Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time (August 29th, 2021)

The Church’s first scripture is an excerpt from the Old Testament Book of Deuteronomy.

The Book of Deuteronomy is a presentation of the laws of the Israelites.  Think of this as meaning the principles which are meant to shape behaviors, unite the people and express their unique way of life.  Israelite laws are not merely prohibitions and penalties but a description of how the Israelites are supposed to live in relation to God and to one another.

The Sacred Scriptures present Israelite laws as originating in the will of God, who communicates his will through the prophet Moses to the Israelites.  Israelite law covers all facets of life- from practical things such as what to eat or not eat, how to deal with infection and disease, how to manage personal possessions and wealth, but also, and most importantly for Israelite law, how God is to be properly worshipped.

Like I said, the laws of the Israelites are best understood as a description of a unique way of life.  Through this way of life, which meant adhering to and practicing the Law, the Israelites were showing the world the kind of people they were and the kind of God that they believed in and worshipped.  The law presented their religion, their faith, their culture, as being both personal and public- not merely assent to doctrines as abstractions of the mind or feelings in the heart, but embodied in actions, in specific things that one did, things that one accomplished in the real events and circumstances of life.

The entirety of Israelite law is given succinct expression in the Ten Commandments. These commandments are the non-negotiable necessities of the law of the Israelites and provide a description of the foundational principles for the Israelite’s unique way of life.  Human flourishing is inextricably bound to the Ten Commandments.  When these laws are broken, when these principles are negated, the result is catastrophic, particularly in terms of social relationships.  If you want to destroy a society, oppose the practice of the Ten Commandments.

Moses indicates in today’s scripture from the Book of Deuteronomy, that people will the see the Israelite’s unique way of life as they practice and live in accord with God’s commandments.  And what they will see in this is a society that is wise, dignified, and just.  Seeing this wisdom, dignity and justice, will make the Israelite way of life attractive to others and draw them into a relationship with the one, true God- which is, bottom line, the purpose of God’s commandments.

The Church is a new kind of Israel.  The story of the Israelites continues in the Church and so we are, like the Israelites have a unique way of life that is expressed in our acceptance of and adherence to God’s commandments.  As Christians we should embody the Ten Commandments and present them, not as a list that is merely imposed, but as the way in which we live.  Remember, the Ten Commandments are foundational, basic to our way of life- if we won’t practice these commandments, we are rejecting our unique way of life and failing to be the kind of people the Lord God wants us to be.

Despite the protests of the worldly and the wicked, the Commandments of the Lord are good and they are a gift. They do not inhibit human flourishing, but instead, makes such flourishing possible. And as I said before, they are meant to be practiced, not merely recognized as important ideals.  People should see the ten commandments in our flesh and blood, in our daily lives and this expression is the most important way to make the commandments known to others.

In our second scripture for today, an excerpt from the New Testament Letter of James, the apostle makes precisely this point- God’s law, his commandments are his word of truth in us- in other words the commandments express who we are as Christians.  And as Christians, the commandments of God, expressed so succinctly in the Ten Commandments, have as their ultimate purpose to make us more charitable, they are meant to teach us how to love.

For James, the perfection of the law is accomplished through charity, through love and the evidence that this is happening is when the most vulnerable among us are cared for- this is what James’ means when he identifies pure religion (which means following God’s commandments) as being care for the “orphan and widow in their affliction”.

When he references in this regard, that the perfection of religion is also to be “unstained by the world” and connects this to charity for the vulnerable, he is saying that the worldly would have us disconnect charity from our way of life which finds its fulfillment in love (in charity).  The worldly want a religion that makes no moral demands on us and is simply expressions of ideas, feelings, ethnicity or culture. You don’t have to love God or neighbor in worldly religion.  It’s merely an instrument, a thing to be leveraged and used.

 This is a religion without love, without charity, and it is a false religion.

Finally, in his Gospel, the Lord Jesus decries the hypocrisy of the Pharisees.  Hypocrisy means that you are appearing to be someone you are not.  You are living a double life in which the exterior of your life is not correspondent to the interior of your life.  In respect to the Lord Jesus’ harsh words about the Pharisees in the Gospel today, it is about appearing to be religious, pious, or virtuous when in fact you are not.

