OMELIE / Omelie EN

11 giu 2023

11/06/2023 – Corpus Christi - year A

11/06/2023 – Corpus Christi - year A

Reading 1 DT 8,2-3.14-16 Psalm 147 Reading 2 1 COR 10,16-17 Gospel JN 6,51-58

God’s Word is giving us three pieces of advice: firstly, to remember God’s work, secondly to keep ourselves fed proportionately to our life of children of God, thirdly to do so with the bread and the wine which are establishing the communion between us and Jesus.

The people is invited by Moses to remember the spiritual journey God has led it on while it was in the desert. The spiritual journey was a journey towards the true humility of the heart, a humility which can stand in front of God to ask Him not what we like, but what He thinks necessary for our life. To guide the people to this humility, God had to test it through various sufferings, hunger, thirst, the poison of the snakes. Every time He was the one to rescue the people: manna, meat, the water from the rock, the bronze serpent were all miracles of the love God used to show them how effective was their humility.

The manna and the quails came after Moses’ humble prayer, instead the water from the rock through his obedience, the safety from the poison of the snakes was granted as a reward for the humility of every single person who was looking at the statue lifted on top of the rod. So everyone needed to understand the need to be focused on God, to receive from Him what is necessary for our life. Everyone received confirmation that the Word of God is life for us, indispensabile food, without which we would be slaves like the people in Egypt had been or at the mercy of death like the people in the desert.

The food that God has given us is the “the living bread that came down from heaven” which Jesus is talking about. It is He Himself, His very person. He is the Word which comes from God’s mouth, the necessary gift so our life may not be extinguished in those few days we get to live, and may not have just a fleeting meaning and influence. They who eat and drink Jesus’s body and blood, so they who welcome in themselves His person, enjoy a life deserving of this name, a life which is defined as «eternal». This is the life Adam was looking for. This is the extra that cannot be enjoyed without God’s intervention, the peace and the joy we cannot give ourselves, not even if we spend all our money for them, not even if we go very far looking for them. I knew a young person who, looking for joy and peace and true life, has wondered around half the world reaching even India. I wonder what he thought he could find in the shadow of Hindu temples or in the cloisters of Buddhist monasteries! He told me he had really found what he was looking for, but only under the tent of some nuns who, for the love of Jesus, were taking care of abandoned children. With their help he has found Jesus, and Jesus has become his bread for the rest of his life. Today still he is living of Jesus, and he has entrusted Him with his life.

Jesus is the bread that God has thought about giving us. He knew and knows we need Him and only Him. I do not find durable joy unless in his presence. I do not have anything in me without him. When I meet some unhappy person, and it happens quite often, if I did not have Jesus in my heart I would let myself be influenced by that sadness and I would not be able to counter that suffering confidence I receive. By eating “the body” of Jesus, so hanging on Him in every possible way – through the Word, the Eucharist, the prayer – I am sure I can be of help to those who meet me: they can enjoy a little bit of heaven.

Saint Paul is reminding us of a third aspect of God’s gift: communion. He gives it to us through the cup and the bread we share, the cup of Christ’s blood and the bread we break in His memory. These gifts make us a single body by establishing the communion with Jesus Christ Himself. In Him we too are not strangers to one another, in Him we feel all siblings.

We live these truths every Sunday, nay, every day, every time we take part in the Eucharist. We can feel them particularly alive today, because the whole Church is thinking of them, the whole Church adores this mystery and she testifies it to the world by leaving the churches to sing in the streets about the love for Jesus and the thankfulness to the Father, to tell everyone, also to those who do not believe, that we live of the bread from heaven, so of the God’s love. By singing in the streets while we carry with us the bread of life, we show to the world our will for peace and unity, and we confirm the certainty that peace and unity and fraternity can come only from Jesus, the Son that God has sent to love us.