My dear friends, today’s readings shake the foundations of casual faith. They present us with the intense, inescapable reality of who Jesus ...
My dear friends, today’s readings shake the foundations of casual faith. They present us with the intense, inescapable reality of who Jesus is and how intimately He binds Himself to us. We will explore this profound mystery using three words: Blindness, Body, and Blood.
Our first word is Blindness. In our first reading, we meet Saul of Tarsus. He is a man convinced that he is completely right. He is aggressively hunting down Christians, dragging them in chains, believing he is doing God a favor. He is physically sighted, but spiritually, he is completely blind to the truth of love. It takes a literal flash of light from heaven to knock him off his high horse and blind his physical eyes, so that his spiritual eyes can finally be opened. Often, our own pride and self-righteousness act as a blindness. We judge others, we hold onto bitterness, and we think we are perfectly justified in doing so. Sometimes, God has to allow us to be knocked down by life just to get our attention and cure our spiritual blindness.
When Saul is knocked down, he encounters our second word: Body. A voice says to him, "Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?" Saul asks who is speaking, and the voice replies, "I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting." Notice that Jesus does not say, "Why are you persecuting my followers?" He says, "Me." This is the moment Saul realizes the profound truth of the Church: the Church is not a club. It is the mystical Body of Christ on earth. What we do to the least of our brothers and sisters, we are literally doing to Jesus. When we gossip about someone, we are striking the Body of Christ. When we help a neighbor, we are tending to the wounds of Christ.
This deep, intimate union leads us to our final word: Blood. In the Gospel, Jesus doubles down on the Eucharist. The Jews are arguing about how He can give them His flesh to eat. Instead of softening His words, Jesus makes them stronger: "Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you." He is not speaking in metaphors. He is offering us a union so close that His very life force, His Blood, courses through our veins. We are what we eat. By consuming the Eucharist, we are drawn into the very life of the Trinity.
Brothers and sisters, let us ask God to cure our blindness. Let us treat each other with the reverence due to the Body of Christ, and let us approach the altar today with profound awe, ready to receive His saving Blood. Amen.
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