Our faith, our relationship with God is not simply meant to be a matter of appearances.  When faith is merely a matter of appearances, one is not living in the truth and when this happens, the dissonance between the exterior and interior reality of a person’s life leads to spiritual catastrophes- the worst of which can be a self-righteousness that expresses itself in bullying and cruelty.  The hypocrite will often use the appearance of piety and virtue as a means a status through which they can manipulate or take advantage of others. 

The lesson here is for us Christians, for we should take the Lord Jesus’ warnings about the hypocrisy of the Pharisees as a warning for us Christians.  The Pharisees are not simply an Israelite religious movement from long ago, they represent a dangerous tendency in our own spiritual lives, for all of us, let’s be honest, are hypocrites in some way.  There is dissonance in the life of every Christian between the exterior and the interior, between appearance and reality.  In each of us is a “no” to Christ that we so often keep hidden. We so easily pay lip service to what Christ wants us to do rather than doing it.  How easy it is to make excuses, defer responsibility, and to point out the failings of others, rather than live the Gospel we profess to be true.

Christians are not an elite group of the perfect, but are we all sinners who have found in the Lord Jesus a savior and a friend, and he is our savior and our friend, not because we are somehow better or of higher status than anyone else, but because Christ is merciful to us, and knowing the gift of his mercy, we want others to have that gift for themselves. 

To be a Christian is to be a sinner who has known and accepted the mercy of God in Christ and is willing to become for others the mercy we have ourselves undeservedly received.

Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time (August 22nd, 2021)

The Church’s first scripture for today is an excerpt from the Old Testament Book of Joshua.

The Book of Joshua continues the story of the Israelites after their deliverance from slavery to the gods of Egypt and the death of Moses, who was chosen by God to manifest his power in signs and wonders and return the Israelites to their ancestral lands.

The Book of Joshua gives an account of this return and notes that it was not easy.  In fact, the return of the Israelites was wrought with peril and filled with conflict, violence, and war. 

Today we hear about how Joshua, who succeeds Moses as the leader of the Israelites gathers the tribes of the Israelites and asks them whether or not they are willing to serve the true God or false gods.  They have to make a decision. If they decide to serve the true God, they will give themselves over to his commandments and become the people that the true God wants them to be.  If they choose the false gods, they will become like those gods and they will lose the purpose and meaning of their lives.

What Joshua is asking the Israelites for is a profession of faith.  What do they truly believe?  What is of highest priority and importance in their lives?  What makes them who they are and gives meaning and purpose to their lives?  What has God revealed to them about who they are and what they should do?  These are all the things a profession of faith express.  A profession of faith is the fundamental way Christians remind themselves repeatedly who God is and what he wants.  A profession of faith expresses what we truly believe.

We Christians stand at attention during our sacred worship and profess our faith.  We publicly recite a long statement that is meant to call to mind the most cherished important beliefs we have as Christians and this statement is meant to bind us together as one people. 

This statement (profession of faith) is not a matter of our opinions or of customs, but it is testimony to what our relationship to God and to one another is all about.  The profession of faith tells us who we are and once we know who we are then we know what to do.

Our profession of faith is a statement, but it is also a kind of story as it relates to us that our identity and mission comes to us from the revelation of God in Christ.  And this story of God in Christ, which is a true story, reveals to us that our faith is in God who seeks to forgive and reconcile sinners who have become estranged from him and for those who receive this forgiveness and reconciliation, we then dedicate our lives to being ourselves agents of God’s forgiveness and reconciliation to the world.

This is what the Church is meant to be. The Church is not merely a non-profit NGO providing social services; or a faith-based discussion club; or a corporate international conglomerate of faith-based initiatives; or peculiar faith themed building and grounds project.   The Church is the mercy of God revealed and given to sinners.  Through the Church sinners are meant to be reconciled to God and to communities.  The Church is sinners who having been forgiven and reconciled to God, and, seek to give to others what they have themselves received from God.

This is who we are and who we are tells us what God wants us to do.

 It’s a difficult and risky mission.  We know this because of what our profession of faith tells us about God in Christ- who for the sake of forgiving and reconciling sinners, is “crucified, dead and buried” and “descends in hell”.

Knowing who God is, we know who we are.  Knowing who we are, we know what we must do.

The Church’s second reading is an excerpt from St. Paul’s magnificent letter to the Ephesians.

In this section, the Apostle Paul gives testimony to what Christians believe about marriage, which was very different from what the culture of his time believed. 

