Letter from the Pastor
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July 28, 2024We have been listening to St. Mark’s Gospel since Advent. Most modern Biblical scholars believe that Mark was the first Gospel to be written, about 10 years after our Lord ascended into Heaven. Mark, or John Mark was a disciple of St. Peter. He was asked to write down the preaching and stories of St. Peter. He was thought to be the young man who ran away naked when our Lord was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane.
St. Mark’s Gospel is the shortest of the Gospels; our Lord is very raw in His emotions and in His sayings. St. Mark's style is clear, direct, abrupt, and picturesque, if at times a little harsh.
Since his Gospel is so short, there are not enough verses to cover all the Sundays of the year. So every year that St. Mark’s gospel is proclaimed, there comes the summer break. In her wisdom, the Church, starting today until the last Sunday of August, we will hear the beautiful entire Chapter 6 of St. John’s Gospel, known as the Bread of Life Discourse.
The Bread of Life Discourse is divided into two parts: John 6:35-47 and John 6:48- 58. The divisions are separated by our Lord’s words “I am the bread of life.”
In the first half, our Lord focused on believing in Him, which will open to us eternal life. We must truly believe in His divinity in order to receive the second half of the discourse where our Lord explicitly teaches about consuming His flesh and blood.
There is a shift from “believing” in the first section, to “eating” in the second part. “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” And when some of His own disciples questioned Him about ‘eating’ His Flesh, our Lord intensified the verb from eating to gnawing. Our Lord is very clear in what He meant about the Eucharist, it is not symbolic speech. Even when some of His disciples decided that this was too difficult to believe and left Him, He didn’t water down what He said, He intensified it!
Those who didn’t possess the necessary faith in our Lord’s divinity and origin rejected this teaching and stopped following Him. Jesus then asked the Twelve whether they would leave also. St. Peter declared, “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.” It is their belief in Who Jesus is (part one) that opens their hearts to receive His teaching about the Eucharist (part two). It is only in reading this discourse that we see the complement of believing in Him so we may then receive Him in the Eucharist.
As our country has concluded its Eucharistic Renewal, it is important for us as a parish to renew ourselves in the belief and the joy of knowing that we can receive our Lord Himself, truly in Holy Communion.
So, for these next few weeks, as you are waiting for Mass to begin, take the missalette and read the Gospel. Quietly reflect on such a great gift our Lord gave us in the Eucharist. If you had to give the homily, what would you say?
