Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time (Homily)
August 22, 2021 11:00 am · Sergio Muñoz Fita
We have reached the end of this series of homilies called "Sign of Contradiction", and we do so with the conclusion of the Bread of Life Discourse. We have just heard how Christ was abandoned by a large number of his disciples when he taught them what they could not or would not understand. I believe that the great sin of those men was their lack of trust. The great merit of Peter and of 10 of the disciples was precisely their trust the Lord. In reality, neither of the two groups understood the words of Jesus that day. The difference was that some trusted Christ, and the others did not. "To whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life."
Among the Lord's disciples today this same problem continues to spread: some do not trust the teaching that Christ continues to communicate to us through the Church. The Holy Mass is the realization of the most perfect communion of God with man. St. Cyril of Jerusalem says that just as two drops of melted wax become one, so he who receives the Body of the Lord becomes one with Him. As we saw two weeks ago, Holy Communion is also communion with the faith of the Church, which Simon confesses today at the end of the gospel.
A professor I had in the seminary used to insist on this idea, which personally helped me a lot. In the Mass there are, in reality, two "holy communions”. The first takes place in the Liturgy of the Word, after the proclamation of the Gospel. There we have to commune with the teaching transmitted to us by the Sacred Scriptures, read in the living Tradition of the Church. Only after this first "Holy Communion" can we then take communion in the second part of the Holy Mass, the Liturgy of the Eucharist, with the Body of the Risen Christ. It would be a most serious offense to the Eucharist to approach to receive the sacred Host without this prior communion with the Word of God and the faith of the Church.
The reception of Holy Communion is a union in the flesh with Jesus Christ. Therefore, we can use a bold analogy. It can be compared to the marital union of a man and a woman in marriage. In God's plan, such a moment is the eminent expression of communion between the spouses. They are united physically because their hearts are also one, with that love of which St. Paul speaks to us in the second reading today. Only in this way does the intimacy of the marital union have its full meaning. Only in this way is it a happy moment of encounter, of shared love and of external expression of the communion of life that has made them one soul. In this logic in which the body is the language through which we express the truth of human love, the marital union of two people who do not love each other, or who do not live a union of hearts in marriage, would be a lie. The conjugal act would be expressing a totality and a union that is not real: their bodies would be united but their hearts would be distant from each other.
Similarly, receiving Holy Communion without first entering into communion with the Word of God and the teaching of the Church is a lie. In many cases, it is also a sacrilege because it offends the most extraordinary Sacrament, the Eucharist.
On the day of his Ascension, the Lord said to his disciples: "Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the holy Spirit, teaching them to observe ALL that I have commanded you.” (Mt 28:19-20). This "all" is the content of communion in the Church: one cannot accept some teachings and leave others aside, just as a husband cannot be faithful to his wife only in some aspects and not in others. Fidelity is either complete or it is not fidelity.
When a person is not in communion with the Church, either because he is not Catholic, or because he dissents from the teaching of the Church in matters of faith and morals, he should not come forward to receive the Lord. He would be communing his own condemnation. In addition, when this dissent and lack of communion is public, because the person lives in an irregular situation or because his positions against the teaching of our Mother the Church are known (for example, in relation to gender ideology, the defense of human life from conception to natural death, or the truth of marriage as a natural institution formed by a man and a woman in communion of life and love), his moral obligation not to approach to receive Holy Communion is united to the obligation of the minister not to give him the Body of the Lord. The reason is not that we are inflexible, old-fashioned, unsympathetic and Pharisees, nor is it a judgment on the person who cannot receive Communion. The reason is the priest's love for the eternal good of that person (to whom, by denying him access to Holy Communion, he thus shows him the objectively disordered situation in which he finds himself), love for Christ in the Eucharist, which he has promised to guard at any price, and love for the communion of the Church, which would be wounded by the scandal of such a situation.
Let me conclude with the words of St. John Paul II. Speaking of the concrete case of the divorced and remarried, with compassion and with clarity, the Pope wrote as follows:
“Together with the Synod, I earnestly call upon pastors and the whole community of the faithful to help the divorced, and with solicitous care to make sure that they do not consider themselves as separated from the Church, for as baptized persons they can, and indeed must, share in her life. They should be encouraged to listen to the word of God, to attend the Sacrifice of the Mass, to persevere in prayer, to contribute to works of charity and to community efforts in favor of justice, to bring up their children in the Christian faith, to cultivate the spirit and practice of penance and thus implore, day by day, God's grace. Let the Church pray for them, encourage them and show herself a merciful mother, and thus sustain them in faith and hope.
However, the Church reaffirms her practice, which is based upon Sacred Scripture, of not admitting to Eucharistic Communion divorced persons who have remarried. They are unable to be admitted thereto from the fact that their state and condition of life objectively contradict that union of love between Christ and the Church which is signified and effected by the Eucharist. Besides this, there is another special pastoral reason: if these people were admitted to the Eucharist, the faithful would be led into error and confusion regarding the Church's teaching about the indissolubility of marriage.” (Familiaris consortio 84)
I conclude this homily with the same message: I ask those who are not in communion with the Church to continue to come to St. Anne where they are always welcome. I encourage you to participate in the Holy Mass by listening to the Word of God and praying together with the whole community. At the same time, I beg you, for the sake of your souls and for love of the Eucharist, not to approach to receive the Body of the Lord. Begin first a journey towards full communion with the Church, without becoming discouraged, speaking first with a priest and allowing yourselves to be guided by the Church, who loves you as her children.
If this language is hard for us, and if we are tempted to leave the group of the Lord's disciples and serve the gods of this world in whose country we are now dwelling, and we seem to hear Jesus say to us, “Do you also want to leave?”, let us respond as Simon Peter, "Lord, to whom shall we go? You alone have the words of eternal life. We believe and know that you are the Holy One of God". “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.”
With all of this in mind, let us say together for the last time the prayers we learned from St. Ignatius of Loyola and St. Francis of Assisi, asking God to become living signs of contradiction in today's world for the salvation of our brothers and sisters:
“In order to imitate and be actually more like Christ our Lord, I want and choose poverty with Christ poor rather than riches, opprobrium with Christ replete with it rather than honors; and to desire to be rated as worthless and a fool for Christ, who first was held as such, rather than wise or prudent in this world.” (Saint Ignatius of Loyola)
“May the fiery and honey-sweet power of your love, O Lord, wean me from all things under heaven, so that I may die for love of your love, who deigned to die for love of my love.” (Saint Francis of Assisi).
