Do you also want to leave?

 Lord, to whom shall we go? You alone have the words of eternal life. This rather painful exchange occurs in today’s Gospel. It serves as the conclusion of the Bread of Life Discourse which we have been reading over the last 4 weeks. This discourse founds our whole Theology, our understanding of the Sacramental nature of our Church and of the Eucharist in particular.

The evangelist begins by recording the feeding of the five thousand and the walking on water. Each of these signs shows the Lord’s ability to make the impossible very possible. They display that the eternal world can be made manifest in this world.

Drawing from the Passover’s identity as a meal, sacrifice, and memorial, the Lord now applies the eternal-worldly to his Eucharistic teaching. John the Evangelist has the Lord preach about heaven – eternal life.

In speaking about heaven, the Lord is indirectly referencing his glorified body (and ours). And so, when he exhorts his disciples to eat his flesh and drink his blood, he is relying on an understanding of eternal life. He is referencing his glorified body and blood which strengthen and empower us to follow him in this life, and thereby persevere to the full banquet of eternal life. This explains why the Eucharist has been called the foretaste of heaven, the “appetizer” of what awaits the Lord’s followers in paradise.

Finally, Jesus summarizes, “The Spirit gives life, the flesh is useless” and so the reality of the glorified body is the answer to accusations of cannibalism on one hand and a tempering of belief that approaches the Eucharist as a mere symbol on the other.

The Gospel says that many of his disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied him. They could not bear the tension, the discontinuity between the promise of an eternal life -- so close that they could almost taste it – and the often painful and sordid reality of life here and now. Theirs was a “Sacramental problem,” how could the glorious eternal be contained in the not-so-glorious here and now.

Many of us may today find ourselves at a similar cusp. We find the tension between the eternal promises of our church and the persistent moral failures of her leadership too much to bear. We thought our greatest sacramental challenge was to believe that this stuff – the poor excuse for bread, this insipid wine – is truly Jesus Christ, the Eternal Word of God, body blood soul and divinity. We thought that was the challenge.

But now, can this hierarchical Church, really be for us the abiding presence in our world of the incarnate Son of God -- a church in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, holy and without blemish as Saint Paul wrote.

I feel that this cusp to have a particularly acute double-edge for me and my fellow priests. I am not a child molester or a facilitator of such; but I am a sinner in many other ways. I am selfish, neglectful, proud, impatient, imprudent and intemperate. Knowing this, I’m may also be too ready to cut my fellows a little too much slack. I have to go to confession too, and I never find it easy. Can I really stand in persona Christi – in the person of Christ -- for you?

Perhaps the best we can do in moments like this is to respond like Peter and the others:

Where else we gonna go? Back to our former lives, lives of unbelief, of indifference or cynicism, back to a life of “useless flesh?” Alas, we have come to believe that this sorry Church of ours remains the chosen spouse of our Lord. We believe she still contains the words of eternal life, and that she represents the way, the truth, and the life. Let us love her, pray for her, defend and care for her. And, yes, when needed discipline and correct her, but never abandon her...AMEN.