Gospel Reading for the 21st Sunday in Ordinary Time.
“Many of Jesus' disciples who were listening said, ‘This saying is hard; who can accept it?’ Since Jesus knew that his disciples were murmuring about this, he said to them, ‘Does this shock you?’” Jesus identifying his body with bread and his blood with wine that we are to consume shocks some of his disciples. The Eucharist presents us with the shock of the incarnation.
God gives God to us in self-emptying love. God comes to us where we are, showing the divine to us in poor and humble flesh. The incarnation is God bending low in humble love to embrace the world according to the Franciscan mystic, St. Bonaventure of Bagnoregio. The Most High comes to us in our flesh, in our humanity, and, therefore, in our frailty and weakness. God became human that we might become God. This is the incarnation.
Richard Rohr writes, “Jesus did not say, ‘This is my spirit, given for you,’ or even ‘These are my thoughts.’ Instead, he very daringly said, ‘This is my body,’ which seems like an overly physical and risky way for a spiritual teacher, a God-man, to speak. Indeed, Jesus’s raw proclamation did shock its first hearers…Incarnation is always somehow a scandal, ‘too much’ for us to deal with!”
We are scandalized that God became a human body, a particular human body in a specific time and place. God became flesh in Jesus. And the Eucharist continues the incarnation: God embodied in Jesus is now bread and wine, which we consume every Sunday. St. Francis of Assisi hymns, “O sublime humility! O humble sublimity! The Lord of the universe, God and the Son of God, so humbles Himself that for our salvation He hides Himself under an ordinary piece of bread!” St. Francis gets the shock.
Franciscan sister and scientist Ilia Delio writes, “If we understand the Incarnation as God bending low in love, we will understand God’s presence in our lives and in our world. No longer will we ask ‘where is God?’ or ‘how does God act?’ We will know the answer in this simple statement: ‘God humbly and lovingly bends low to embrace us.’ In fact, God bends so low that we do not recognize his presence. God is so close to that which he embraces that he becomes one with it while never being anything less than God. Incarnation is about God’s involved goodness in creation.” We overlook this divine in the ordinary, in the mundane. Incarnation means God in the mundane. God is not just in the special.
A significant part of the shock is that humble flesh shares in God’s own life. God entered our flesh to bring us to the divine reality. Through Jesus, the Word-made-flesh, we are to continue the incarnation: the unmanifest become manifest, the invisible become visible, the nothing as being in each and every one of us, no matter how small or seemingly unimportant. Shocking!
After marveling at the God who becomes flesh in Jesus and the Eucharist, St. Francis of Assisi invites us to “look at the humility of God, and pour out your hearts before Him! Humble yourselves that you may be exalted by Him! Hold back nothing of yourselves for yourselves, that He Who gives Himself totally to you may receive you totally!” We must let ourselves go to receive God in the Eucharist. This explains Jesus’ enigmatic statement, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him.” We will not be drawn to the Father, who reaches out to everyone, unless we surrender our preoccupations and concerns to abide in the divine nature.
Meister Eckhart attests to this need to let go when he preaches, “Since it is God’s nature not to be like anyone, we have to come to the state of being nothing in order to enter in to the same nature that He is. So, when I am able to establish myself in Nothing and Nothing in myself, uprooting and casting out what is in me, then I can pass into the naked being of God, which is the naked being of the spirit. All that smacks of likeness must be ousted that I may be transplanted into God and become one with Him: one substance, one being, one nature and the Son of God.” The shock of the Eucharist, the shock of the incarnation is that ordinary people of faith will enjoy being one with God.