21st Sunday Yr B (Gospel: John 6:60-69) What about you, will you go away too?

A few years ago I spent two days in a parish in Los Angeles.  The parish priest was an Irish man and he was explaining how things work over there.  He said that for years there was a man in the parish who used to lead the folk group.  He played the guitar.  Then one day he decided to start his own church.  So he rented a building down the street and started his own church, just like that.  That’s how it works in LA.  I doubt if it would happen so easily here.

What if you could change whatever parts of the faith you wanted to?  You could have women priests, married priests, divorce.  You could change some of the more difficult teachings like having to love your enemies; seems a bit extreme after all.  And you could tailor it just to suit your own needs. You could believe what you wanted to believe.  What would you end up with? A religion of nice ideas, of wishful thinking.  It would mean nothing.  It might make you feel better, but it would be empty.  Why? because it would be man made, not God made.

The word of God and the teaching of God can be difficult, but at least they are the teachings of God.  It’s not just something we made up.  We are free to either take it or leave it, to accept it and struggle with it, or to walk away from it.

Look at what happened in this Gospel passage.  Jesus was just after teaching about the Eucharist.  He had said, ‘I am the bread of life’ and ‘unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood you will not have life in you’.  And the people said, ‘this is ridiculous, who could accept it’ and they walked away.  But Jesus’ response is even more interesting.  He didn’t go after them and say, ‘let me explain’.  He said to the disciples, ‘are you going to go away too’?  In other words he said, ‘this is the teaching, take it or leave it.’  And it says that many people stopped following him then.  They couldn’t accept what he said, so they left.  But he didn’t change anything he had said.  How could he, if it’s the truth?  And this applies to all of the teachings of Christ, handed down to us.  They don’t change.  They can not change.  But we are free to accept them or not.

Jesus says to us, ‘if you love me you will keep my commandments.’  Above all this means putting putting God above everything else in your life; above your wife or husband, above your children, above your work.  God must be at the center.  And God assures us, if we put him first, everything else will follow.

If it were impossible for us to follow God’s teachings God wouldn’t have given them to us.  So it must be possible to follow them.  Trying to do it on your own seems impossible and it probably is.  But God doesn’t ask us to do it on our own.  He asks us to continually turn to him and receive his help, which he gives us through prayer, through Holy Communion, Confession and all the sacraments.  God knows exactly what we’re able for and He gives us all the help we need, if we ask for it.

At the best of times it can be difficult to live our faith.  But the invitation is to keeping coming with an open heart to listen to what God might be saying to us?  Have we already decided we know what God has to say? Could God say something new to us that we haven’t heard before? It is an ongoing struggle for us, but we believe a very worthwhile one.

God also says to us, ‘what about you, will you go away too?’  And we can go away, or we can say, ‘Lord where else will we go, you have the message of eternal life and we believe, we know you are the holy one of God.’

20th Sunday Yr B (Gospel: John 6:51-58) The Eucharist is the source of our life

During the time our economy was doing better there were more jobs around and naturally everyone was happy about that.  Yet how is it that despite those better times economically people didn’t seem to be much happier?  There seemed to be much more pressure on people to ‘succeed’, people had less and less time for the ordinary things.  Everyone seemed to be mad busy trying to get money.  The rate of suicide increased and so did the rate of crime.  What was wrong?  We thought we finally had it all together.

We are experts at looking after the body, but most people are extremely ignorant when it comes to looking after the spirit, or soul and we are body and soul.  As a result, no amount of money or work, or the right house or car, will bring us happiness, because there is an emptiness inside us that material things cannot fill and will never fill.  This is the spiritual side of ourselves which can only be fulfilled by what is spiritual.  Sometimes it takes a death, or serious illness, to make us wake up to this.  We will only be fulfilled in God because God has created us this way.

In this Gospel Jesus is talking about just this.  He says, ‘If you do not eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you will not have life in you.’  ‘Whoever eats me, will draw life from me.’  Jesus himself is telling us that this is where we will find fulfillment, in him whom we receive in the Eucharist, in Holy Communion.  This is why Jesus is constantly inviting us to spend time with him and to receive him often.  But we object, we don’t have time…  Let me tell you a short story.

