Receiving Communion

John 6: 51-58

I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.” 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.”

 Discussion Questions:

1. Anything we do on a regular basis can become routine. Is there something in the way you receive Eucharist each week that helps remind you of the Christ-partnership occurring inside of you? How do you keep Eucharist from becoming routine?
2. How would you explain “your experience” of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, to someone who has no knowledge of it?
3. There is a saying; We are what we eat. How does consuming Christ at Eucharistic help you to become Christ for others in the day-to-day of your life? Can you give an example?
4. Eternal life starts now. Do you think of eternal life as a “Christ Consciousness” that is always present, or do you tend to mentally push the whole thing into an “end of life project” where being with God is only for after death?
5. In the quiet moments after communion, what are you doing, thinking, and feeling inside?

Gospel Context

Margaret Nutting Ralph PHD
John 6: 51-58

Today’s Gospel reading begins with the last sentence of last Sunday’s reading. “I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.”

As we have already learned, it is much easier to understand what John is teaching in this discourse if we think of the words that John places on Jesus’ lips as being directed to John’s contemporaries. The words are not understandable to a person contemporary with Jesus. John makes this clear by constantly picturing those to whom Jesus is speaking as failing to understand. The Jews who are listening to Jesus “quarreled among themselves, saying, ‘How can this man give us his flesh to eat understanding gives Jesus an opportunity to explain.

Jesus says, 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 vou. “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day.” The words that have upset the Jews, “flesh” and “eat,” are repeated. In fact, both of these words appear six times in today’s short reading. Rather than backing away from this upsetting concept or explaining that he didn’t really mean “flesh” and “eat,” Jesus seems to insist on it: “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.”

Of course, John’s audience and we are able to understand that Jesus is referring to Eucharist. Remember that John’s audience is looking for the risen Christ. John is teaching his audience that the risen Christ is present in Eucharist. Eucharist is truly the body and blood of Christ. Those who receive Eucharist are with the risen Christ.

Notice that as Jesus speaks of his presence in Eucharist he fluctuates back and forth between the present and future tenses. Emphasis is added here to the future tenses to point this out. First, he says that ‘whoever eats this bread will live forever.” Then he says, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life.” In other words, eternal life is not something to be hoped for, but something already received and begun. He promises that “whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him,” and then says, “The one who feeds on me will have life because of me.” John is teaching his end-of-the-century audience the already but not yet nature of the coming of the kingdom and of Jesus’ return. It is true that the church is waiting for a dramatic culminating event. Jesus refers to this himself in today’s reading when he says, “… and I will raise him on the last day.” However, John wants his audience to understand that while the culminating event has not occurred, the church is not without the presence of Christ in the meantime. Those who receive Eucharist are in Christ, and Christ is in them right now.

Receiving Communion

Reflection
John Shea

When I was growing up, more than a few years ago, one of the liturgical practices was a meditation after communion. When people returned to their places after receiving communion, they usually knelt and, putting their head in their hands, focused on the presence of Christ who had just entered into them. It was a “mini-meditation” because the celebrant usually resumed the final prayer of Mass rather quickly. In those day priests were often clocked to see how fast they could say Mass. But many people stayed on after Mass to continue the interior activity they had begun.

I have no idea what other people did in that post-communion quiet. In fact, I do not remember in any detail what I did. But I do know that for me, it was the most meaningful part of Mass. It was guaranteed intimacy with Christ. For a short time during and after the host dissolved, God was immediately accessible to an inward glance. In my growing up years this was incredibly important. In my later years this importance has returned.

But there was also what I can only call a transcendent evanescence, a sense that this divine presence dissolved and went beyond. I could be there with it, but I could not hold onto it. And there was that moment when it was over, when somehow, I knew it was time to move on. I was never sure if I left the presence of Christ in the church because I decided to leave, or if Christ, by the very nature of his vastness, decided to withdraw. But suddenly the everyday world was in my mind, modified by my time with Christ, but as insistent and demanding as always. I knew one eating would never do it. I would have to return again.

I enjoyed this post-communion activity, but I never fully understood it. Then I came upon three mystical prose poems of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, collected under the heading “Christ in the World of Matter,” {Hymn of the Universe, trans. Simon Bartholomew [New York: Harper & Row, 1965] 42-58).  In all three stories a friend is telling Teilhard of his mystical experiences of Christ. The stories move Tielhard to new levels: “After listening to my friend, my heart began to burn within me, and my mind awoke to a new and higher vision of things. I began to realize vaguely that the multiplicity of evolutions into which the world-process seems to us to be split up is in fact fundamentally the working out of one single mystery. The friend is a priest on a World War I battlefield in France. He carries the Eucharistic species in a pyx (a small round container that is carried next to the heart.) “I suddenly realized just how extraordinary and how disappointing it was to be thus holding so close to oneself the world, and the very source of life without being able to possess it inwardly, without being able to either penetrate it or to assimilate it.” This is the emphasis of this Gospel text. There is a need to be incorporated into Christ by assimilating his consciousness, to eat his body and drink his blood.

So, the priest “gave myself Holy Communion”—ate the flesh of the Son of Man. But what he expected to happen did not happen. Although the bread had become “flesh of my flesh, nevertheless it remained outside of me.” He marshals his attention, humbles himself, purifies his heart— all in a “vain yet blessed attempt!” He envisions the host as always ahead of him, “further on in a greater permeability of my being to the divine influences.” Although he continues to penetrate more deeply into the host, its center was “receding from me as it drew me on.

Since he could not reach the inner depths of the host, he decides to focus on the surface. “But there a new infinity awaited me.” When he tries to hold onto the surface of the host, he found that what he was holding onto was “not the host at all, but one or other of the thousand entities which make up our lives: a suffering, a joy, a task, a friend to love or to console …” The innermost depths of the host had eluded him and now the surface of the host was likewise eluding him, “leaving me at grips with the entire universe which had reconstituted itself and drawn itself forth from its sensible appearances.” In eating the consciousness of Christ, he discovered both God and the universe were beyond his capturing. He states simply, “I will not dwell on the feeling of rapture produced in me by this revelation of the universe placed between Christ and myself like a magnificent prey”.

Christians eat the body and drink the blood of the Son of Man (the fully Human One) on a regular basis, some every Sunday, some every day. But anything done on a regular basis can become routine. For those of us prone to habituation, it is good to dip into the mystical consciousness of the Eucharist. Receiving communion can initiate entry into the consciousness of Christ, and the consciousness of Christ, no matter how it is presented, is always quite a trip.

Selections from Breaking Open the Lectionary: Lectionary Readings in Their Biblical Context for RCIA, Faith Sharing Groups, and Lectors—Cycle B, by Margaret Nutting Ralph, Copyright © 2005 by Margaret Nutting Ralph. Paulist Press, Inc., New York/Mahwah, NJ. Reprinted by permission of Paulist Press, Inc.

Spiritual Commentaries and Teachings are excerpted from The Spiritual Wisdom of the Gospels for Christian Preachers and Teachers by John Shea © 2004 by Order of Saint Benedict. Published by Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota. Used with permission.