St. Edmund's Church, Beckenham

I would like you to cast your mind back to the best meal that you have ever eaten.  Can you remember the details of the food, the restaurant, or maybe you were at home?  If you use your imagination, now, can you summon up the tastes, the smells?  Recently I was fortunate enough to visit Costa Rica, in Central America, and particularly Stella’s Café in Monteverde.  Stella was an English Quaker who moved to Costa Rica in 1982.  The café named after her continues to offer amazing locally produced food which long remains in the memory.  Especially, since I follow them on Instagram, and I am tormented almost daily by new videos of the most exquisite looking meals eaten in a beautiful garden, surrounded by exotic birds, with monkeys trying to steal some food.

But why am I talking about food in a homily, you might ask?   Well, it’s because I can’t recall another Sunday in the year when food is so clearly and definitively the theme of our readings and of course that makes sense, because we are truly nourished by coming to Mass.

So perhaps the question we should ask ourselves is do we anticipate the delights of the feast that is the Mass just as much as we anticipate a good meal?  Are we as keen to feed our souls as we are to feed our stomachs?

The banquet, that is the Mass, is served in two courses, the first course, or perhaps we could call it the appetiser, is the Word.  “Taste and see that the Lord is good” we are told.  And elsewhere in the Bible the prophet Jeremiah describes the Word of God being as “sweet as honey in my mouth”, although he then continues to speak of the bitterness that this food brings to the stomach.  The word of God has great beauty, memorable phrases, such as “I am the living bread which has come down from heaven”.  So perhaps it’s strange to think that the Word of God can also be uncomfortable for us, even undigestible, but then again maybe it isn’t, because sometimes we can all struggle with God’s Word.  Sometimes the teaching of the Gospel is just such a challenge to our everyday lives that we don’t want to hear it.   We don’t want to absorb it.  In the next verses of John’s Gospel, the disciples describe todays Gospel as “difficult teaching”.  In fact, they ask, “who can accept it?”, indeed the Bible subsequently tells us that many of His disciples turned back and stopped following Jesus at this point.  Jesus lets them walk away, he doesn’t ‘water down’ his teaching to keep them with Him.  He then challenges the twelve, those closest to him, asking them if they also wish to leave Him.  Thankfully, the twelve can ‘stomach’ the Word of God and they accept the wisdom that Christ is sharing with them.  In the same way that we digest food so we need to ‘digest’ Christ, this sustenance must be accepted, consumed and internalised in order to gain true life, eternal life.

The main course at Mass is of course the Eucharist, the source and the summit of our Faith, as it was described at the Second Vatican Council.  The Eucharist is where our Faith begins, and it is also the very fulfilment of our Faith.  It is worth reflecting on how seriously we take this teaching in our lives.

Hospitality is a recurring theme in the Bible from Abraham feeding the three mysterious visitors at Mamre (as we see in the icon by the sanctuary) through to the last supper and beyond.  Today Wisdom is portrayed by the author, King David, as a woman of generous hospitality, wisdom represents the word of God and in the original Hebrew is actually wisdoms, in the plural.  Wisdom’s house represents the church, which is described as being founded on seven pillars, which represent the truth of God’s word.  The bread, the meat of the slaughtered beasts, and the wine mixed with water offered at her feast, are clearly precursors of the Eucharist.  Likewise, the servant girls foreshadow the disciples as they are sent out to summon everyone, even the foolish, is invited to eat at her table.  But those who respond to this invitation must reject their foolish ways and embrace God’s will, exercising true wisdom.

Today, in places like Gaza and Yemen, hunger is a reality of life.  So again, I ask you to take a moment and remember a time when you were really hungry.  Perhaps you were fasting voluntarily, or perhaps there has been a time in your life when you simply couldn’t have the food that you wanted.  Imagine if that was the reality of your life every single day.  When you are starving your stomach shrinks, you simply cannot consume as much food as you could before, and it takes some time to recover.  In a similar way our capacity to be spiritually nourished diminishes if we are not being ‘fed’ regularly.  If we neglect the word and the Eucharist, we damage our souls and we need to recover.  St Paul calls us to be wise, to walk carefully, other Bible translations use the word circumspect, in Latin this literally means to ‘look around’, but for what?  Well, the evangelist tells us to seize every opportunity, every moment, for Christ.  This is what we should be looking for, those opportunities to become closer to God.  We need to be regularly topped up, not with wine, but with the Holy Spirit.  Without this refilling we can, just like the people of Gaza or Yemen, become weak, lethargic and defeated, unless we are spiritually replenished.  There are many Catholics in the world such as North Korea, parts of Nigeria, India, Iran, China, Pakistan, Eritrea, Algeria who, through persecution, struggle to receive the Word or the Eucharist regularly, these people are being spiritually starved.

We are set apart from most other Christians by virtue of what we believe about the nature of the Eucharist.  For us as Catholics, the most important point is, that when Christ was challenged by the Jews, he repeated in several different ways that His flesh is true food, and His blood is true drink.  The Jews wilfully misinterpreted this teaching as promoting some form of cannibalism, but the message was always clear, Christ Himself is the living sacrifice offered for atonement, to wash away the sins of the world.  In the Eucharist we receive the entirety of the body, blood, soul and divinity of Christ.  What other meal can offer such a feast, such a delight for the senses?  The bread and wine are not just symbols of His sacrifice, they are the reality which expresses the sacramental grace of the Eucharist, the transformation of the substance of bread and wine into the real presence.  This is the ‘mystery’ of transubstantiation, something that cannot be rationalised, the ingredients are transformed by the priest into real food and drink, food for the soul.

This is Christ’s great gift to us, and we should not take it for granted.  Many practising Catholics deny the real presence in the Eucharist, and that’s a tragedy, because so many others would literally die to receive the Eucharist.  So, let us delight in the food that is served from God’s table.

Here ends the appetiser, and now for the main course!

Deacon Ray