Our Sermons
Sunday 25 August
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Last Thursday I was in the charming town of Teglio in Valtellina, in the north of Italy. I was invited to deliver a talk about mindfulness and spiritual intelligence before a very interested and eager audience. I have to confess that I was a bit nervous because I didn’t expect such a great response and interest. 120 people were there to listen to me very attentively, and deeply intrigued by the topics I was presenting. Therefore, I felt the good vibe and delivered my talk very confidently knowing that I had prepared this talk with solid research and wanted to share the experience of all these years of practicing and teaching meditation here at St Peter’s and during my time as Assistant Chaplain at Twyford High School. While talking I could see from their faces how interested they were, and eager to ask questions at the end of my talk.
While reading and reflecting on Today’s Gospel, I had a completely different feeling. I imagined myself as part of the audience listening to Jesus and felt hostility towards him, and essentially distrust and mixed feelings about what he was saying. I thought: ‘This must have been one of the most challenging sermons Jesus ever preached!’ Differently from my talk about mindfulness and spiritual intelligence, Jesus must have felt all that negative vibe from his audience.
Some people think that it was actually the Sermon of the Mount -with its calls for love of one’s enemy, the cleansing of the interior life, and nonresistance to evil- as the most challenging one! However, it was the talk concerning the sacrament of his Body and Blood that was the most problematic! Rivers of ink have been spent to write tons of volumes of theological reflection about this topic.
Going back to my talk about mindfulness and spiritual intelligence, I can tell you that nobody would object to the claim that Jesus is a spiritual teacher of great importance, and his person is central in regard to our relation with God, but I think I would have found mindself in a more difficult position if part of my talk had to explain the doctrine of Jesus’ flesh as real food and his blood as real drink! I would have certainly experienced the same rejection that Jesus experienced. As a matter of fact, his claim was so shocking that many of his disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied him.’ We are talking about a real faith crisis. This is why Jesus asked the Twelve -meaning the most trusted and closest disciples- whether they wanted to leave too!
Now, before reflecting on their answer to Jesus’ question. Let’s try to understand what’s the meaning of this crucial event in the life of Jesus and his disciples. We learned from the Book of Joshua that God demands complete faithfulness and loyalty, and this is why we heard in this solemn ceremony the whole people of Israel swearing their allegiance to YAWE and just to him, rejecting all the other gods. By promising to be faithful to the God of Israel, and only to him, they reaffirm their identity as a people of Israel. Belonging and believing go hand in hand, and are deeply ingrained in their existence, their culture, their history, their past, present and future memory. It is full awareness of who they are here and now, and also a longing for what they want to be in the future. This gives us a hint into what Jesus is trying to do with this provocative claim about eating his flesh and drinking his blood. By revolting his audience with the realism of his language, Jesus is pushing the bounderies of their spiritual imagination and essentially expanding their awareness as individuals and as a community of faith.
In this event, we are closer to the disciples than to the audience who were shocked by his words, because like the Twelve we don’t look at Jesus just as a preacher or a prophet, but as the Son of God, and therefore, capable of creating new life just as his Father. What Jesus does when blesses the bread, breaks it and gives it to his disciples saying, ‘Take, eat; this is my body’, and then does the same with the cup filled with wine, is an act of creation. He expresses the creative power of the Logos of God.
When Simon Peter says: ‘Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God’’, a representative of the Twelve Peter is recognizing that what Jesus did is not just symbolic or metaphoric, but deeply spiritual and existential. It touches the very roots of existence in our lives, and makes us as part of himself with the experience of sharing the bread and wine, his flesh and his blood. The theology keeps claiming that this is a mystery, and it certainly is, because we don’t really know how it happens. What we certainly learn from experience is that the Eucharist is at the very center of our individual and spiritual experience, and in the silence of the bread and wine blessed at the altar, we become part of this mysterious and wonderful mystery of faith. Something incredible happens in our hearts and our minds. It is an ongoing act of creation and renewal of our inner lives, which almost spontaneously encourages us to say with Peter: ‘‘Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God’’