When the Missionaries of Charity, founded by Mother Teresa, had just begun, there were only a few of them working, but there was a huge amount of work to be done and they were really finding it hard to manage.  So they prayed to God and asked him to show them what they should do.  They felt that the Lord was telling them to spend an extra hour a day in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament; that is an extra hour before the Blessed Sacrament and an hour less of work.  But they thought to themselves, ‘we already don’t have enough time to work, so how can we give an extra hour to prayer?’  However, since they really felt that this was what God was saying to them, they decided they would try to be obedient to it.  So they began to give an extra hour a day to adoration of the Blessed Sacrament and an hour less to work.   The interesting thing is that after a short time many more people began to join the order and soon they had lots of extra people to help them with the work.  God will never be outdone in generosity.  If you give time to God He will make it up to you. 

Finally, it is important to remember that while Jesus is humble enough to give himself to us in Holy Communion, we should be careful about how we approach him.  He has come for sinners and we are sinners.  But if we receive him often we should also confess our sins often.  God has given us the gift of Holy Communion, but He has also given us the gift of confession, so that we can be free of sin and so that we can approach him as we should, with humility.  This is one place where we cannot demand our rights, because before God we have no rights.  Everything from God is a gift.  So we should confess to a priest, especially if there is something serious that we have done.  And we cannot say that we have no sins.  St. John says in one of his letters: ‘If anyone says they have not sinned they are calling God a liar’ (1 John 1.10). This is God’s word.  If we feel emptiness within us, it is probably because our spirits are starving.  Jesus is the one who will fulfill us.

I am the bread of life.  Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives in me and I in them.

19th Sunday Year B (Gospel: John 6:41-51) Get up and eat or the journey will be too long for you

Have you ever felt so sick and tired of everything that you found yourself saying, ‘I’ve had enough.  I’m sick of everything.  I wish I was dead’?  I think most people can relate to this every now and again.  I know I can.  I find it very consoling that the prophet Elijah also said this.  This is what he says in the first reading, ‘Lord I’ve had enough, I wish I was dead.’  This is the prophet Elijah talking, one of the most extraordinary prophets in the bible.  He raised people from the dead, cured people, multiplied food miraculously, made the waters of the Jordan separate, and here he is just like any one of us saying, ‘Lord I’ve had enough.  I wish I was dead.’  And then he goes to sleep as people often do when they are feeling down.  It’s a kind of escape.  But it is interesting what happens next.  The Lord doesn’t say, ‘oh poor Elijah, I’ll make everything better for you.’  Instead he says, ‘get up and eat or you won’t have enough strength for the journey.’  Take nourishment, you need nourishment.

In the Gospel Jesus is talking about food again.  He is saying that there is a food that we need.  I am that food.  I am the bread of life.  The food that I give is my flesh.  When he said this most of the people left him.  They thought he was crazy.  They said, ‘who can listen to this?  He is nuts!’  But he didn’t change what he said, or take anything back.  He let them walk away, not understanding.

What he had said was, ‘Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you can not have life within you.’  He was talking about the Eucharist, Holy Communion.  He was saying, ‘You need me.’  If you don’t have me you are empty, you are dead, you have nothing.’  My body and blood are the food that you need for the journey.  We need to feed ourselves properly, both physically, but also spiritually, or we will die spiritually.  And sadly many people do die spiritually, you can almost see it in their eyes.  There is a darkness, an emptiness.  I notice it especially in cities, where people are more inclined to lead crazy lives running after money as if it will bring them happiness, but they have nothing else, they are empty.

There is a terrible spiritual poverty in many people at the moment, especially in the so called ‘developed’ world.  People are spiritually empty, and they don’t know what’s wrong.  They are searching to find some kind of meaning, some kind of depth to their lives but they don’t know where to look.  Jesus is telling us where to look.  He is saying that he is the only one who will satisfy this emptiness in us.  We who already believe in Jesus are very fortunate or blessed.  You mightn’t think of yourself as blessed because you believe, but if you have any little bit of faith you are very fortunate.  And you do have faith, or you wouldn’t be here reading this.

Jesus has given us an immense treasure by giving us the Eucharist, because this is the gift of himself and we can receive him every day if we wish.  Through this extraordinary gift he nourishes us, gives us purpose, gives us direction.  It is the spiritual strength we need and the more open we are to him the more he can guide us and lead us deeper in faith.  The journey of faith is the greatest adventure if you are open to it.  The Eucharist is God’s gift to us.

 ‘The angel said to Elijah, “get up and eat or the journey will be too long for you.”’

18th Sunday Year B (Gospel: John 6:24-35) Do not work for food that cannot last; but work for food that endures to eternal life.

