Gospel John 6:52-59
The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying, "How can this man give us his Flesh to eat?" Jesus said to them, "Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the Flesh of the Son of Man and drink his Blood, you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my Flesh and drinks my Blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day. For my Flesh is true food, and my Blood is true drink. Whoever eats my Flesh and drinks my Blood remains in me and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats this bread will live forever." These things he said while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum.
Reflection It’s fascinating to me that when Jesus comes to the end of his ministry, he reveals the essence of the mystery that is the hope of all of us.
God living in us. God guiding us, God using His power to help us heal one another. And he uses such a dramatic statement about standing in front of a crowd in the synagogue, and he's already a sort of a questionable character. And he screams out something that nobody would be able to make sense of by hearing it. Eat my flesh, drink my blood.
I mean, that's that's really a bizarre thing. It's almost like he's stirring their imaginations on purpose so that they can say, this man who now has the authority of miracles, is claiming something that is absolutely out of our categories, because this new category that they are bringing into the world, this category of God living in you is radical.
Closing Prayer Father, the words that Jesus spoke to us were so difficult in one sense to understand, but at the same time so rich, so loaded with meaning that when we ponder them, we grow slowly into the fullness of what it really means. You are choosing to live within us. You dwell in our hearts, You are in me and I am in you. That is a mystery that I can only surrender to without really understanding exactly how it works. But to know that it is changes everything. Because I'm no longer doing what I do alone, out of my own understanding or my own strength. It is you in me that does the real work. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, Amen.