The Apostle Paul likens Christian marriage to the relationship of Christ to his Church, which is a relationship of mutual love expressed by self-sacrifice.  The meaning of marriage is not made, for Christians, by the individuals who seek it or by the state or by the culture, but by God and the nature of the marital relationship, for Christians, is defined by him and expressed in who Christ is for the Church and who the Church is for Christ.

And who is Christ for the Church?  And who is the Church for Christ? The answer: Mutual love expressed by self-sacrifice.

Finally, in his Holy Gospel, Christ the Lord has confronts resistance among his own followers- even his own disciples find his teaching about the Holy Eucharist to be troubling and they are concerned that because it is so audacious that many people will reject it. 

The resistance of Christ’s disciples is found in all Christians in all ages as concerns about practical needs or worldly projects are so often thought to be in our own minds linked to pleasing people or to being successful or accommodating the powerful in politics, culture or economics or keeping conflict at bay. 

Why not just change something, or at least, soften what seems to appear extreme the Church teaches so that more people would remain associated with the Church or would make things easier for people to join us?

Christ gives us an answer.  Because what he gives us, what he teaches us, shocking as it is, has the capacity to redeem and to save, to reconcile and to forgive.

Christian faith is full of hard teachings and our way of life is one of great risks.  Christ who gives us everything of who he is, invites us to join us in his mission and in doing so to become for others who he is for us- the one who is willing to love those whom the world so often deems unlovable and to seek to save those whom the world has deemed unsavable.  There is no love without sacrifice and the greater the love, the greater the sacrifice.  Such is the love that forgives and reconciles.

So while we might be tempted to accommodate what Christ asks of us to make the Church more popular or to dull the razor’s edge of the Gospel so that it no longer cuts into our consciences, or to follow the crowds into a retreat into safe spaces, we must know that to give in to that temptation is to take leave of the only One who truly has the words of eternal life.

Front of the Basilica of Saint Paul Outside the Walls – Roma – Italy

Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary (August 15th, 2021)

Today the Church celebrates one of the great truths of our Catholic Faith- the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

What is the Assumption?

The Church teaches us that at the end of the course of her earthly life, Christ’s Mother, the Blessed Virgin Mary, was taken (assumed) body and soul into heaven. This is a truth of the Catholic Faith and it expresses our faith in hope in Christ’s Resurrection- what happened to the Blessed Virgin Mary is that she experienced for herself the fullness of all the gifts Christ promises us through his resurrection from the dead.  Death is not our end, but a route of access to a life that exceeds our worldly expectations.  Christ desires that that we experience with him the fullness of life- body and soul.  The strange revelation of the Assumption anticipates the fulfillment of Christ’s promises to all those who are faithful to him.

The Assumption is an ancient belief, celebrated in the prayer and worship of the Church for centuries.  It was defined as an article of the Church’s Faith in 1950 by Pope Pius XII.  This means that the pope formally clarified what the Church teaches about this mysterious truth of our Catholic Faith.

The Church’s scriptures for today are all intended to help us to appreciate the great mystery of the Assumption.

We first heard a fantastic and frightening vision from the Book of Revelation- the last book of the Bible.

The Book of Revelation describes in mystical terms the situation of the Church in every age of her life- a Church that is so often immersed in a world that opposes Christ and will not accept him.  Unable to harm Christ, those who oppose him strike out against the Church and the result is great suffering.  However, it is through this suffering that the Church is perfected and redeemed and Christ remains triumphant. 

The vision we heard of today begins with an extraordinary glimpse into the temple of God in which the innermost and hidden sanctuary called the Holy of Holies is opened for all to see.  This vision is meant to be interpreted mystically as referring to the Blessed Virgin Mary, who as the mother of God, contained within herself Christ the Lord.  She is God’s living temple.  She is the holy ark of covenant, in which was contained that which was most sacred and upon which the presence of the living God dwelled.

This image of Christ’s Mother as temple and ark of the covenant mystically  represents her identity and mission.  It is because of who Christ’s Mother is that the Church teaches the truth of her Assumption.

Then there is the vision of a great sign “in the heavens” of a woman “clothed with the sun” who is threatened by a terrifying monster capable of horrific destruction.  The woman is pregnant and gives birth to a holy child who is destined to rule over all the nations.

What does this mean?

