What makes a Catholic a Catholic is not so much the pope and bishops, the creeds and catechisms. What makes a Catholic a Catholic is the Holy Eucharist. The gospel for today provides exactly the right image of the closeness, the intimacy, the familiarity to which Jesus invites us as we eat his body and drink his blood. Jesus is the vine from which we draw life. Jesus summarizes the meaning of Holy Communion in the Gospel: “Remain in me, as I remain in you.” In receiving communion we are literally taking Jesus in, inviting him to remain in us. “My flesh is true food,” Jesus had declared a little earlier in the gospel (chapter 6.) Just as the consumable food we eat gets broken down to provide nourishment to our skin and bones and kidneys and liver, so the Eucharistic Food provides divine nourishment to our soul and spirit, mind and heart. You are what you eat, grandmother used to say. She was urging us to have vegetables instead of candy, fruit instead of french fries. But as far as the Eucharist goes, she was dead on. The Eucharist is all about becoming what we eat. We take Jesus into our bodies so that we can be transformed into the Body of Christ. “Behold who you are; become who you receive,” according to the ancient formula of St. Augustine. We consume the sacramental body of Christ in communion so that we can become the body of Christ as church. How could Jesus be any closer to us than in the process of being absorbed into our very being and our being then being transformed by the divine presence!
“Remain in me, as I remain in you.” So at Holy Communion Jesus remains in us – BUT how do we remain in him? A story: once upon a time there was a curious fish. He had heard about the ocean his whole life long but didn’t know where it was. He looked everywhere for the ocean but could never find it. Finally he decided to ask the wise old whale, Moby Bob, (Moby Dick’s twin brother), where the ocean was. “The ocean,” said the whale, “is what you are swimming in now.” “That can’t be right,” said the fish. “This is only water. I’m looking for the ocean.” So the disappointed fish swam away to look elsewhere. Church, remaining in Jesus does not require any special skills or expertise. To remain in Jesus all we need do is to come to the awareness that we are in the divine presence at every moment of our lives. We are swimming in God every step we take and every move we make. We are often too distracted to understand that we are being held in the divine embrace right at this instant. Remaining in Jesus is a matter of hearing the voice of God in the song of a bird, of seeing the face of God in the beauty of a child, in feeling the presence of God while basking in the sun. We don’t have to go anywhere else to remain in Jesus. All we need do is remain where we are and know that Jesus is here right now. Holy Communion teaches us to remain in Jesus by exploring the miracle of the ordinary. The ordinary elements of bread and wine are changed into the body and blood of Christ to show us that God is found in the ordinariness of life. As we appreciate the real presence of Jesus on the altar we are empowered to remain in the real presence of Jesus in the ordinary stuff of our lives.
Receiving Holy Communion is not merely a nice, pious, Sunday thing to do. Receiving communion is meant to change us in fundamental ways. We are supposed to be different because we share in the bread of life and the cup of blessing. The readings for this Sunday describes the change. The first reading from the Acts of the Apostles illustrates the change that results in receiving Holy Communion: community, oneness, fellowship. Around the table of the Lord what unites us overcomes what divides us. Jesus in the gospel puts it this way: “Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit.” What does it mean to bear fruit? When a tree or a plant bears fruit it produces something sweet, something worthwhile, something valuable. So we as Eucharistic people are to produce something delectable and valuable as well, divine fruit. We know what some of the divine fruits are: love, charity, forgiveness, generosity, peace, patience. But in order to bear fruits like that, according to Jesus, we have to be pruned. “Every branch that does bear fruit my Father prunes so that it bears more fruit.” Every gardener knows that for a plant to flourish you periodically have to cut it back, to trim off the dead wood. Jesus is saying the spiritual life is like that as well. We have to get rid of, subtract, dispose of certain parts of our life if we are to become the fruitful persons we are called to be when we receive Communion. Certainly we have to prune off any nasty, ugly or hateful attitudes we might have. They can keep us from producing divine fruits. But we also need to prune parts of our lives which, though not sinful in themselves, can keep us from trusting completely in God. We must prune our own plan or agenda because it can keep us from producing fruits for God. A fruitful person prays, “not my will, but thine be done.” Then the epistle from First John reminds us that as a Eucharistic people are called to love God “not in word and speech but in deed and truth.” We who approach the altar this Sunday are making a commitment not limited to within these four walls. We are committing ourselves to bringing the real presence of Jesus whom we have received by our actions, by our deeds, by our words — into our homes, our schools, to our friends and to hour family. They should say of us what they said of those initial followers of Jesus: Look how those Christians love one another. Then and only then have we become whom we receive, the body of Christ.
