Love Feeds
Corpus Christi Homily – Love Feeds
His followers asked the wrong question that afternoon on the journey toward Calvary.
Jesus had just told them that he was the living bread who would give them his “flesh to eat for the life of the world.” Admittedly, if it makes us a little uncomfortable hearing that, imagine what those following him that day thought of those very words.
Their first question: How? How is this possible? How can this Jesus become our very food for the journey?
It’s not a terrible question. There are a lot of “how” questions throughout Scripture: “How can this be since I do not know man?” asked Our Lady. “How will my wife conceive in her old age?” asked Zechariah to the angel. “How can someone be born again?” asked Nicodemus the Pharisee to Rabbi Jesus.
Good questions, all. We have to ask the “how’s” in order to get to the answer of God Himself. “How are these things possible?” we ask.
“God alone” comes the answer.
Our first reading from the Book of Deuteronomy pulls no punches in explaining how the wandering Israelites would be fed on their desert journey toward true and lasting freedom. “God let you be afflicted with hunger and then fed you with manna – a food unknown to you and your fathers – in order to show you that not by bread alone does one live …”
The Father is the how. He can do all things, for God is the Creator, and as such, He feeds and leads. That’s the very nature of God.
But here’s the question that the disciples should have asked, but didn’t: Why? Why is Jesus offering his flesh and blood for the life of the world? Why is he offering to feed us as our manna on the journey?
And the only answer that I keep returning to, time and again – no matter how much I have tried to run or no matter how often the spirit of Satan or the world has attempted to make me think otherwise: God feeds us because He loves us. He feeds me because he loves me as his child.
That’s it. Love.
It struck me powerfully just last week as I was called to the NICU at Nemours. As I entered the unit, there sat a young first-time Mom feeding her sickly newborn son. Cradling him, she fed him with her very self as tears rolled down her cheek. It cost her, and it caused her pain – but she remained and fed her precious little boy simply because it is what love does. Love feeds.
What the followers of Jesus missed that day in asking “how” instead of “why” – and what so many of us miss today when we consider Communion to be nothing more than pious symbolism of a past moment at the Last Supper – is that this Eucharist is anything but mere bread.
It is Living, because Love is living.
Why wouldn’t Christ – the Second Person of the Trinity, who is God and Word Made Flesh – why wouldn’t He continue to offer that same Flesh to us for our desert journeys? Why wouldn’t He want to feed us – just as that new Mom did at Nemours – in the deserts of our hospital stays, times of crisis and fear, moments of great joy, and at the moment of our transition back to Him? Why wouldn’t He want to give us Himself to say: I am here. I will never leave you.
Isn’t that God’s nature? To remain? To journey with? To love back to wholeness and set free from sin? Wasn’t it He who told us: “I am with you until the end of time?”
He is a God of covenantal promise; a God who never goes back on His Word, even when we do. True love stays and feeds, humbly and in very hidden ways. If God can provide mysterious manna long ago as a sign of His Love, why wouldn’t He now become that very Food for our lives?
Why wouldn’t His Love – poured out in and through His Spirit at this very altar – transform the same elements from the Last Supper (“Take this all of you and eat …) into the Bread of Life for us right now? Do we think He can’t or wouldn’t?
Do we think that everything we do here is just pious ritual with little effect after we leave Mass in 50 minutes? Is this celebration of Eucharist meant to be nothing more than a “nice” time of worship? I hope we answer ‘no’ to that.
Nothing about this celebration of the Body and Blood of Christ is meant to be milquetoast. It is a radical outpouring of sacrificial love that transforms the world, and each one of us. It makes us One Body in Him; it makes us Church for the world; it makes us feeders of others – in how we live, love, serve, forgive and lay down our lives. Eucharist makes us cross-carriers and it unites us to His Sacrifice of Love.
In a word, Eucharist makes us other Christs. Think about the radicalness of that statement. His Sacramental Presence doesn’t just make us good. It makes us sharers in His Divinity, and it makes us His Presence in the lives of every single person, place and thing we encounter.
How can we not fall to our knees in awe of that mystery? Better yet: how can we NOT respond to the power of that Love? How can we not let that Love change us? Isn’t that what true love does?
When all is said and done, here’s what strikes me so powerfully about Eucharist, and it comes from a real-life moment that happens time and again in countless ways from the time of the early Church until the end of time:
A man married for 60 years comes alone to Mass; those around him see how he tired he looks, how much of a struggle is it to shuffle forward to receive Communion. But he does, with great effort and devotion.
That same gentleman leaves here and heads home, where his beautiful bride awaits him, now clothed after six decades in wrinkled pajamas and lying in a hospice bed in their living room. There he will sit the rest of the day, reading to her, holding her hand, watching her sleep and feeding her a soupy mixture of Ensure and medicine when she needs to be fed. As she finishes, he gently wipes the side of her mouth where leftover vanilla pudding had gathered. The same devotion he had for our Eucharistic Lord is shown in the devotion he offers for his wife.
The same Eucharistic Lord who fed him at Sunday Mass now gives him the strength and courage to feed the one for whom he vowed his heart, in good times and in bad … in sickness and in health … until Love calls her Home.
After all, that is what true Love does. It can’t help itself: it feeds. It sacrifices. It gives all.