Taking The Bread Of Life Always In Faith

Twentieth Sunday in Course 2024

There are, we know intuitively, that there are two ways for a human being to go. The Scriptures refer to them as Wisdom and Foolishness. The writer of the book of Proverbs introduces our theme by picturing Wisdom as a person who builds a kind of Temple with seven pillars holding up the roof. That may refer to the first seven chapters of the Book of Proverbs, but it certainly lays the structure out as one that will take time and effort to comprehend.

Later on, “folly” is also pictured as building a structure, but it is a Temple of falsehood, where fools can come for pleasant times, but who leave with nothing but a foul taste in their mouths. It is a Temple of sin and stupidity.

St. Paul picks up on this theme in the letter to the church at Ephesus. He contrasts walking as a wise man with a fool, an “unwise” man. The wise person makes best use of the time left before judgement. One cannot just look at the calendar, or at the secular world, for hints on how to make use of time. After all, you know that your search engine will choose activities and purchases that are designed to steal your time and waste your money on glittery merchandise and activities, even pornography. That’s what makes the day evil for our modern society. No, there are, for the pious Christian, three supports for a happy life, and they are Torah, the Law, the writings of the prophets, and the teachers of wisdom, like the author of Proverbs. The many proverbs in the wisdom books are practical suggestions that the wise person memorizes and acts on to keep on the right path. At the end of that path is wisdom and joy, the perfection of human life.

Paul also contrasts the foolishness of debauchery with the wisdom of right living, picturing the fool getting drunk in some bar, singing raucous and suggestive verses, with the wise Christian, “addressing one another in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs, singing and making melody to the Lord with all your heart,” And he finishes off this advice with the admonition to always and for everything giving thanks to the Father through Christ, our Lord.

Now you can look more wisely at today’s Gospel passage, which is getting close to the end of the awesome chapter 6 of John’s Gospel. Remember that holy Wisdom, Sophia in Greek, set up a banquet with flesh and wine, basically what in Texas we’d call a fancy barbeque. And Wisdom sent out her helpers to summon wise people, and people looking for wisdom, to come and eat and drink. The true Wisdom, Jesus Christ, now equates the bread from heaven, the True Bread, with His very Flesh. The Jews listening to His discourse immediately react. They think Jesus is talking about cannibalism. It’s instructive that this kind of response is what catechists often get when second-grade children first hear this chapter. “Yew,” they exclaim. “We have to eat human flesh?”

Of course, that’s a natural reaction–from the eight-year old kid! But Jesus is telling us that what appears to be bread is actually the Bread of Life. He is identifying what we take in communion with his very self. And taking this in faith–always in faith–is our passage fare into the kingdom of God.

This is very difficult to perceive, because we only see the superficial–what I call the physical and chemical reality. If there is a change after the Word of God is spoken over the bread and wine, it is not something we can see, hear, taste or smell. The world sees what we consume as a wafer of bread and a taste of wine. But our senses, as St. Thomas taught, deceive us. Only faith enables us to recognize the reality. And there is another new reality not just in the Host and wine. Through faith and sacrament, if we internalize what we have done and say, like Mary, “be it done to me as you have spoken,” there is also incremental change in me–in all of us. We become more like the One we consume in faith, our Lord and Savior.