6 May 2022
Friday of the Third Week of Easter
“How can this man give us his Flesh to eat?”
Is it so unusual, brothers and sisters? Do we not eat the flesh of animals for our own sustenance? “Behold, the Lamb of God!” John the Baptist cried, “who takes away the sins of the world!” (John 1:29): the Law commands that the lamb must be consumed, as it is food for the journey ahead. The lamb is sacrificed and dies in the place of sinners; its life was given for the life of our souls, its flesh is given as life for our bodies. Through the lamb, the whole person is provided for by God: even more so by His Son.
But even within our own human experience, our own mother, as we grew within her womb, silently said to us, “This is my body…this is my blood…” and she bears in her own flesh the scars and proofs of her own passion in delivering us to newness of life, does she not? That we might be born into everlasting life God, too, through His Incarnate Son, too, gives us His Body and Blood. Does He not say through the Prophet Isaiah “Can a mother forget her infant, be without tenderness for the child of her womb? Even should she forget, I will never forget you,” (Isaiah 49:15).
Even more apparent to us is the reality of our body: can I not say to any part of my body “This is my body, this is my blood?” When a member of the body is cut off from the rest, it dies, for it receives life through its connection to the flesh, from the blood that courses through every artery, vessel, and capillary. “…in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body…now you are Christ’s body, and individually parts of it,” (1 Corinthians 12:13, 27). As members of His Body, we are nourished by His Flesh and Blood, just as our members are nourished likewise. Thus Jesus can say, “Whoever eats my Flesh and drinks my Blood remains in me and I in him.”
“How can this man give us his Flesh to eat?” the crowd asks. If we truly believe in Jesus, if we are doing the works of the Father and are receiving the food that is due for that work, how could He not give us Himself? God told Noah after the waters receded that he could eat any living creature that moves about, but “only meat with its lifeblood still in it you shall not eat,” (Genesis 9:4) for, as Leviticus spells out, “…the life of the flesh is in the blood,” (Leviticus 17:11), and the mixing of an animal’s lifeblood with that of a human would be an abomination. But the mixing of the lifeblood of God and man…that is precisely what Jesus offers to those who will believe in Him. Just as God has eternal life, should we receive that life within us we, too, shall come to have eternal life, and Jesus says, “…I shall raise [you] on the last day.”