[00:00] Praise be Jesus and Mary, now and forever. The Gospel readings for all this week are taken from the second half of the sixth chapter of St. John's Gospel. It's where Jesus explains to us the bread of life. Reading St. John's Gospel, we can't help but realize that there really is something more to life, that something more is Jesus, Himself. Toward the end of His Gospel, St. John even explicitly tells us that everything that He

[00:33] wrote was written, "so that you may believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing, you may have life in His name," John 20:31. As we mentioned before, belief in Jesus isn't just merely intellectual, like believing that Babe Ruth played for the New York Yankees, even though he first played for the Red Sox, for whatever that's worth. Belief in Jesus means embracing the Gospel, living the Gospel, being faithful to the teachings

[01:03] of the Church. Belief means putting your money where your mouth is. It means living as a follower of Christ, whatever it may cost. And being a follower of Christ means not being content with the natural necessities of life. It means searching, seeking, striving for that something more, which truly makes life worth living. Jesus Himself has told us, "Whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever

[01:34] loses his life for My sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?" Matthew 16:25-26. Following Christ doesn't mean necessarily understanding everything. St. Anselm famously said, "I believe so that I may understand," not "I understand, therefore I believe." There are certain things that our own intelligence can only very dimly understand.

[02:07] For example, like the Blessed Trinity, being three divine persons in one God. To give an analogy, it would be like walking into New York City on a pitch-black night with no lights lighting up any part of the city. And all you have in your hand to navigate and see is a cheap Energizer flashlight. The city itself is already too big a reality for you to be able to take it all in. Turn out all the lights and walk into it with a small flashlight; it's even harder to comprehend.

[02:40] Similar with our relationship with God, although God cannot be measured because He's infinite, He's boundless, but He's also personal, and He's love itself. So He's a lot different than New York City. So following Christ means walking in faith and accepting what are called the hard sayings of Jesus and the hard sayings of the Church, too. Those hard sayings include, again, teachings about faith that we might find difficult to comprehend like the Immaculate Conception of Our Lady, like suffering, like the eternity

[03:12] of hell. And those hard sayings also include the moral teachings of Our Lord and of His Church that offend our selfish inclinations. One of those hard sayings of Christ and of His Church is exactly what the sixth chapter of St. John speaks about this week, the teaching on the Holy Eucharist. In the Holy Eucharist, we find that something more to life, which Jesus Himself and which is Jesus Himself, and which He wants to communicate to us.

[03:43] Jesus said to the people in Capernaum, He said, "Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in yourselves." John 6:53. That "truly, truly," which Jesus adds, means a solemn declaration, means I'm not kidding and I'm not just speaking figuratively. You must eat My flesh and drink My blood if you want to have eternal life. The verb which Jesus uses regarding eating His flesh is given to us in its Greek form

[04:17] by St. John, which is the word trogon. And it literally means to gnaw or chew on something. It's not just spiritual eating. It's the type of eating that you do when you sit down to dinner, or if you pick up something at a drive-thru menu at Wendy's or something like that. And the noun for flesh is sarx, which in St. John's Gospel means the concrete living Christ, the living, the concrete Man, the living Christ.

[04:51] In the sixth chapter discourse, Jesus says, "He who eats, trogon, My flesh, sarx, and drinks My blood has eternal life. And I will raise him up on the last day for My flesh, sarx, is true food and My blood is true drink. He who eats, trogon, My flesh, again sarx, and drinks My blood abides in Me and I in him as the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father.

[05:22] So he who eats Me, trogon Me, he also will live because of Me. This is the bread which came down from heaven. Not as the fathers ate and died, he who eats this bread will live forever." John 6:54-58. And St. John writes that as a result of this teaching, "many of Jesus's disciples withdrew and were not walking with Him anymore." John 6:66, because they understood that He was really talking about eating Him, eating

[05:57] His flesh, drinking His blood. Unfortunately, they didn't stick around for the Last Supper with Our Lord when they would have realized that the realism, which Jesus was insisting on, was not cannibalistic. It was sacramental, as we all know by now. Again, this is one of those hard sayings of Jesus that was hard to accept, and that was rejected not only by those who were His disciples in the first century in Palestine, but it was also rejected 1,500 years later by the Protestant reformers, by Martin Luther, by

[06:31] John Calvin, by the Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli, they were the three major protagonists of the Reformation. Luther said that in the Eucharist, the body and blood of Christ are present, he said, but that also the bread and wine are present at the same time. He said that Christ is present with the bread and in the bread, and that His presence remains only until the communion of the faithful, teachings which he would have known were heretical

[07:02] according to the Church, which teaches that after the consecration, the bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ. Only the accidents of bread and wine remain, so what you can see, taste, touch, smell. And the Church teaches that Christ's substantial presence remains as long as the accidents remain. So He's present in the tabernacle as we speak, contrary to Luther's opinion. Zwingli, for his part, said that Christ is present in the Eucharist only as a figure

[07:35] or as a sign, so He's not really present, according to the Swiss reformer. And Calvin, the French reformer, didn't agree with either of them, either Luther or Zwingli. He said that the consecrated bread and wine are signs and symbols of the union of Christ with His disciples, and that in receiving the Eucharist, the faithful receive the dynamic sacrificial force of Christ in the Eucharist. Again, not what the Church clearly taught and clearly teaches.

[08:06] Church's teachings on the Eucharist were not rejected by King Henry VIII in England, but since apostolic succession was eventually lost in the English Reformation, the ordained ministerial priesthood was also lost, and with the priesthood, the Eucharist was lost as well. It's the Catholic Church which safeguards not only the true teaching on the Holy Eucharist, but which also safeguards the Holy Eucharist itself.

[08:37] So again, that's something more to life is truly found in Jesus Himself, and Jesus is found in this life not only through prayer, through the Scriptures, through the teachings of the Church, through the good examples of His followers, through His grace, but Jesus is found personally, wholly in His body, blood, soul, and divinity in the Holy Eucharist. Without the Catholic Church, there would be no apostolic succession. Without the apostolic succession, there would be no ministerial priesthood.

[09:11] Without the ministerial priesthood, no sacrifice of the Mass. Without the sacrifice of the Mass, no Holy Eucharist. And without the Holy Eucharist, there would be no food, which gives us eternal life. So let's ask Our Lady, Mother of the Eucharist, for the grace to appreciate and to be able to feast on the gift of her Son's body and blood in this earthly pilgrimage of ours, this valley, this trail of tears in many, many ways for many of us.

[09:44] Praised be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.