Friday of the Third Week of Easter

Today's Mass Readings

“What IS the Good News, anyway?” This is a question that I first asked years ago, when I had some doubts about whether Christianity could be true. What could the Good News possibly have to do with me 2000 years later? Christians see Easter as very good, because of the resurrection – but this good news does require us to pause and consider how the resurrection of Jesus’ body might relate to us, in our world. Today’s readings help us do just that – take time to pause and reflect on the resurrection and its meaning for us today. The Gospel (John 6:52-59) reminds us that for Christians, the fact of the resurrection did not end 2000 years ago but continues today. Throughout John’s Gospel, Jesus exhorts people to “remain in me”, which is a line that we see in this text as well. How do we remain in Jesus? John reminds us at several points that we are to love each other as Jesus loves us. But in Chapter 6, “remaining in Jesus” takes on a whole different slant when Jesus suggests that we literally remain in him, by eating his body and blood.

This was a disturbing picture for many. In the verses that follow this passage some say, “This saying is hard, who can accept it?” Some apparently leave behind Jesus because eating flesh and drinking blood smacks too much of cannibalism. In fact, many Roman and Jewish authorities found the earliest Christians to be repulsive precisely because they DID say they eat Jesus’ body and blood.

This might well be a major reason why Saul (who would later be renamed Paul) is repulsed by the Christians and seeks to destroy them. At the beginning of today’s reading from Acts (9:1-20), Saul is a man on a mission to search out and destroy Christians wherever he finds them. This is why it is so amazing, so miraculous, that Saul should be converted. He meets the risen Lord on the road to Damascus and is baptized. Subsequently, he becomes the vehicle through which many hundreds and thousands convert. Saul, the one who rabidly persecuted Christians, becomes the one whose many letters we still read today. We meet the risen Lord still in Paul’s letters, where he proclaims Christ and him crucified, where he tells about the one who emptied himself and became a slave for our sakes (Philippians 2:5-11)

So, Christ’s resurrected body is alive and well 2000 years later. It is a resurrected body, so it will not look exactly like our own unresurrected bodies look. Paul gives us glimpses of this resurrected body in his letters and in his own witness and experience of Jesus’ risen body. And this is also why Christians are able to say that it is not cannibalism, in fact, when we eat Jesus’ body and blood – because Jesus’ body lives forever, we do not consume it. The body does not go away, but instead we are constantly given opportunities to meet and see glimpses of our Risen Lord. Jesus gives us his own life, which carries on forever (John 6:58).

The point of these readings is that the resurrection was not a one-time event that happened 2000 years ago, but something that continues on and on, through the centuries in all sorts of ways – including in the Eucharist, and in the witness of a man who once hated Christ.

--Jana M. Bennett