Eat and drink 'worthily'

By Father Vincent Hawkswell

17th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
July 30
1st Reading: 2 Kings 4:42-44
2nd Reading: Eph. 4:1-6
Gospel: Jn. 6:1-15

This Sunday’s First Reading tells how Elisha fed 100 people on 20 loaves of barley and ears of grain. The Gospel Reading tells how Jesus fed 5,000 people on five barley loaves and two fish, with 12 baskets of food left over.

This Sunday is the first of five when we listen to Jesus’s promise to give us His Body to eat and His Blood to drink. On two of them, we also hear how God fed people in the Old Testament. (This year the Feast of the Transfiguration of the Lord takes precedence over the 18th Sunday in Ordinary, or numbered, Time.)

Most of Jesus’s contemporaries did not believe that He could transmit God’s life to us by giving us His Flesh to eat, and not even His apostles knew how He was going to do it. Most people do not believe it today. Even we who do can grow careless about it.

It is God Who provides even the natural food we need. He made this clear to the Israelites by feeding them with manna in the desert and to Elijah by feeding him through the angel in the wilderness. Moreover, it is He Who ordained how our bodies should process this food so as to maintain our natural life.

If God can do all that, why should He not supply the Food we need to maintain our divine life, the God-life with which we were reborn at our baptism? "Let Me solemnly assure you," Jesus said: "if you do not eat the Flesh of the Son of Man and drink His Blood, you have no life in you.... Just as the Father, Who has life, sent Me, and I have life because of the Father, so the man who feeds on Me will have life because of Me."

Belief essential

However, St. Paul warned us against accepting this food carelessly. "Whoever eats the Bread or drinks the cup of the Lord unworthily sins against the Body and Blood of the Lord," he said. "A man should examine himself first; only then should he eat of the Bread and drink of the cup. He who eats and drinks without recognizing the Body eats and drinks a judgement on himself."

To properly "recognize" the Body of Christ, we must first believe that bread and wine have been transubstantiated, or transformed in their very substance, into His Body and Blood.

"It is not possible to give Communion to a person who is not baptized or to one who rejects the full truth of the faith regarding the Eucharistic Mystery," said Pope John Paul II in his 2003 encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia. Moreover, Catholics, "while respecting the religious convictions of [their] separated brethren, must refrain from receiving the communion distributed in their celebrations, so as not to condone an ambiguity about the nature of the Eucharist and, consequently, to fail in their duty to bear clear witness to the truth."

Accordingly, all ministers of Holy Communion, whether priests, as the ordinary ministers, or lay people, as extraordinary ministers, must remain alert in distributing Hosts. It is very easy for us to fall into a careless rhythm: "The Body of Christ. The Body of Christ. The Body of Christ."

We must be careful to allow each communicant time to signify his or her belief in the Real Presence by responding "Amen," before we place the Host on the hand or tongue. As far as possible, we must make sure that communicants consume the Host and do not carry it out of church or even back to their pews.

State of grace

A few years ago, a Protestant pastor from a nearby parish brought me a host which he had found in one of his hymn books. Guessing that it had come from a Catholic church, he had kept it, he said, knowing What we believe it to be. I did not know whether it had been consecrated or not, but I consumed it with the utmost reverence and offered an apology to God.

In this respect, all the faithful should do their part in guarding the Body of Christ. We do not have to watch our fellow-communicants like policemen, but we should not hesitate to stop someone we see walking away from the altar carrying the Host.

However, having faith is not the only prerequisite for us to receive Christ’s Body and Blood worthily, Pope John Paul said; we must also "persevere in sanctifying grace and love, remaining within the Church bodily as well as in our heart."

Therefore, he said, "I desire to reaffirm that in the Church there remains in force, now and in the future, the rule by which the Council of Trent gave concrete expression to the Apostle Paul’s stern warning when it affirmed that, in order to receive the Eucharist in a worthy manner, one must first confess one’s sins, when one is aware of mortal sin."

Only God and we ourselves know whether we are in a state of grace, Pope John Paul admitted, but he added that the Church "cannot fail to feel directly involved" in cases of "outward conduct which is seriously, clearly, and steadfastly contrary to the moral norm." In fact, he quoted the Code of Canon Law, which states that those who "obstinately persist in manifest grave sin" are not to be admitted to Eucharistic Communion.

"There is one body and one Spirit," St. Paul says in the Second Reading, and Pope John Paul said that it is "Eucharistic Communion" which "confirms the Church in her unity as the Body of Christ." Let us, then, respond to St. Paul’s call to "lead a life worthy of the calling to which [we] have been called."