You are all priests

Deacon Douglas McManaman

The gospel reading today (Jn 6, 53, 60-69) is a very interesting part of the Bread of Life discourse. “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” The expression flesh and blood was a Jewish expression that meant the whole person. And for the Jews, to share a meal is to enter into communion with all those who are at the same table eating from the same source, the life source which is the food on the table. So what Jesus says here is really quite remarkable. Christ mysteriously gives us his entire self to eat, to consume, and all of us who are sharing in this same meal are becoming one with each other. There is a profound union that takes place between us all. When we leave this Church, we really are relatives, of the same blood, we are genuine brothers and sisters. 

It is very interesting to think about the nature of the Mass as a whole. The procession of this liturgy really began with each one of you, when you left the house to come to Mass. That’s the beginning of the procession, and you were all headed to the same place, which is the altar. The formal procession at the beginning of Mass is merely a continuation of your procession, and of course it is a procession to the altar, the table of sacrifice. Our procession at the beginning, with the altar servers, represents the procession of the entire community. 

At the offertory, when a family comes forward to present the gifts, the bread and wine, it is really the entire community who offers bread and wine, represented by that family, and that bread and wine is the product of your labor, and it represents all the sacrifices, the difficulties, the headaches, the work, the sweat, that you all had to carry out this past week. The bread and wine is the fruit of your labor–the money you offer each week pays for that bread and wine. So that offering symbolizes the fruit of your labor. It is brought forward, Father ___________ receives it. What does he do with it? He too offers it. 

Now a priest is one who offers sacrifice. But the offertory is the sacrificial offering of the community, your offering. That means you, all of you, are priests. And we know that is true from the first letter of Peter. He says: “You are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s special possession, that you may declare the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light.” In every baptism we perform here, there is an anointing that takes place, one just after the pouring of the water, in which the baby is anointed with sacred chrism. The words are: “As Christ was anointed Priest, Prophet and King, so may you live always as a member of his body.” Each one of you here who is baptized shares in Christ’s priesthood, and you exercise your priesthood during the week at work and here at Mass when you offer your suffering, sacrifices, and the fruits of your labor. You are a Royal priesthood, as Peter says. Catholics of the Latin West are not used to hearing this or seeing themselves this way–it is more emphasized in the Eastern rites. 

Father __________, who is a ministerial priest and who represents this parish, takes your offering and offers it to Christ, who takes it, and changes it into himself, his own body and blood in the act of offering himself to God the Father, which is the sacrifice of the cross made present here and now, and then it is re-distributed back to us as food, a different kind of food, no longer bread and wine, but his body and blood. We consume it, and we become what we consume. We become him. We walk out of this Church as Christ figures. 

St. Paul says in his letter to the Galatians: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me”. You and I are taking Christ into this world, when we leave here. We have become him. And so it is not necessary to get preachy and start trying to convert or recruit others. That’s not evangelization. Our task is to just be what we have become, namely Christ, and allow ourselves to become more and more like him, and so if others who have nothing to do with the faith love what they see in you, then they love what you have become, and that means they love Christ without even knowing it. 

That’s evangelization, proclaiming the good news of the risen Christ. The world out there doesn’t know explicitly that the gospel is being proclaimed to them when they meet you and come to know you, but you are that proclamation, your life, your character, the kind of person that you are. If you have become Christ and they love you, then they love Christ without them necessarily knowing it explicitly. Whether that brings them back to Mass or not is not our concern; that’s God’s problem, not ours. When we make it our problem, we tend to turn people off and turn them away, because we become pushy and obnoxious. 

It’s really a great gift to be able to believe in the power of the Mass, that what we receive is really and truly Christ himself under the appearance of bread and wine, that in receiving that host, we are joining ourselves literally to the Second Person of the Trinity, his body, blood, soul and divinity. Many people don’t have that faith, as we saw in today’s gospel. The teaching was too difficult for them to accept, so they left. Imagine walking away from Christ. But what a gift that the twelve did not walk away. They had that faith. They knew he had the words of eternal life. And Christ said it: “No one can come to me unless it is granted them by my Father”. If you and I believe in the Sacrifice of the Mass, it is not as a result of our own decision, our own choice. It is because God the Father gave us the ability to believe: “No one comes to me unless the Father draw him”, he said. We’ve been drawn to Christ, not because of anything we did in our lives. It is sheer gift. We did nothing to deserve it. It was pure mercy. And it is the greatest gift we can receive from him. I remember a priest friend of mine was pulling my leg one day, I was probably about 18 years old at the time, and he said to me “I’m leaving the priesthood”. I was so shocked and disappointed. He strung me along for a minute or so, then he smiled and I knew he was just kidding around. He said to me: “Listen, priesthood is the 2nd greatest gift that God has given me”. I was relieved. But then I asked him. 2nd greatest gift? What’s the first greatest gift? And he said: “faith”. Faith is a gift. If you have it, you are not the origin of it. It was given to you by God. We could have rejected it, but if we received that gift, that free reception and cooperation is itself a grace. We might die without any money at all, destitute, poor, bankrupt, very sick, mentally ill perhaps, but if we die with the gift of faith, we are the greatest of success.