To
Believe in Jesus is to Believe in the Eucharist
Thursday April 14, 2005 Homily by Fr. Robert Altier Third Week of Easter
Reading (Acts 8:26-40) Gospel (St. John 6:44-51)
In the Gospel reading today, Our Lord tells us that
whoever believes has eternal life, and then He goes on to say, I am the
bread of life.
So we see once again this point of thinking it would be easy to say, “Well, I
believe in Jesus,” and then He turns it right around and says that we need to
go deeper. We need to be able to look at the Eucharist and ask the question: Do
we believe that He is right there? If He is the bread of life, it is not just a
generic belief in the Lord.
As we heard
in the first reading, the Ethiopian eunuch traveling along the road was reading
from the prophet Isaiah, from Chapter 53, about how Jesus was like the lamb led
to the slaughter or the sheep before the shearer, and His life was taken from
Him. It is precisely in this that as the Passover Lamb had to offer his life
and had to be consumed by the people who sacrificed him, so too, Our Lord – Who
is the Lamb of God, Who is the Bread of Life – is to be eaten, to be consumed;
and if we do not, we have no life. He makes that absolutely clear. He is the
bread of life, and along with that He says that the bread He will give is His
flesh for the life of the world. If He is the bread of life and the bread that
He will give is His flesh, then He is making very clear to us exactly what is
required if we are going to say that we believe in Him. In part, to believe in
Jesus Christ requires in an absolute sense a belief in the Eucharist, that what
He has offered – the bread, the manna that comes down from heaven that the
Father gives to the world – is Himself as the Lamb of God, as the Bread of
Life, as the Passover, and as the fulfillment of everything the Old Testament
foreshadowed. We have to be able to look deeper and see exactly what Our Lord
is telling us. Over and over in John’s Gospel, He tells us that whoever
believes has life, but then He keeps qualifying what it means to believe. It is
not enough just to believe in Jesus. We have to believe in everything that He
tells us, and central to what He tells us is His teaching about the Eucharist.
Now if we
are going to understand what He means that His flesh is the bread that He will
give, we have to keep in mind the nature of His priesthood. He is a priest
according to the order of Melchizedek. That was prophesied by the prophet David
in Psalm 110. Melchizedek did not have a priesthood like that of Aaron. The
Levitical priesthood had to offer bulls and goats and so on in sacrifice;
Melchizedek offered bread and wine. If Jesus is a priest in the order of
Melchizedek, then the sacrifice that He offers has to be what Melchizedek
offered: bread and wine. So what does He offer at the Last Supper as a
sacrifice? Bread and wine. But He tells us, as we celebrate every single day, This is My Body…This is My Blood. What does He say
in the Gospel today? The bread that I will give
is My flesh for the life of the world. We have to understand that what He is doing
here is to exercise His priesthood according to the order of Melchizedek. We
need to be able to see what that sacrifice is, and He is telling us very
clearly that the sacrifice is Himself. The bread that He will give is His flesh
for the life of the world. This is the manna that has come down from heaven for
people to eat and to never die. That is what He is giving to us, and it is in
this way that He says, Anyone who believes has
life.
So it is to
go deep and to be able to recognize Jesus present in the Blessed Sacrament, in
this new manna, this true manna sent down from the Father. No one, He says, knows the
Father except the Son, and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal Him. If we recognize
Jesus present in the Blessed Sacrament, then we will have the Father revealed
to us. It all works together. Without this central point, we have missed it
all. If we are going to have life, He makes very clear that there is only one
way, that is, to believe in the fullness of Jesus Christ. And the fullness of
Jesus Christ is continuing to be with us and is found only in the Blessed
Sacrament.
* This text was
transcribed from the audio recording of a homily by Father Robert Altier with minimal editing.