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DRAWING LIFE FROM JESUS BY SHARING IN HIS SPIRIT AND BEING ONE WITH HIM - stephenkhoo - 04-27-2012 09:50 AM
27 April, 2012, Third Friday of Easter
DRAWING LIFE FROM JESUS BY SHARING IN HIS SPIRIT AND BEING ONE WITH HIM
SCRIPTURE READINGS: ACTS 9:1-20; JN 6:52-59
Easter is a celebration of life. So the question that confronts us Christians is, how can we find life? The answer seems to be clear. If God has raised Jesus from the dead, then life can only come from the Father. That is why Jesus declared that He draws life from the Father. But how does He draw life from the Father? Firstly, by acquiring His spirit. Secondly, by being one with Him in every way. In scholastic terminology, we say that He is consubstantial with the Father; that is “one in being.” Indeed, because He is one in being with the Father and one in spirit with Him, Jesus becomes the life-giver as well. Hence, for ourselves, if we want to find life, then we must draw life from Jesus since we cannot see the Father and do not know Him. For us, the way to the Father, the origin of life, is to come to Jesus who is the bread of life. Only by coming to Him, can we share His spirit of life and become one with Him. Within this perspective of sharing in His spirit and being one with Him, can we better understand the import of today’s message on the need to eat of Him in order to draw life from Him.
This necessity of eating His flesh and drinking His blood, of course, has been a command that is as controversial among us Christians as it was among the Jews, whom we read in today’s readings, questioned: ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat?’” In Christianity, three views are being held among adherents of the faith. The first view is a spiritualistic interpretation of the words of institution. For some Protestants, they understand the command of Jesus to eat His flesh and drink His blood mainly as an invitation to share in the humanity of Jesus, which is represented by His flesh, and to die to oneself, which is symbolized by His blood. Thus, to eat the flesh and drink the blood simply means that we will have life if only we imitate Jesus in the way He lived His life in the flesh and join Him in giving up Himself for the love and service of others even unto death. In this way, one acquires the Spirit of Jesus and thus draw life from Him. Such an interpretation of course is a reductionism of the clear intent of Jesus.
Hence, many Christians feel that such an interpretation does not do full justice to the import of Jesus’ teaching. In reaction to such reductionism, some fundamentalist Catholics go to the extreme of emphasizing the physicality of the Eucharist as Jesus’ real physical body and blood. Such perception gives the impression that Catholics are cannibals. The implication for such a view is even more grotesque than the spiritual interpretation. It reduces faith to a superstitious partaking of the literal and physical body and blood of Christ, which is supposedly to give life. As a result, many Catholics are simply not interested in the mass, or the scriptures, but simply concerned with the moment when they receive the host, the body of Christ at communion. Some even bemoan the fact that because they don’t consume the wine, their reception of the Eucharist lacks power.
That being the case, we are no better than those ancient mystery religions which believe that when we consume food offered to idols or the deities, we would become like them. Such thinking is still prevalent among some Christians and Catholics who believe that if we eat food offered to the deities, they will possess us. Alas, if only that were so, then such a physicalistic thinking would have made all our Catholics more and more like Jesus. But the truth is that Catholics who simply receive the consecrated host in a physical manner are certainly not transformed in any way. In fact, being superstitious, their faith becomes weaker and eventually, they will one day give up faith in Christ as well.
Where, then, is the truth of the teaching of Jesus to be found? It can be found only in the third view, which is the sacramental view of the Eucharist. This view embraces both the spiritualistic and realistic interpretations of the Eucharist. For the Church, it is clear that the full reception of the Eucharist entails a sharing in the Spirit of Christ, which is the desire to imitate Him in His death and so rise with Him in the new life. This is what we proclaim every time at mass in the proclamation of faith at the consecration. Christian life is nothing less than a sharing in the paschal mystery of Christ, which the Eucharist is all about.
However, the Church is not contented to give this only a spiritual meaning. The Church insists on the reality of the glorified Christ, both in His humanity and divinity in the consecrated hosts. Thus we are not simply receiving bread but truly the real presence of Christ. Of course, we do not hold that the bread substantially is still bread, even though it still tastes like bread. But we know that the underlying reality of the bread is transformed into the real presence of the whole person of Jesus. So, in truth we are not so much receiving the physical elements of Jesus’ body and blood but rather, we are receiving the whole person of Jesus in His glorified self, which includes His humanity and divinity. It is precisely this union with the person of Jesus that transformation becomes possible.
Hence, the Church emphasizes the intrinsic connection between the Liturgy of the Word and the Liturgy of the Eucharist. The Word gives the full meaning to the reception of the Eucharist and the Eucharist is the concretization of the Word. Without the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, the Word does not really bring out our full union with Christ in both spirit and body, even though it certainly does, to a certain extent, enable us to have some sharing in the mind of Jesus,. This is because we cannot really say we are one with Jesus. On the other hand, a cannibalistic reception of Christ’s physical body or blood will not make us any better, for like a mouse that eats the host and remains just the same, so too, it will be for us. However, if we receive the spirit and person of Jesus, then certainly our union with Christ is complete because we share in His Spirit and one in being with Him. In this sense, it can be said that we truly draw life from Jesus.
This way of looking at the Eucharist is certainly confirmed by the experience of Saul in the first reading. For in the encounter with the Risen Christ, Jesus identified Himself with the Christians. He said to Saul, “I am Jesus, and you are persecuting me.” In other words, Jesus had identified Himself personally with the Christians. Yet this identification cannot be a physical identification; rather, it is a personal identification; so personal that it is as if Jesus was one in being, both in spirit and one with the Christians. Hence, to persecute the Christians is to persecute Jesus.
We are told that through Ananias, Saul recovered his sight and was filled with the Holy Spirit once this truth was recognized. This Spirit that Saul acquired was the same Spirit of Jesus, for as foretold to Ananias, Saul would be the chosen instrument to bring His name to all unbelievers and he would also have to suffer on account of His name. Consequently, Paul became a great disciple of the Lord only because Christ identified Himself with him both personally and spiritually. In this way, Saul found a new lease of life.
Today we, too, are called to remove the blindness from our eyes. In other words, we are called to a greater awareness of what and whom we are receiving at the Eucharist. Unless, we are conscious of what we are doing and whom we are receiving, we will not be able to draw life from Jesus. But if we do, then we become more fully united with Jesus in Spirit when we listen to the Word of God, the Bread of life, and when we live out that spirit of Jesus in our lives through death to self. At the same time, we must be one in being with Jesus by being incorporated into His body through a sacramental reception of Jesus.