This week I was thinking about preaching on the first reading. I was wondering whether God’s message was perhaps: before you do anything big, first have something to eat and then a lie down. But I have decided to go in a different direction, if that’s ok.
[Last Sunday, Deacon Jim/ Last week’s Gospel] asked us what do we hunger for? This question – what do I hunger for/what do I really want – is incredibly provocative. Bishop Barron, in one of his YouTube conversations, says that if he knows what someone worships, what they really want, what they hunger for, then he really knows them. He knows everything he needs to know about that person.
I have noticed this too. It is therefore not only a provocative question, it is a deeply personal question. And in a culture that it is built on hiding this question behind the creation of more and more little desires, the question “what do you really want?” can cause spiritual vertigo. You really have to know when to play that card.
If you ask that question too soon in a relationship, it can either miss the mark because it is not heard sufficiently deeply; or it can cause the other person to dive into the depths, before one knows whether the other person can swim.
But if you ask the question too late, again perhaps it cannot be heard. Perhaps it cannot be heard because too much has already been taken for granted, or permitted. The relationship has got off on the wrong foot, and we don’t know how to restart it. Wrongful desires have already staked out too much ground, and we are scared to undermine that ground in case there is nothing underneath. That vertigo, I mentioned.
Again, “what do you really want?” is a very personal question, especially when heard in the right key, the one that demands honesty, and a searching honesty. And the depth of intimacy goes both ways. The revelation that such a question demands, itself demands trustworthiness. Putting my heart in your hands is always a risky manoeuvre, and so I need at least some reasons to believe that I can trust you, trust you with what is most personal.
Perhaps this is one way to hear our gospel today, indeed, the whole of John chapter 6: Christ broaching this most personal of conversations: what do you want? And then Christ offering himself in the most intimate way. Offering his body as food. The Bread from heaven. The only thing that in the end can feed our deepest hunger. Our hunger for God.
It is perhaps worth praying about, this idea of hearing this Gospel, thinking about the Eucharist in terms of intimacy. I think I have mentioned before that in the early church and really still today in our Rite of Christian Initiation, catechumens were asked to leave the Church before the Rite of Communion. It was considered too intimate. It was also the case that many of the Church fathers did not really talk about the Eucharist, again precisely because of that intimacy. Our Lady was treated in the same way: too holy to be discussed.
I have also mentioned before certain Rabbinic schools restricted the reading of the Song of Songs until someone had reached a level of maturity, precisely because it spoke about Israel’s relationship to God on the most intimate of terms. Origen said it appeared in the middle of the Old Testament because it revealed the beating heart of the nuptial union between God and his people.
I in fact remember a friend of mine talking along similar lines about a couple we knew. He spoke about their home as being incredibly warm and open, but that he knew this was the fruit of an exceptional level of intimacy at the heart. Something hidden from view. A holy of holies veiled, and only revealed in the life that flowed forth.
In fact, it is interesting that Jesus’s teaching on the Eucharist – that it truly is his body and blood, the most intimate of gifts – this teaching is rejected by so many in exactly the same way that his disciples reject his teaching on marriage. And if we needed any doubt that these mysteries are deeply connected, we can see that still today these are precisely the ones that are mocked first by society.
Perhaps John chapter 6, then, is a deep revelation of God’s love. A love that demands vulnerability but precisely in order to meet that hunger. A love that demands vulnerability but only through first placing his heart in our hands. A love that is incarnate, closer than we are to ourselves, but still searching for more. For greater openness. Wanting all we are. Wanting to bestow all God is.
What if we heard this gospel as the deepest of conversations, a type of courtship, the real act of love? How would we then approach communion? How much would we want God to purify us, make us clean in advance of such intimacy? And how much of our bare desire would we want God to see? Would we really believe that that deepest of hungers would be fed?
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