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OMELIE / Omelie EN

26/6/2016
18/06/2017 -  The Holy Body and blood of Jesus - A 

18/06/2017 -  The Holy Body and blood of Jesus - A 

1st reading Deut 8,2-3.14-16 * from Psalm 147 * 2nd reading 1 Cor 10,16-17 * Gospel John 6,51-58


In the prayer we asked Jesus: “O God, grant us, we pray, so to revere the sacred mysteries of your Body and Blood that we may always experience in ourselves the fruits of your redemption”. This is really a beautiful prayer, but I ask myself: do I really understand what I just asked for? And also: is it really this the thing that I am looking for above all others? The Lord is going to answer me, because I have been praying with you, and he answers in such a deep way that goes beyond my ability to understand, even more, He is listening to me even more attentively than I could possibly think. However, I still ask myself: what does “to revere” mean? Let us read again the first Reading, that is telling me precisely about Moses trying to revive the faith of the people that was walking with him in the desert, in order for it to become “living faith”. And what did he do, then? He tried to remember: “Remember” and “Do not forget”. Remember everything you have already done to obey God, all the troubles you have faced and overcome, the temptations you have won, but also all the benefices that you have received. The people had to remember also the things it learned thanks to the concrete experience, that “human beings live not on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of Yahweh”. The “living faith” lives on memories brought back with gratitude, and not with complaints: do not give weight to the evil in your sins and in the consequential sufferings, give weight to all the benefits you received for free from God, instead. And again “do not forget”: therefore, do try hard to remember all the times in which you have been liberated from thirst, hunger, from the bites of venomous snakes. My “living faith”, to be truly so, needs the commitment and the effort to keep memory alive. I have a lot of events to remember, as well, events that influenced me during my childhood, my youth, and during all the years up to yesterday. Each one of us has memories, significant and beautiful, true wonders worked by God. The memory of them keeps our faith alive.

Among my memories, those more suitable for keeping faith alive, there are above all the words of the Lord, Jesus. Today we heard again those he has spoken in Capernaum, after the miracle of the loaves and fishes. The crowd could still remember that occasion, and reached the other side of the lake in search of Him. They thought they could benefit again of the free gift of the bread, such a spectacular sign, but He did it precisely only as a sign: a piece of evidence from which they should have deduced that He was the Messiah. The people instead had not understood, and was searching for Jesus like he was a person working cheap miracles. He spends His words in order to explain that sign, so that they can finally understand, and open their hearts to Him. Then, instead of searching for Him to witness a new miracle, they would search for Him to say: “Here I am, Jesus, I am at your service in order to fulfil your plans, in order to do what you deign to tell me.” This really would be “to revere” somebody! Instead of searching for Him they were searching for more bread to eat, so he says: “As you please, search then not for something that is useful just for a moment, but for something that lasts forever: eat me, my body, my life. I am the true bread. Absorb me to become me. In order to really live as God wants, you must become one thing with me. You will eat me, you will receive in you me, my love for the Father, my obedience to his will”.

We adore “the sacred mysteries of your Body and Blood”. We worship this mystery of which we derive sustenance we recognize that all God’s love is in it. First and foremost, we eat the Body and the Blood of the Lord, but we eat knowing that we will be transformed, obtaining all that love for ourselves.

I am aware, of course, that this is a complicated topic for somebody who is used to consider only material things, and even impossible to understand. As a matter of fact, all those people who were listening to Jesus started to angrily grumble and, in the end, they left one by one leaving Him alone. Only those who had already started to love Him and to make efforts for Him stayed.

The wish we are making to Jesus is, after all, this “that we may always experience in ourselves the fruits of your redemption”. What are those fruits we are talking about? The very first and the very last one at the same time is being able to live in communion with the Father, and therefore with all His children. This is very well highlighted by the Apostle in the second Reading. “We, although there are many of us, are one single body, for we all share in the one loaf”: the communion we live among us becomes an interior drive for behaving like siblings, sharing all the gifts with which God enriches our life.

We revere Jesus while eating His Body, broken for us. We will pay attention to really revere Him, not only by words, pretending to be disciples of His. And in case we realize that we have been ignoring Him in our choices and we have been behaving in a way contrary to His Word, we will promise ourselves right away to take concrete and bold steps towards conversion to Him.