Friday of the Third Week of Easter
CHRIST LIVES IN ME
Introduction
“Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” This is the question of Jesus the Lord when he lets Saul, the persecutor, encounter him on the way to Damascus. Jesus identifies himself with his persecuted disciples. From that moment on, Saul will serve the Lord, whose life he will live. It is an encounter that radically changed Saul into Paul.
The Lord speaks to us today: “Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood live in me and I live in them.” This will be our encounter with Christ. May this encounter be so deep that it changes us.
Reading 1: Acts 9:1-20
9 1-2 All this time Saul was breathing down the necks of the Master’s disciples, out for the kill. He went to the Chief Priest and got arrest warrants to take to the meeting places in Damascus so that if he found anyone there belonging to the Way, whether men or women, he could arrest them and bring them to Jerusalem.
3-4 He set off. When he got to the outskirts of Damascus, he was suddenly dazed by a blinding flash of light. As he fell to the ground, he heard a voice: “Saul, Saul, why are you out to get me?”
5-6 He said, “Who are you, Master?”
“I am Jesus, the One you’re hunting down. I want you to get up and enter the city. In the city you’ll be told what to do next.”
7-9 His companions stood there dumbstruck—they could hear the sound, but couldn’t see anyone—while Saul, picking himself up off the ground, found himself stone-blind. They had to take him by the hand and lead him into Damascus. He continued blind for three days. He ate nothing, drank nothing.
10 There was a disciple in Damascus by the name of Ananias. The Master spoke to him in a vision: “Ananias.”
“Yes, Master?” he answered.
11-12 “Get up and go over to Straight Avenue. Ask at the house of Judas for a man from Tarsus. His name is Saul. He’s there praying. He has just had a dream in which he saw a man named Ananias enter the house and lay hands on him so he could see again.”
13-14 Ananias protested, “Master, you can’t be serious. Everybody’s talking about this man and the terrible things he’s been doing, his reign of terror against your people in Jerusalem! And now he’s shown up here with papers from the Chief Priest that give him license to do the same to us.”
15-16 But the Master said, “Don’t argue. Go! I have picked him as my personal representative to non-Jews and kings and Jews. And now I’m about to show him what he’s in for—the hard suffering that goes with this job.”
17-19 So Ananias went and found the house, placed his hands on blind Saul, and said, “Brother Saul, the Master sent me, the same Jesus you saw on your way here. He sent me so you could see again and be filled with the Holy Spirit.” No sooner were the words out of his mouth than something like scales fell from Saul’s eyes—he could see again! He got to his feet, was baptized, and sat down with them to a hearty meal.
19-21 Saul spent a few days getting acquainted with the Damascus disciples, but then went right to work, wasting no time, preaching in the meeting places that this Jesus was the Son of God. They were caught off guard by this and, not at all sure they could trust him, they kept saying, “Isn’t this the man who wreaked havoc in Jerusalem among the believers? And didn’t he come here to do the same thing—arrest us and drag us off to jail in Jerusalem for sentencing by the high priests?”
Gospel: Jn 6:52-59
52 At this, the Jews started fighting among themselves: “How can this man serve up his flesh for a meal?”
53-58 But Jesus didn’t give an inch. “Only insofar as you eat and drink flesh and blood, the flesh and blood of the Son of Man, do you have life within you. The one who brings a hearty appetite to this eating and drinking has eternal life and will be fit and ready for the Final Day. My flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. By eating my flesh and drinking my blood you enter into me and I into you. In the same way that the fully alive Father sent me here and I live because of him, so the one who makes a meal of me lives because of me. This is the Bread from heaven. Your ancestors ate bread and later died. Whoever eats this Bread will live always.”
59 He said these things while teaching in the meeting place in Capernaum.
Prayer
Our living and loving God,
how could we know the depth of your love,
if your Son had not become flesh of our flesh
and blood of our blood?
How could we ever have the courage
to live for one another and if necessary to die,
if he had not given up his body
and shed his blood for us?
Thank you for letting him stay in the Eucharist with us
and making himself our daily bread.
Let this bread be the food that empowers us,
to live and die as he did,
for one another and for you,
our living God, forever and ever.
Reflection:
28 April 2023
John 6:52-59
The Body of Christ is the Community
Understandably the Jews are deeply shocked at Jesus’ invitation to eat his flesh and drink his blood. It sounds like a primitive recipe for cannibalism. For Jews, drinking blood was an abomination because blood is the source of life, and the scriptures prohibited consuming blood.
To come into contact with blood would mean that a person immediately becomes ritually unclean. In the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:30-37), one of the reasons the priest and the Levite did not come to the help of the injured man lying on the road between Jericho and Jerusalem was that he was bleeding and the priest and Levite were travelling to the Temple. The woman with the chronic bleeding problem (Mark 5:25-34) did not dare reveal herself to the crowd or even to Jesus because she should not have been in such close proximity to people.
Jews only eat kosher meat, that is, meat from which blood has been drained. And here is Jesus inviting his listeners to drink his blood! Having heard these words so often, we no longer feel anything special about them.
Yet Jesus makes no apologies for what he said. On the contrary, he tells his hearers that they will not have life if they do not eat his flesh and drink his blood. “Whoever eats me will draw life from me.”
In our reflections on Chapter 6 of John this week, we attempted to understand Jesus’ invitation to eat his flesh and drink his blood. The goal is to assimilate completely into ourselves the whole thinking and acting style of Jesus, the very Person of Jesus. To be able to say with Paul, “I live, but not I. It is Christ who lives in me.” “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives in me, and I live in him.”
The Body and Blood of Christ imply much greater meaning than receiving Holy Communion. In the Gospel, Christ invites us to understand the Eucharist as part of his wider relationship. The Eucharist is primarily a community celebration of what we are – brothers and sisters who are the Body of Christ for each other and for the whole world. Jesus’ flesh and blood come to us through the Word of God and the sharing of the Bread and the Cup in the Liturgy. He comes to us also through every experience of love, appreciation and empathy we have in the community. The Eucharist is incomplete without the Body of Christ – the community!