18th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
First Reading: Ex 16:2-4, 12-15, 31a
Second Reading: Eph 4:17, 20-24
Gospel Reading: Jn 6:24-35

This Sunday’s Readings parallel last Sunday’s. There is the same emphasis on food and there is the same duality between the Old and the New Testaments. The climax comes in the Gospel Reading, when Christ said, “I am the bread of life.”

For the next three Sundays, the Gospel Readings continue Christ’s discourse on the Holy Eucharist. Later in this discourse, he said plainly: “I myself am the living bread come down from heaven. If anyone eats this bread he shall live forever; the bread I will give is my flesh, for the life of the world.”

“Let me solemnly assure you,” he said: “if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. He who feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has life eternal and I will raise him up on the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood real drink.”

At the Last Supper, Christ showed how he would do this: he took bread, blessed it, broke it, and gave it to his disciples. “Take this and eat it,” he said; “this is my body.” Then he took a cup, gave thanks, and gave it to them. “All of you must drink from it,” he said, “for this is my blood, the blood of the covenant, to be poured out on behalf of many for the forgiveness of sins.”

By this, the Church has always understood that “in the most blessed sacrament of the Eucharist, the body and blood, together with the soul and divinity, of our Lord Jesus Christ, and, therefore, the whole Christ, is truly, really, and substantially contained,” says the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

She calls this presence “real” because “it is presence in the fullest sense; that is to say, it is a substantial presence by which Christ, God and man, makes himself wholly and entirely present.” It “begins at the moment of the consecration and endures as long as the Eucharistic species subsist.”

Unfortunately, a great many Catholics do not really believe this, according to surveys. Admittedly, the mind boggles at this truth. Perhaps we have taken it for granted for too long. This Sunday, let us renew our faith in it.

“In the liturgy of the Mass we express our faith in the real presence of Christ under the species of bread and wine by, among other things, genuflecting or bowing deeply as a sign of adoration of the Lord,” the Catechism says. 

“The Catholic Church has always offered and still offers to the sacrament of the Eucharist the cult of adoration, not only during Mass, but also outside of it, reserving the consecrated hosts with the utmost care, exposing them to the solemn veneration of the faithful, and carrying them in procession.”

“Jesus awaits us in this sacrament of love,” Pope St. John Paul II said. “Let us not refuse the time to go to meet Him in adoration, in contemplation full of faith, and open to making amends for the serious offences and crimes of the world. Let our adoration never cease.”

Many of our churches are open throughout the day. Many have periods of adoration when the Blessed Sacrament is exposed. Some have perpetual adoration.

The Eucharist is the sign of a new order of things, in which human beings can live not just with their human life, but also with the life of God. It is the food which maintains this supernatural life. Unless we eat it, we shall not have this new life in us.

It is the Eucharist which gives us the strength, as St. Paul says, to put away our old self, corrupt and deluded by lusts, to be renewed in the spirit of our minds, and to clothe ourselves with the new self, created according to the likeness of God in true righteousness and holiness.

Father Hawkswell's course, “The Catholic Faith in Plain English,” has now ended, but all the materials (video and print) will remain available online free of charge at beholdvancouver.org/catholic-faith-course until the end of August.