Recently a priest friend of mine was telling me that he was just back from holidays where he had been mountain climbing with a German priest friend of his.  They were somewhere in the mountains on the Austrian-German border.  His friend had a map, but it was five years old and one of the paths they took turned out to be very dangerous.  It was basically no longer usable.  He said that for most of it there was a rope on one side for safety, although there was a sheer drop on the other side.  But then they came to a place about 5m long where there was no rope, so they just had to cling to the side of the cliff on this extremely narrow ledge until they got past it.  He told me that it was quite terrifying and a matter of slowly taking one step at a time, then finding proper hand grip, then another step.  By the time he got to the far side he was quite exhausted and traumatised, but what interested me was that his friend—who is an experienced mountaineer—then told him to sit down and that they should eat something.  When you have been through an experience like that, eating changes your metabolism and calms you down.  And he said that it did just that.  Within a short time he was fine again.

There is also an interesting story in the Old Testament where the prophet Elijah is on the run having just worked an extraordinary miracle, but now queen Jezebel is out to kill him.  So he escapes into the desert, but at one point he sits down feeling fed up and prays to God, ‘Take my life, I am no better than my ancestors’, or in modern English, ‘I wish I was dead; I’ve had enough’.  Then he lies down and goes to sleep.  But then he is woken by an angel who tells him to get up and eat, so that he will have enough strength for the journey.  There he finds food beside him.  The right kind of nourishment is essential.

In this Gospel passage Jesus is just after working the miracle of feeding five thousand people with the five loaves and two fish and the people come after him to see more of this wonder-worker.  However, as is often the case, the miracle Jesus worked was pointing to something deeper and he says to them, ‘you are only looking for me because you got free food, but you didn’t see the “sign”.  What ‘sign’?  What was he talking about? And then he says, ‘don’t be worrying about temporary food, but look for the food that endures forever.’  The miracle of multiplying the loaves was a sign of something much deeper. Jesus then begins to teach them that there is another kind of food that we need for our whole life; not just material food that you eat, but food which is meaning/purpose/direction.  And then He tells them that He is this food that lasts forever, and the kind of food we need for the journey which is our whole life.  Jesus is the one who gives us strength and meaning to keep going.  He is the one who makes sense of what our whole life is about.  If you don’t have the right kind of meaning or purpose for being here, then it is very hard to keep going especially when things don’t make sense, as they so often don’t.

It is interesting too that in the second reading (Ephesians 4:17, 20-24) St. Paul says, ‘don’t live the kind of aimless life that Pagans live.’  That is exactly what can happen to us if we lose sight of our faith, or get too caught up in the world and worldly worries.  We forget what the real purpose of our life is about.  You see this happening all the time, especially when the economic boom was here.  Many people got completely carried away with money and forgot themselves.  I suppose now that things are harder it’s a lot easier for us to focus on what is really important.  That is much harder, but it is also helping us.

God is showing us that to have the right kind of strength for the journey, we need the right kind of food, and Jesus is this food.  ‘I am the bread of life’.  That is why Jesus gives himself to us in the Eucharist and speaks to us through his word, so that we have all the nourishment that we need for the journey.  If we know what our life is about, it is much easier to keep going even when we are struggling physically.  Where do we get direction from? In Jesus.  He is the one who makes sense of what we are about.

Now I know that there are also real worries such as how am I going to provide for my family when I’ve no work.  But what God is telling us is that if we focus on him first we will begin to discover that He will look after all of these needs as well.  Jesus must be at the centre, everything else second.

I am the bread of life. 

Whoever comes to me will never be hungry;

whoever believes in me will never thirst.

17th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B (Gospel: John 6:1-5) The Lord feeds us with his own body and blood

The world we live in makes it very easy to become cynical.  There are explanations for so many things, and people are quick to dismiss what cannot be proved.  Well today I would like to tell you about two events which you could be very cynical about, but personally I believe in them.

The first is a Eucharistic miracle which occurred in Siena, Italy, on 14^th August 1730.  As people were preparing to celebrate the feast of the Assumption a thief broke into the church, picked the lock of the tabernacle and stole the gold ciborium, which contained the Holy Communion breads.  This was only discovered the following day and of course there was great distress when people realised that the sacred hosts were still in the container when it was stolen.  Two days later a priest in another church noticed something white sticking out of the offering box in the wall.  He then discovered all the stolen hosts.  Since the hosts were now quite dirty, it was decided to put these stolen hosts into another ciborium and allow them to naturally decay which you are allowed to do in such cases.  However, a few years later when they examined the hosts they discovered they were still perfect, so they continued to preserve them.  Fifty years later they were examined again and still found to be perfect and even smelt fresh.  To make a long story short, various investigations were done over the years, including putting aside other unconsecrated hosts and leaving them for a similar length of time, but after a few years they had completely decayed.  Today, 282 years later, the hosts are still as fresh as the day they were found and they are now on display in a special glass ciborium in the Franciscan church in Siena.  I was there a few years ago and saw them myself.  It is a wonderful thing to see.

