The Medical Mission Sisters of Fox Chase tastefully prepare the Sunday Eucharistic table.   I celebrated the Mass with them on Sunday August 9.   The scripture readings spoke of Jesus' reactions to his followers who wanted at least another miracle of loaves and fish.    He instructed them: "Eat my Flesh; Drink my Blood."

Nineteenth Sunday of the Year   John 6 on The Bread of Life

Food and all of the rituals surrounding food play a big part in our lives.   For some of us, granted, food is a pedestrian matter and meals are simply a necessary fueling station as we go about our busy lives.   But for most of us the rituals of food all the way from shopping to relaxing with friends after a meal are part of a program to sustain a meaningful life.   This even despite our anxiety about so many local and international food needs,

To signal that religion is not something outside human life, then, it should come as no surprise that the inspired authors of the Bible give food and our eating a key role in the Bible, all the way from the forbidden apple in Genesis to the scorn that Paul in First Corinthians heaps on those who exclude the less fortunate from the Christian table.  In between such symbolic frames to Scripture, Yahweh is busy rescuing his people in times of famine and Christ is proving our Father’s generosity of spirit in events like the miraculous catch of fish and the miraculous multiplication of  loaves and fish.

The Eucharist itself that we celebrate at this table gives us a simple mnemonic key to understanding all of our interactions with food: bless, break, take, eat.  Bless, break, take, eat.  It will be well for us to integrate these four simple words not only into our eating together and even into snack time but also into every daily routine.  These four simple directions imitate the simple directions of a recipe book, words like shop, chop, boil, savor in their various forms.   But “bless, break, take, eat” are written in the recipe book for our lives.  These four words are not only about food; they are about every resource God gives us to carry out our mission in life.   

We read today in the Book of Kings about the prophet Elijah suffering from a bout of depression, meditating on his failure to bring about any sustained change to the paganism of Israel.   He has tried to change the culture of paganism, even by arranging the deaths of false prophets and now he is running for his life from the regime.   He has no appetite; would prefer even to die.  But God has not finished with him and insists that he eat for the journey and the work ahead.    His journey will take him to Horeb, that is, Mount Sinai, to meet God in his prayers and hear instructions that will sustain the prophetic mission in Israel.  

In this instance God summons Elijah from his depression with a blessing of food.  Elijah must break from his own desire for death and take and eat.   The food that he finds as a blessing before him has no source but in the God who has been miraculously accompanying him all of his prophetic life.   Without an understanding of this food as blessing, Elijah would have ignored what was set before him and remained confirmed in his desire for death.   But he is obedient to God’s call: Bless, break from your self-pity, take and eat.   Whether we recognize it or not, God is always putting resources in front of us for our mission.  Bless, break, take and eat.

This message is underlined in the gospel reading from John.   You are following me, Jesus says to the crowd, because you ate at the multiplication of the loaves and fish.   As if that was not enough of a sign, you want more from me.   You want more of the food that will sate your physical appetites.   But now I ask you to bless, break, take and eat of my very life and its gifts.    Eat my flesh; drink my blood.   

This invitation is as startling to us as it was to the disciples, some of whom were always trying to define Jesus in their own terms.  I think of this invitation as stunning material imagery but one with literal meaning.   It is an invitation to grasp all of the Incarnation as a gift for our own wholeness of body and spirit.  Like the best of hosts, Jesus conscious of his mission from his father, sets a full table for us in the Eucharistic celebration and offers for our sustenance everything that he is and has. 

When it comes to meals in the gospel stories, Jesus is more often a guest of someone else than the host.   But, nevertheless, even as guest he brings gifts to the table: for example, forgiveness to the host Zacchaeus and to that unusual guest, the woman who bathes his feet with her tears, healing to Peter’s wife, miraculous wine to the wedding feast, a powerful revelation at the Inn in Emmaus.   He never comes to a meal empty handed.     But he most startles us with the meals in which he is host: the Last Supper, the enduring Eucharist, in which he offers himself to us, and, in today’s gospel, the feeding of the five thousand. 

Yes, eat my flesh, drink my blood is a crude expression.  But I believe Jesus uses it to stun us into the knowledge that, whether we are a guest at his table or he comes as a guest at our table, he will share himself with us and give us every gift we need to bring about a wholeness of body and spirit, and this even when one or another part of us, as in the case of Elijah, seems to be failing us.

He calls the knowledge, the trust that he will give us himself in the Eucharist and whatever sustenance we need by the simple word “belief.” 

 

May we remember the words of the Eucharist, bless, break, take and eat. Like Elijah may we have the willingness to take what God offers us.   Like Peter and the disciples may we come to know that there are no other tables that will truly sustain us.  And may we recall the words “bless, break, take and eat three, four, five times a day.