NINETEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME - AUGUST 11, 2024

NINETEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

Every Christian accepts and believes that the Word was made Incarnate, came down from Heaven, and lived among us as one of us. However, few Christians understand what this moment, the Incarnation, means for us in the modern age when this historically occurred over two-thousand years ago. The truth is that the Word made Flesh, Jesus Christ, came to us as one of us and never left. If Christ came to us in a physical and tangible way that can be acknowledged through our senses at one point and we were told by him that he would never leave us, we must understand that he remains with us in a physical and tangible way in this age also. This is the Eucharist.

READ THIS SUNDAY'S MESSAGE

Most Christian denominations reject the belief in the Real Presence of the Eucharist. As Christians, they must accept that Christ remains with us, though this belief is almost always in the context of a spiritual presence. As we continue these Sunday Gospel readings focusing on the Bread of Life discourse in John 6, we are witnessing an increasingly frustrated Christ attempt to tell these crowds that the “bread of life” he has come to offer is not merely symbolic, merely spiritual, or something exterior to him. Jesus Christ is the bread that has come down from heaven that gives eternal life to those who eat of it. Jesus’ exasperation in this message, in which he doubles, triples, and even quadruples down on his teaching that he is the bread, is due to the fact that this sounds too strange for the crowds to accept it. Christ uses real words to make this message even more literal for interpretation. He tells us, “whoever eats this bread will live forever.” The Greek words translated for eating throughout this Chapter are transitioned: he moves from using phago to trogo. Phago was used more generally to refer to eating, but could have been interpreted to mean a symbolic consumption. His transition to trogo, on the other hand, further indicates his literal meaning in this scene, because this word is more literally translated as the act of “chewing” or “gnawing”. There is no room for a symbolic reading of this word being used. The last message of this particular passage from the Gospel is even more important to a literal understanding of the text: Christ specifically says, “the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.” Interestingly, Christ tells the crowd he has not offered this bread yet. He stands in front of them as fully Christ, but he has not given them this bread yet. This bread is his flesh, which we know was offered later at the Institution of the Eucharist and consummated in the sacrifice on the Cross. The Greek word for flesh, sarx, is used and understood to be the fleshy substance that covers the bone.