The vision is expressing the truth of the Blessed Virgin Mary in terms of her cosmic and mystical significance.  On the level of worldly appearances, Christ’s Mother seemed merely an ordinary woman of limited means who lived in an insignificant place.  But this is only how she appeared to be, in actual fact she was much greater than anyone realized- she is the one through whom God acted to accomplish his great purpose of uniting humanity and divinity, God and man.  She is the one God chose to accomplish his will of inviting all people into a relationship with himself.

Therefore, the Blessed Virgin Mary, “the woman clothed with the sun” is the enemy of all those powers- sin, death, the devil (represented by the dragon).  But these powers cannot defeat God and cannot overcome her. 

This is expressed in the great truth of the Assumption.  In the conflict between all that is opposed to God and the power of God to redeem and save his people and his creation in Christ- it is God in Christ who is victorious.

The Church’s second reading for today is from the first letter of St. Paul to the Corinthians and in this excerpt the Apostle Paul gives testimony to the Resurrection of the Lord Jesus- which is the ground and source of all Christian faith and hope.

The Resurrection of the Lord Jesus is not merely a symbol or metaphor but a real event that happened in this world to the real, physical body of the Lord Jesus.  Christ is God. And God in Christ who himself suffered death is more powerful than death.  This is revealed in the most dramatic way in the reality of the Resurrection.

And the reality of the Resurrection is not just a revelation of what God in Christ can do for himself, but what he intends to do for all of us.  This life is not all that there is but God opens up to us a life that is much greater and important.  The Resurrection is the great sign of God’s promise that at the end of the course of our own earthly lives, he offers to us, through Christ, a destiny greater than that of a grave!

This promise has been manifested and fulfilled for Christ’s Holy Mother, she is the great sign of the promise of his Resurrection, a promise he has made for all of us.

Finally, in Christ’s Gospel we hear the account of Christ’s Mother going out to visit her cousin Elizabeth.  The Blessed Virgin Mary is pregnant with Christ the Lord and therefore, what she brings to her cousin Elizabeth is not just the pleasure of her company, but the living presence of God!

At this occasion the Blessed Virgin Mary cries out in praise of the mighty deeds of God in a song known as her Magnificat. 

The song of Christ’s Holy Mother extolls the power of God to overturn worldly expectations and surprise us.  God has chosen her to be the Mother of Christ, a person that the worldly might look at and think was nothing but a nobody.  And yet she is the one who is “full of grace”.

Christ’s Mother has an identity and mission that is exclusive and unique.  No one else of the Mother of the Lord.  No one else has the kind of relationship she has with Christ.  And yet she does not, through her relationship with God in Christ, instrumentalize or use her relationship for selfish or ego-driven purposes.  In response to what she has been given, she accepts as her mission to love and to serve.  She loves and serves all that Christ loves and serves.  This is what holiness is and this is what holiness looks like.

This love and service finds is fullest expression in the Assumption, for this gift enables her love and service to transcend the limits of this world.  Christ’s mother is the mother of all, a new Eve for a new creation, and the Assumption displays this truth to the Church and to the world.

She loves and serves us even now in heaven, allowing us to come to her as children come to their mother in need, offering to us her consolation, understanding, prayers and protection.  She sets herself against all that is within us that opposes and resists Christ and directs our attention to Christ so that we can learn to live as the friends of the Lord Jesus and so that do not lose our way.

The Blessed Virgin Mary is not a goddess or a symbol, she is a real person who lived in this world and knows what it means to be human.  As such, we know she has compassion for us and wants always to help.  In this she models for us how we Christians should live, loving and serving what Christ loves and serves and offering ourselves to the service of God and neighbor even if it means sacrifices on our part.

In a world that is often so harsh, lonely and unforgiving, Christ’s Mother is the Mother of Mercy, the one to whom we Christians can turn to both now and at the hour of our death.

It is in this mercy, that the deep mystery and mysticism of the Assumption is revealed. 

Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (August 8th, 2021)

The Church’s first scripture is taken from the First Book of Kings.

The First (and Second) Book of Kings is a chronicle of the rise, and then decline and fall of the Kingdom of David.  David is presented by the scriptures as the most important of all the Israelite kings and he establishes a dynasty that lasts for generations, coming to an end in 587 BC with the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonian empire.

The first (and second) book of Kings is unlike many of the other ancient chronicles of kings inasmuch as it is brutally honest about the failures, foibles, foolishness and faithlessness of the kings of the Israelites. History is presented in its reality and it is not whitewashed.  We come to know the kings and queens of the Israelites as flawed and prone to bad decisions.  They are regularly called out and even excoriated by the prophets.

