No onions

A homily for the Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 18, 2024

Prv 9:1-6, Eph 5:15-20, Jn 6:51-58

Here’s a story about how dense I can be sometimes.

The first time I heard the phrase “six-foot sub,” I wasn’t sure if the speaker was talking about a new Navy vessel or a second-string basketball player coming off the bench.

Yes, I knew what a submarine sandwich was (and is); Dad treated my brothers and me to No. 2s from Elsie’s, and later, from Joyce’s, at the start and end of every semester from first grade through high school graduation.

But those ham-and-capicola subs were one-person two-fisted concoctions at six inches, not crowd-feeders at six feet. I just couldn’t see it.

Besides, where would somebody get a roll that big, anyway? That’s a whole lotta bread.

And yet, the party sub can serve as an apt metaphor for part of what Jesus promises us when he describes himself as the Bread of Life.

For the third weekend in a row, our Gospel passage — again, from John — quotes Jesus referring to himself in bakery terms. The Bread of Life. Bread come down from Heaven. Divine sustenance. The main course at the heavenly banquet that awaits us in our eternal reward.

Simple. Touchable. Relatable, especially to the Israelites who remembered how manna in the Sin Desert was a lifesaver.

And important, considering how we’ve heard about divine bread three times now. (Don’t forget: Three is a mystical number.)

But this week, Jesus throws in a detail that makes some people’s heads explode:

[T]he bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.

So, cannibalism?

Eating the hearts of vanquished foes, the way pagan warriors did through hundreds of years of fighting over territories in the Middle East? To absorb the courage with which they fought?

No, thank God.

Well, not exactly.

We have the synoptic Gospel accounts of the Last Supper, in which Jesus established the Eucharist by breaking bread and sharing wine, for us to understand that he transformed — transforms — the substance and essence of grain and grapes into his sacred body and blood.

The body and blood that Jesus would surrender to the whips and scourges and ridicule and torture and Via Dolorosa and splintered wood of the cross. The body and blood that Jesus would sacrifice to atone for the sins of every person who ever lived or who was yet to be born.

For us to take and eat, for us to take and drink.

For us to nourish ourselves physically and, even more so, for us to nourish ourselves spiritually and communally.

For us to bring the Christ into ourselves literally and palpably.

For us to become what we eat.

For us to become the Body of Christ, continuing his work on Earth, caring for the least among us, caring for all of God’s Creation, seeing Christ in each other, being Christ for each other.

Being Christ individually according to our God-given gifts and talents, and together as a people, with those skills interwoven.

So, what about that hefty hoagie, that giant grinder?

Back in my college days, in the heady afterglow of Vatican II, the handful of us Catholic kids who actually gathered for Sunday Mass semi-regularly would sit on the floor in a small private dining room off the main cafeteria. We sang (or faked it), offered our petitions, and recited much of the Eucharistic prayer in unison, though not the consecration parts. We recognized those words belonged/belong to the presiding presbyter.

The priest consecrated a large loaf and a full chalice, and just as the Apostles did at the Last Supper, we took and ate and drank and passed the transubstantiated bread and wine to the person beside us.

Breaking of the bread of life. Sharing of the cup of salvation.

Literal Communion.

Literally in Comm. Union.

Aware that there is someone beside us, actually or figuratively, to whom we are commanded to share Christ’s body and blood and infinite love with.

Indeed, that is a whole lotta bread.

Because today, there are a whole lotta mouths and and a whole lotta souls to feed.

We need only to look to our left and to our right to find them.