20th Sunday Year B - Homily 3

Homily 3 – 2012 

It's vivid, strong language we're hearing today: flesh given for the life of the world, engaging with it by eating that flesh and drinking blood, and the transformation it brings about: drawing life from, living for ever, living in Christ and Christ living in us.

The Christ who, from his point of view, gave his life for the life of the world, in fact had that life savagely taken from him.  Who was responsible for that brutal death?  Pilate who ordered his execution?  The Jewish priests who brought him to Pilate and demanded his death?  Judas who betrayed him?  The crowd that shouted for his death?  The many who simply stood by and did nothing?  The disciples who, at his arrest, deserted him in fear?  Do we need stop there?

Why did they all do what they did in the way that they did it?  Because they were human - like us.  Because violence is the world's accepted way to deal with people who threaten or inconvenience us.  Self-interest and violence are a universal condition.  We might call it: the sin of the world.  And it is there in the hearts of us all – in different guises, to different degrees, but there just the same, often unrecognised, hidden under more acceptable labels: common sense, the natural thing to do, self-defence, national interest, the demands of the market, and so on …  Those more closely involved in crucifying Jesus were simply the ones through whom the violence and self-absorption present in us all took  practical shape.

Yet, from the point of view of Jesus the victim, his death became the most intense expression of the opposite: of his love for this world that killed him.  He gave his flesh for the life of the world.  And today, at this Mass, he gives to us, complicit as we are in the same violence that killed him, that flesh of his to eat and his spilt blood to wash it down with.  We took his life, and through that very sin of ours, he gives us life.

But the process of becoming alive is not mechanical.  The bread and wine are sacraments, symbols of Jesus' flesh and blood - symbols that contain the reality they express.  They are not the only symbols.  We eat the bread and drink the wine – and our eating and drinking are symbols - symbols of, as he put it, our drawing life from him; somehow enabling, again as he put it, our living in him and his living in us.

It is not only the bread and wine that are transformed.  We who feast on them do so in the hope that we might be transformed - transformed.  Transformed into him…  Transformed from our instinctive self-focus, self-protectiveness, our hidden violence, … transformed into people who, like Jesus, deliberately take the option to move beyond self-interest, to abandon the sterile ways of rivalry, opposition and mutual harm, to choose instead to love, and, in the process, to change our world.

Today, as we eat the bread and drink the wine – as we eat his flesh and drink his blood – very conscious of our complicity in the world's murderous ways, we do so together, complicit, now, in the ways of love and inclusion, breaking the one loaf and sharing the one cup.  But, whereas our transformation depends totally on Jesus, it depends equally on ourselves – on our choice to co-operate with his Spirit as we find ourselves empowered to love, to forgive, to listen, to dialogue, and to pick ourselves up each time we fall and begin again.  As we painfully die to our violent ways, slowly we undergo God.