21st Sunday in Ordinary time
As we gather this weekend we have seen the situation in Afghanistan getting worse as the USA and their allies leave the country after 20 years. There is much fear and trepidation around as we try to make sense of this move as the Taliban take over the government of the country. As people of faith we are called to pray for peace we are also asked show our solidarity with all those who may come to our shores as refugees in what we say and do for them when they arrive. This Sundays Gospel reading has a resonance with the modern world In today’s Gospel, Jesus puts the choice to His apostles of following Him, or of leaving Him that is also the choice he gives to all of us as well. Many of the Lord’s followers had left Him because of His teaching After hearing Jesus’ teaching on the bread of life, many of the people find Jesus’ language intolerable and they asked how could anyone accept it..
As a result of this intolerable language some of them choose to leave him. In a similar way today so many people find the words of Jesus to be intolerable language as many people have got up and left their faith behind them and some may never return again. No one who accepts that Christ is the Son of God has any difficulty in believing that he left us himself in the Eucharist. He promised to give his body and blood in the Eucharist as an everlasting memorial to be our spiritual nourishment and our means of offering an acceptable sacrifice to God every time his body and blood are made present by the words of the priest. He fulfilled that promise at the Last Supper. He gave to his Apostles and their successors the power to repeat this act of divine love when he said: “Do this in memory of me.” When Simon Peter answered Christ’s challenge will you too go away?” he spoke not only for his fellow Apostles he also spoke for us when he said “Lord to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. and we believe; and we know that you are the Holy One of God.”
We are the people who really believe that Christ was the incarnate Son of God. Peter made his act of faith before he was fully convinced of the divinity of Christ, but he already knew that Christ was close to God and spoke nothing but the truth. We have the proof of Christ’s divinity which Peter and the Apostles later got, he gave them the bread of life and he went to the cross and rose again it certainly was intolerable language for some people. We also have the witness of the early Christians whose belief in Jesus the bread of life was at the very centre of their Christian lives as it should be the centre of ours. We can trust that what Jesus taught is true, even if we do not fully understand how it could possibly be. Many people who became saints died for their belief in Jesus; hopefully we can live our faith fully, even in times of doubting some doctrine or even the wisdom or actions of some of those in the Church. So with all the doubting and faith filled people wherever they are we say “Lord to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.” and we believe; and we know that you are the Holy One of God.”
Fullerton T 