One of the greatest of these prophets was Elijah who was not just a seer, but a worker of wonders.  One of the kings of the Israelites, Ahab, and his pagan queen, Jezebel, were the focus of Elijah’s wrath and this led to hard times for the prophet.

Today’s scripture presents Elijah on the run from Ahab and Jezebel and taking refuge in the wilderness.  There he laments his predicament and comes close to despair.  God hears the lamentations of Elijah in the wilderness and sends comfort and aid to him in the form of an angel, who provides Elijah with food and drink.  Strengthened by this divine intervention, Elijah returns to his mission.

What does this mean?

The Church presents this scripture to us today as a foreshadowing of our relationship God in Christ as it is expressed in his gift of the Eucharist.

Let’s face it folks- our lives can be at times very hard.  We might not have to face the kind of distress that Elijah did, but we all have known or will know times of desolation and even the experience of despair.  The world is fallen and we are finite creatures and as such suffering is an inescapable part of who we are.  The wilderness of Elijah is a symbol of this reality.

And, yes, like Elijah, we cry out to the Lord for comfort and aid, hoping that the Lord will listen and attend to our prayers.

As Christians, we believe the Lord God sends to us his comfort and aid in the Eucharist, in the Blessed Sacrament.  This is “heavenly food” (the Eucharist has been called from time immemorial “the bread of angels”). It is meant to sustain us, to strengthen us for our mission.

Like the food given to Elijah, the Eucharist may seem to us on the level of worldly appearances to be a small thing, but like Christ in his Incarnation, who in worldly appearance, made himself seemingly insignificant, the reality of the Eucharist exceeds its appearance.  The Eucharist is the divine life of Christ given to us to console us and sustain us in a suffering world.

A people who receive the divine life of Christ should be different in attitude and actions as a result of what they receive.

This is the message the Apostle Paul has for us in his Letter to the Ephesians.

St. Paul lists for us those qualities that should be noted as contrary to the Christian way of life- bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, malice. 

He proposes contrary values to this list- kindness, compassion, and forgiveness.

Christians espouse a unique way of life, a way of life that seek to love what Christ loves and serve what Christ serves. 

This way of life cannot be accomplished unless we come to know and accept that we must cultivate and habituate ourselves to specific practices of virtue- one becomes kind, compassionate and forgiving, not in abstraction, as if simply acknowledging those virtues are important and true.  Instead, we become kind, compassionate and forgiving through our practice of these virtues- by actually “doing” them.

The most convincing and impressive witness Christians have to demonstrate their unique way of life is not simply to assert our virtues and values as being important, but to show forth their importance by practicing doing what Christ asks us to do- to love what he loves and to serve what he serves.

Finally, Christ speaks to us in his Gospel. 

One of the great keys to unlocking the meaning of the Scriptures is to understand that when listening to or reading the text, we should see ourselves in the position of Christ’s interlocutors. 

In today’s Gospel, we are the crowd (the Jews) who find Christ’s testimony about himself as being for us the Bread of Life to be hard to take. 

And in response to our opposition, Christ remains insistent that who he is and what he offers is of eternal, or everlasting importance.

He gives himself to us as food and drink, and what he gives us is his own divine life.

This is what the Eucharist is.  This is what we receive. 

The claims that the Church makes in regards to the Blessed Sacrament are not the result of theological musing or philosophical abstraction.  The claims that the Church makes in regards to the Blessed Sacrament is the claim of Christ himself- he is the bread of life and the bread that he gives is his flesh for the life of the world.

The Church does not waver from the extremity of the Eucharist.  If the Church did, she would be content to call the Eucharist a mere symbol, but this is not what she teaches because it is not a symbol that Christ is speaking about.

Christ tells us that the Eucharist is his very self.  He gives to us the Bread of Life, which is who he is.

Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (August 1st, 2021)

The Church’s first scripture is an excerpt from the Old Testament Book of Exodus.

The Book of Exodus describes the events that accompanied the liberation of the Israelites from the power of the false gods of the Egyptians.  Languishing as slaves to these gods, the Israelites cried out to the one, true God to be rescued and he answered their pleading.  Through signs and wonders, the power of the one, true God defeated the false gods of the Egyptians and the Israelites were free to return their ancestral lands that they had left many generations ago.

The signs and wonders wrought by the one, true God described in the Book of Exodus are as terrifying as they are awe-inspiring.  One would think that those who experienced them would have an indomitable faith and a resolute conviction to serve the Lord God without complaint or hesitation- but this was not the case.

