him.  Turning towards the Twelve He said,

"Will you too go away?"

Peter loved his Master too well to doubt His words, however incomprehensible they might seem; indignant at the very thought of deserting Him, he straight way replied for all:

"Lord, to whom should we go?  Thou hast the words of Eternal Life.  We believe, we know, that Thou art the Holy of God."

Dear and comfortable as this confession was to the Heart of Jesus, it could not quite console Him nor distract His thoughts from the traitor in their midst.

"Have I not chosen you Twelve?" He said, "and one of you is a devil."

"By this He meant Judas, son of Simon, the man from Kerioth, who was to deliver Him up, even while he was still one of the Twelve." It is evident from these words, as we have noted before, that Judas took some part in these murmurings of the citizens and pilgrims.  Long since the struggle between greedy avarice and his heavenly vocation had been going on within him, and hence every allusion to a spiritual Kingdom filled him with vexation and anger; for it all seemed to him more visionary and foolish every day.  The discourse just now delivered in the synagogue of Capharnaum completed the destruction of his faith.  Hereafter, though he remained in the intimate companionship of Jesus, he had already betrayed Him in his soul.  By this rebuke the Saviour graciously sought to stir the soul of the thief.  Finding He could only get silence in return, He wended His way sadly from out the synagogue.

Totus tuus ego sum 

Et omnia mea tua sunt;

Tecum semper tutus sum:
Ad Jesum per Mariam