The bread that does not perish and our vocation

Today’s gospel (John 6: 52-59) presents us with another part of the episode that we have been following all week. Jesus continues his teaching on the Eucharist, and His listeners sink into ever deeper and deeper bewilderment and confusion. What is Jesus communicating to His listeners and to us in these moments?

I imagine Jesus in the 21st century having to sit through an obligatory workshop on pastoral homiletics where He finds himself subject to the judgment of pulpit experts who believe they have mastered the means of communication by trotting out a down-to-earth anecdote, a cheap admission of their own human frailty, and a reference to the latest drivel on the television. I have to say I also imagine Him addressing them as He addressed Saint Peter: get behind me Satan. Your thoughts are not of God but of man. With a wink of course!

Jesus does not spare his listeners in Capernaum. He does not tailor His message to their needs. He does not seek to connect with them and make them feel that He is just one of them really. He does not, as the saying goes these days, get down with the kids.

Instead, this teacher of teachers assaults their minds by drawing back a veil on the eternal drama of His life in the Father and on the temporal drama of the call He offers his listeners to enter into the communion of the Holy Trinity. We use the word ‘communion’ as a reference to the sacrament that is confected in the Holy Mass and distributed to the faithful. And yet its first meaning has nothing to do with us or indeed to do with the Holy Sacrament in itself, but rather gives expression to the internal life of the Blessed Trinity. The original communion is that in which the Father begets the Son, and both together breathe forth the Holy Spirit, in a perpetual giving of the divine essence in three persons equal and coeternal. If we find this hard to understand, it is because it is hard to understand; nay, impossible, at least for our minds. It is the deepest of our holy mysteries. It cannot be boiled down to the level of a funny anecdote, a cheap admission, or even a handbook for dummies that sells in the millions.

His listeners are scandalised by the idea of eating His flesh and drinking His blood. Yet the real scandal here, if only they knew it - or rather the real surprise - is the invitation to commune in the life of the Son who Himself communes in the life of the Father in the love of the Holy Spirit.

He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood lives in me …as I … draw my life from the Father.

The invitation to live in Him is the root of what in COLW we call our personal vocation. And our personal vocations are so varied not because humans have existed in their billions throughout the centuries and we cannot all do the same job (as if vocation were primarily our job in life), but because there can never be enough humans to reflect the endlessly rich and varied goodness of the God who shares His very self with us.

It is for this reason also that vocation is not primarily an exercise in our self-definition, a project for our fulfilment, or a kind of subconscious therapy to make us feel like our gifts are recognised and valued. Our gifts would be recognised and valued in the eyes of the Eternal Lord, even if we found ourselves stranded on a desert island for the rest of our natural lives; even if we found our ambitions thwarted and ourselves surrounded by apparent futility in a desert world of hi-tech secularism apparently exorcised of God's presence. And while it is fully human to need the company of others, it is our fallen natures that clamour for attention and for that sense of public self-realisation (in which our God-given talents are recognised) which is the most subtle form of the bread that perishes. 

In such a dumb pursuit of perishing bread, we miss the richness and depth of a personal communion with Christ who, if only we surrendered fully to Him, could either deploy us to transform the entire world (if that were our mission), or simply spend eternity delighting in this creature who by His grace has also become His child (and ‘praise of His glory’, like St Elizabeth of the Trinity). Our personal vocation gives us no leverage on the world; it calls us into something much greater by which the world and we are defined, despite our infidelities, despite our ingratitude.

Let us not look down on the scandalised congregation of the synagogue of Capernaum. In so far as we do not embrace all the implications of our personal vocation, and revel in the meaning of communion as an internal sharing in the inner life of the God of Eternal Love, we are just as unbelieving and as sceptical a congregation as they ever were.