The second event is also a Eucharistic miracle which happened in the 8^th century around 1200 years ago.  A priest was celebrating mass in a place called Lanciano, which is also in Italy.  Now this priest admitted to having doubts about the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist.  But one day while he was celebrating the mass the bread and wine actually turned into flesh and blood in his hands.  As he got an awful shock when this happened, he first tried to hide what had happened, but then he confessed his doubts to the people and showed them what had happened.  The flesh and blood were preserved and centuries later when science had developed enough, investigation showed that the flesh was real human flesh and was actually heart tissue.  The blood was also real human blood.  Both are still preserved today.  This is only a very brief account of these two miracles, however, they have both been officially recognised as miracles by the Church. 

Why am I talking about Eucharistic miracles?  We are not obliged to believe in them, but sometimes I think it is good to be reminded that these things have happened in different parts of the world, and there have been several other ones too.  Perhaps it is one of the ways that Jesus reminds us of the gift that He has given us in the Blessed Sacrament.  In each mass we believe that the bread and the wine really and truly become the body and blood of Jesus in when the priest says the prayers of consecration. 

Why does this happen?  What is the most important thing for most of us throughout our lives?  To have the people we love around us.  Well this is one way that Jesus gives himself to us in a really extraordinary and beautiful way, showing us that He is with us all the time and that we can even receive him into our own bodies each day if we wish.  He loves us and wants us to know and experience that.  There is no greater way to give yourself to another person than this.

The readings of today’s mass are also all about this.  The miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and the fish is a sign of how Jesus would continue to feed us with his own body and blood, which He continues to do today two thousand years after He walked the earth.  It is probably one of the most controversial teachings of our Church, and the one which often causes people to laugh and say ‘What a ridiculous thing to believe’.  And yet when Jesus himself gave this teaching it says that many of his disciples stopped following him.  They said, ‘It is too much, who can believe that?!’  So it has been something which people have struggled with from the beginning.  But remember, we are not asked to understand it, only to believe it.

The Eucharist is the greatest gift that God has given us, because it is the gift of Jesus himself to nourish us; not just holy bread, or a reminder, but really and truly the body and blood of Jesus. 

This is my body which will be given up for you.

15th Sunday Yr B (Gospel: Mark 6:7-13) If they do not accept you in any town, shake off the very dust of your feet as a sign to them.

 

As a priest, I often find myself in a position which is strangely similar to what we hear about in the first reading from the prophet Amos (7:12-15), even though this is 2000 years later.  In modern English it might sound something like this: ‘Look Amos/Murchadh go and talk about God somewhere else.  We don’t want to hear about it here, we are important people and we are busy with our own Church.  And I might say, ‘You listen to me (Amaziah)!  I didn’t choose to do this.  It wasn’t my idea, but God ordered me to go and speak to you, and now you can take it or leave it.’

In one way we priests—and indeed anyone who teaches about the ways of God—are still in the same position today.  We are supposed to pass on the same message regardless of whether people listen to us or not.  This is not an easy thing to do, as people often don’t want to hear what we have to say.  There is a great temptation for us, for me, to try to say what people would like to hear, so that people will think well of me, because like anyone else, I want to be accepted by other people too.  But that is not what we are called to do by the Lord. 

We are called by the Lord to do a specific job, and that is to tell people about him and his message.  To tell people that Jesus is the way to the Father, that without him we can not have our sins forgiven, that he is the way for us to find happiness and that God has made himself known to us in the person of Jesus Christ.

The message that the Lord calls us to preach is not an easy one and often meets with a lot of opposition, but that is beside the point.  It is not my business if people decide to follow Jesus Christ or not, that is up to them.  But it is my job to tell people about the Lord, as He asks us to. 

Pray for us priests that we will have the courage that we need to do what the Lord calls us to do.  Help us to be strong in our faith. It is not our place to preach our opinions, but to preach the Word of God.  Our opinions will not help you or nourish you, but the Word of God will.  What we say should challenge you, because the voice of the Lord, which is always calling us to begin again, is not an easy one to follow or listen to.  Just about all of the prophets were killed because they challenged the people about how they were living when they strayed away from the ways of God.  They kept calling them to come back to God, to continually change their ways and many didn’t want to be challenged in this way, so they got rid of the prophets.  Killing them off was their way of shutting them up.