Instead, the Israelites were beset by a resistance to trust the Lord God and to serve him.  The real and imagined difficulties of life seem to be the source of the Israelites resistance to God, these things and also a kind of nostalgia that construes the past into something it was not- even to the point of thinking that the slavery to false gods they experienced was better than the liberation and freedom that the Lord God had given to them.

And so, the Israelites grumbled and complained and threatened rebellion- throwing the gift that the Lord God had given to them back into his face.

Today’s testimony from the Book of Exodus tells us that the dissatisfaction of the Israelites about the quality and quantity of their food is met by the Lord God’s response- which is not a response of chastisement or wrath, but to send them “bread from heaven”.  The Lord God who gave the Israelites defeated oppressive false gods and gave them their freedom will also feed his people with food of heavenly origin.

(Some writers and scholars speculate endlessly about what this food literally was and offer all kinds of theories, but losing our focus in such speculation usually means losing the meaning of the story).

A spiritually fruitful way of understanding this passage from the Book of Exodus is understand that it is not just a story about an event from long ago, but an event that is happening now.  Inasmuch as the story of the Israelites is now the story of the Church the meaning is discerned in what this scripture is teaching us about ourselves, our own ingratitude and rebellion, and our response to the gifts that God gives to us- particularly the gift of “heavenly bread” or “bread from heaven” which is the Church’s Eucharist. 

Seeing ourselves in this scripture is an examination of our own conscience in terms of what our own relationship with God in Christ and our resistance to him.  It further compels us to acknowledge that we, like the Israelites, too often bring ourselves to the Eucharist with an attitude, which in the words of the scripture from today, responds to a heavenly gift, by saying “what is this? For they did not know what it was”.

Or knowing what the heavenly bread is, we do not allow ourselves to appreciate the gift we have been given.

Today’s second scripture is also a provocation to examine our conscience.  In this brief passage from St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians the great Apostle insists that we live as the Christians that we are.  This means that accepting that our way of life is different there are beliefs and practices that are essential to a Christian’s way of life that cannot be easily assimilated or accommodated to other forms of life. 

The challenge here is that we should not “spiritualize” the Christian way of life and think that it is merely a matter of interiority, ideas or emotions.  Instead, believing and living as a Christian has real world implications and is not merely a private matter, but a matter of public significance.  Professing the Christian way of life within one’s heart or within the confines of Church buildings while at the same time allowing the faith you profess to little to no impact about the reality of your life means that you are living in a contradiction, a kind of double life. 

St. Paul insists that this contradiction, this “double life” is a non-starter.  He doesn’t use the word “hypocrisy” in today’s passage, but this is precisely what his teaching for today is about.

The Lord Jesus speaks to us today in his Holy Gospel.

Like we did with the Old Testament text from the Book of Exodus, we should accept the Lord Jesus’ words as being directed directly and explicitly to us, and not try to defer their impact by pretending they are meant for a people from long ago.

The Lord Jesus is speaking addressing our tendency to be fascinated with him because we want something from him, something of worldly importance.  The people have seen the signs and wonders he performs and having experienced such power many want the Lord Jesus to act like their personal genie and give them what they want.

The Lord Jesus recoils from this attitude and insists that while we seem to have great certitude about what we want, we truly do not know what we need.

He means to give us something greater than our limited and limiting expectations.

This gift is himself- his divine life, the only reality that endures once everything that we want in this world has passed away into dust. 

The divine life of Christ is given to us in the Blessed Sacrament. This is what the Eucharist really and truly is.  It is a gift that exceeds even the “heavenly bread” that the Lord gave to the Israelites in the wilderness and it is also a greater miracle than the food the Lord multiplied and gave to the crowds to satisfy their hunger.    

Like the Israelites in the Book of Exodus, or the crowd today in the Gospel, we may also lack a true appreciation for the gift that God in Christ imparts to us in the Eucharist.  We diminish its importance by prioritizing worldly expectations and desires over against the Mass, or we lack appreciation for what the Blessed Sacrament really and truly is- making it less than what it really and truly is so that the demand on us is diminished. 

And so, we call the Eucharist a symbol, reduce the Mass to an experience of ethnicity or self-expression, and we forget (perhaps intentionally) that what is given to us in the Eucharist is not just bread, but is really and truly God.