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For five Sundays the Gospel reading has been from the sixth chapter of St. John: “The Bread of Life Discourse.” It began with the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fish and continued with the teaching, “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life within you.” Today, the Gospel passage ends with the response, “This saying is too hard to endure.” Many of His disciples leave Him and return to their former way of life. Jesus never says, “I was only speaking figuratively! Please come back!” Do you believe that He is here?
I began this series of homilies with two reflections. First, every time you come here to your spiritual home please see a unity between the altar and the crucifix, which hangs above it. Every time you see the cross, hear how He says to you, “I love you this much.” Every time you see the altar know that He is here. He is saying to you, “I know everything about you. I love you this much that I want to give my life for you, that I may live in you.”
Second, “If we do not understand sin, we will not understand the statement of sacrificial love that is expressed at the altar and the cross.
For two Sundays I explained how the three ways we deal with sin is: first, to minimalize it! “Everybody does that.” The second way is to cover over it with pride. The third way is to bury it under fear. “If my parents knew this or that about me; if my siblings knew such and such; if my friends ever suspected that; they would reject me.” The fourth way is the only livable way to deal with sin. Take it to the cross; take it to confession. In this way, it cannot hide in the dark anymore, because you have brought it into the light.
Then for two Sundays I “flipped it around” and said, “If we do not understand what love is, we will not understand sin.” Have you come here in love? When you leave your job and come home; are you in a state of love? When you come home from school and return to your family; are you in a state of love? A young adult stopped me after Mass last Sunday and said, “I understood your message. Then when I left church I thought, ‘I can-not go into work in a state of love because I know which co-worker is going to stab me in the back; I know the issues I have with my boss. I cannot go home in a state of love because of this and that.” I was sweating like a pig.
For my teenagers, my single young adults, my widows and widowers, and separated and divorced. What is the answer? Mother Teresa wrote to a young priest the following to help him in his challenges. This is what you share in common with me. She said, “First, focus on your emptiness not on what you have to give. Second, do not focus on what you feel, but think about what He feels being in you. Third, think of the broader picture. Focus on Him and not yourself. How does He live in you?
For my married people, the second reading speaks of the Holy Communion in your relationships. It is about the relationship between a wife to a husband, a husband to his wife, children to their parents, and then parents to their children.
On the one hand, if you are an adult who has survived a verbally or emotionally abusive relationship between you and your parent; between you and a spouse: this scripture passage is not for you. Run, do not walk to get help. On the other hand, if this is not the case for you, then you have to pray for protection against the spirits of anger, fear, or recrimination that tears marriages apart.
During pre-marriage sessions I once heard a young woman say to her future husband, “You can be the head, but I will be the neck. What’s it like to move your head without consulting with your neck?”
Are we living in love? Can we rejoice in our emptiness? Only God can fill what is empty. How can God fill us if we are full of ourselves? Can we focus on what Jesus truly feels being one with us; rather than on what we feel? Can we focus on Jesus, and not on ourselves?