We constantly want to do things our own way, but the Lord says, ‘If you really want to follow me, then you must listen to what I tell you and follow the way that I point out to you.’  ‘The way’ is the way of Jesus Christ, but it is one that we constantly need to re-commit ourselves to.  It is not enough to say, ‘Well I go to mass once in a while and I’m alright.’  The Lord Jesus is not just calling us to do something once a week, or once a month, but He is calling us to a whole way of living and thinking that affects everything we do.  The Lord will never force us to follow him; He simply points out the way to us and invites us.  We must make the decision.

Perhaps it seems like I’m preaching to the converted, but I believe that if we really want to grow in our faith, then we need to continually re-decide to follow Jesus Christ.  The world around us may not agree with us, or like the way we live.  Many people today are deciding not to be Christian anymore, perhaps not consciously, sometimes just by indifference.  But the Lord is very strong in the Gospels about indifference.  He demands a decision from us. 

If any place does not welcome you and people refuse to listen to you, as you walk away shake off the dust from under your feet as a sign to them.

14th Sunday Year B (Gospel: Mark 6:1-6) The thorn in the flesh. Our weaknesses can help us

 

A couple of years back I was talking to a man who was telling me about himself.  He said that most things in his life were grand, except for one thing.  He had a terrible temper, which was so frustrating.  And he said, ‘If only I didn’t have this temper, everything would be perfect.’  I couldn’t help thinking that this weakness that was so frustrating to him, was probably also one of the things that helped him to stay close to God.  If we thought we were perfect we would probably also think that we had no need for God.  It is also true that when we are not aware of our weaknesses we can become terribly arrogant.

There is a priest known simply as Brother Andrew, who co-founded the Brothers part of the Missionaries of Charity with Mother Teresa.  In one of his books about his experiences, he begins by saying: ‘Few people would believe the weakness on which the Missionaries of Charity are built.’  It is a strange statement for most people to hear when we think of people like Mother Teresa and the extraordinary work that she and the many other sisters and brothers do.  Brother Andrewe speaks a lot about his own weakness, although he doesn’t say exactly what it was, except that he suffered from some kind of addiction.  This weakness, which frustrated him so much, was also one of the things that made him holy.   He doesn’t say that, but you can see it from his writings.  The reason why God did such great work through him, through Mother Teresa and through so many others, was not because they were talented enough, but because they were aware of how weak they were and so they relied totally on God for everything.

The reason why God was able to do such extraordinary things through the saints is not because they were perfect, but because they were weak people who continually turned to him and so God was able to use them in an extraordinary way.  It is very easy to get a false impression of what holiness is:  Books can often give us the impression that saints were people who did no wrong.  The truth is that saints were and are weak people, with just as many weaknesses as any of us, but they continually turned to God for help and as a result God was able to work through them in an amazing way.  To understand this is key to growing in the spiritual life.  If the saints were perfect people who never did any wrong, then very few of us could relate to them.  But if they were weak people just like any of us—which they were and are—then not only can we relate to them, but it should help us to see that the same path is open to us, because it doesn’t depend on us being good enough, rather it depends on us continually turning to God.  That is the key.

There is no one here who doesn’t struggle with weaknesses of one kind or another.  It could be some kind of addiction, it could be a need to control, an emotional dependency, whatever.  We all have something and as you well know it can be extremely frustrating.

I find it consoling that two thousand years ago St. Paul writes about the exact same thing (See this Sunday’s second reading 2 Cor 12:7-10).  Paul was a very intelligent man, well educated and obviously very talented.  And even though he had visions of Jesus which converted him and then he went and preached everywhere, he too suffered from some kind of weakness, although he doesn’t say what it was. In this second reading you can really sense his frustration as he says that three times he asked God to take this thing away from him, and three times God said ‘No, my strength is at its best in weakness.’  This weakness, whatever it was, obviously helped him more than he realised.  It kept him humble and it meant that he continually needed to turn to the Lord and ask for his help and that is why he and so many other men and women were such powerful instruments in God’s hands, because they relied totally on God and not on themselves as they were well aware of how weak they were.

I have no doubt that all of us probably feel we would be much better off if we could overcome our weaknesses.  But perhaps these readings will help us to see that the Lord knows what He is doing when He allows us to struggle with them.  Yes, they are frustrating, but they can also be a gift in the sense that they make us rely on the power of God more than on ourselves.  It also reminds us that it is not a question of being ‘good enough’ for God.  We will never be good enough, but that doesn’t matter.  As long as we know that we are weak then we will see that we have someone to turn to who really can and will help us.

So I shall be very happy to make my weaknesses my special boast so that the power of Christ may stay over me.