TWENTY-FIRST SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME - AUGUST 25, 2024

TWENTY-FIRST SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

To follow Christ is to pursue Truth. However, many people throughout the world follow Christ in ways outside of the Catholic Church, or even the Apostolic Churches. Only in Catholicism, though, can one find the fullness of Divine Revelation because our faith is built upon those things over which so many left Christ in his public ministry, namely the True Presence in the Bread of Life and the testament of Saint Peter. As the Bread of Life discourse in the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John comes to an end, Christ stands defiantly behind his teaching that one must eat his flesh to have eternal life, even as so many leave him specifically over this teaching. Only Peter, our first Pope, affirms that he and the other Apostles will not leave Christ’s side.

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With our other Christian brothers and sisters, we profess the divinity of Christ and his sacrifice to the world. We as Catholics must cherish the fact that each Christian makes up an individual part of the Mystical Body of Christ, but we must also affirm the Source and Summit of our Faith - that Christ is truly present in body, blood, soul, and divinity within the Eucharist. Over the past month, our Sunday Gospel readings have covered the entire Bread of Life discourse because this chapter of John’s Gospel plainly reveals that Christ would not budge on the identity of his flesh being the Bread of Life. Our entire religion hinges on this belief. Still, so many Christians in the past 500 years have begun to reject this teaching. This Sunday’s Gospel reading is a good indication that we have not changed much since the time of Christ; Christ has plenty of followers, who even John describes as his disciples, yet many of them leave him here and return to their previous lives because they cannot accept the weirdness of his claim that one must eat his flesh. Catholicism is weird. We not only believe that we eat the flesh of our God, but that this is the most important part of living out of our faith. While so many have left this teaching behind in order to follow Christ as they want to see him, we embrace this seemingly strange mystery because we have come to trust Christ’s word based on everything else he showed us about himself. Christ gave his apostles the opportunity to leave as well. But it was Peter, our first head of the Church, who spoke the words every Catholic must hold within their hearts: to whom else would we possibly go? No one at any moment in history has been as truthful, as loving, or as worthy of following than Jesus Christ alone. How could we possibly not accept something potentially strange he taught when it was clearly something so important that he was willing to lose vast numbers of disciples so that he would not change his wording?