In this section you can find a daily commentary on the Gospel of the Day.

Sunday 31 October 2021

Thirty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time – Year B

Word for today
The Gospel of John 6:51-58

Eat the present

When you think, you are absent. When you are absent, you are separated. When you are separated, you are not within yourself, you are not ready, you are not awake.
When you are not awake, life's beauty, happiness, opportunities and chances can literally crash onto you but you hardly realize it. When you are not awake, if some danger or difficulty arises, they will fall onto you disastrously.
When you think, you are absent and you nourish yourself with cerebral celluloid of mental images. It is a false kind of nutrition which does not provide energy. When you think, you do not feed yourself with the present moment and you easily find yourself without energy or capabilities. When you think, you do not feed on the living bread, but on an illusory surrogate spiritual food. When you think, you are absent from the present and you are therefore absent from the Present who is God.
Jesus is the present, He is the "right now" of the living Father. That is why He can say with certainty: Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you.  Jesus is not something to think about; if you think about Him you are distant from Him. Jesus is to be heard in His word, He is to be lived in everyday life, He is to be talked to in prayer, He is to be eaten in the Eucharist. Jesus is to be eaten, not to be thought about. When you eat, even if you do not think about it, you are uniting yourself to the food you have just eaten. The food becomes you, there is no separation, no identification, nothing can be labeled. There could be no better or more powerful parable.
The opposite of thinking is eating. When you eat, you turn yourself into what you have eaten and the food turns into you. If you think, you are absent. If you eat, you put something inside yourself, you are inside yourself, you live inside yourself. If you eat Jesus every moment, He lives within you. To eat Jesus physically in the Eucharist is the most extraordinary source of energy in the universe, it is the source of unity, and not from the perspective of belonging to a creed, but in the sense of belonging to the whole of God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit. When you eat the present that God gives you on the dish of the “right now” moment, you are not absent, you are awake, you are conscious, you are here and now, you are alive, you are united.
The Eucharist is celebrating God's present, it is praising, assimilating the Word, immersing oneself into forgiveness, into sharing gifts and gratitude, singing and blessing.
The Eucharist is a memorial in the present, the memorial of the death and resurrection of Jesus who frees now, who saves now, who is always with us now and forever.