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Eucharistic Heart: Fr. John Hardon |
The Real Presence and Sanctity
Fr. John A. Hardon, S.J.
In speaking about Holiness it is remarkable how we can overlook the
obvious. For example it is obvious that we cannot become holy unless
we obtain the extraordinary graces needed to reach sanctity. Hearing
about holiness; reading about it; even seeing holiness, does not
make one holy. We need grace. It is equally obvious that the graces
we need must come to us from Christ since as He told us, "Without Me
you can do nothing". If that nothing refers even to salvation, it
most certainly refers to sanctification.
The question remains - how? How do we obtain the grace that only
Christ can give, in order to become more and more like Him, in a
word to become holy, because Christlikeness is holiness? We obtain
the graces we need from Christ by asking Him, by praying to Him and
by begging Him for them. All of this is true. But then we begin to
touch on a mystery, because Christ will give us the grace we need
(and we need a lot of grace to become holy) only if we ask Him for
it as He wants us to approach Him. And the "as He wants us to" is
the key to the mystery. How does Christ want us to approach Him, so
that approaching Him we might ask Him effectively? The answer is
plain - by faith. Faith in Christ is what Christ demands as the
precondition for answering our prayers. It is not in much speech nor
in long hours of petitioning that prayer is efficacious but only
insofar as it is animated by faith and for our purpose, so animated
as to obtain the beyond-ordinary graces of holiness.
But we are not yet at the center of our subject. There are manifold
mysteries about Christ, such as the many aspects of the Incarnation
and the infinitude of meaning behind the Name "Jesus". Is there some
one mystery of our faith in Him which, if we believe in it deeply we
shall tape the resources of His gracious mercy? Yes. It is the faith
in His Real Presence. No wonder over the centuries this has been
called THE mystery of faith. It is the epicenter of Christology.
In order to impress ourselves with this very central fact, we should
go back to Christ's promise of the Eucharist in Saint John's Gospel.
What needs to be kept in mind is that there are two levels to this
promise of the Eucharist recorded by John in his sixth chapter. They
intertwine through the forty some verses dealing with the promise of
the Eucharist, but the two levels are not the same. One is the level
of faith where Christ insists on the absolute necessity of believing
in Him to be saved and sanctified; belief, believing, believe run
right through as a theme in the Eucharist itself which Christ
proceeds to identify as the special object of our faith in Him.
When reading many of the verses from Saint John, note the interplay
of these two levels, the need for believing in Christ and the
characteristic object of this faith in Christ, namely that He is
really present in the Eucharist as the nourishment of our spiritual
life.
You recall the context. Christ had just worked one of His several
miraculous mutiplications of food. Then He went on:
"I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never be hungry; he
who believes in me will never thirst. But as I have told you, you
can see me and still you do not believe....Yes it is my Father's
will that whoever sees the Son and believes in him shall have
eternal life, and that I shall raise him up on the last day....I
tell you most solemnly, everybody who believes has eternal life. I
am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the desert and
they are dead; but this is the bread that comes down from heaven, so
that a man may eat it and not die. I am the living bread which has
come down from heaven. Anyone who eats this bread will live for
ever; and the bread that I shall give is my flesh for the life of
the world."
Then begins the dialectic. Christ made it prelucidly clear that no
one would be saved, much less sanctified, unless he believes in
Christ. An what is the core of believing in Christ? It is believing
that He is the bread that came down from heaven to live in our midst
as the Eucharist and to be received in our bodies as Communion.
"Then the Jews," so John continues, "started arguing with one
another: 'How can this man give us his flesh to eat?'" There was no
taking back on the part of Christ. "I tell you most solemnly, if you
do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you will
not have life in you" - meaning, if you do not believe, clearly you
will not receive life; then you shall die.
Then John goes on: "He taught this doctrine at Capernaum, in the
synagogue. After hearing it, many of his followers said, 'This is
intolerable language. How could anyone accept it?' Jesus was aware
that his followers were complaining about it and said, 'Does this
upset you? What if you should see the Son of Man ascend to where He
was before?....But there are some of you who do not believe.' For
Jesus knew from the outset those who did not believe, and who it was
that would betray him. He went on, 'This is why I told you that no
one could come to me unless the Father allows him." After this, many
of his disciples left him, and stopped going with him."
But John is not finished yet. "Then Jesus said to the Twelve, "What
about you, do you want to go away too?'" He might have lost all
twelve right then. "Simon Peter answered, 'Lord who shall we go to?
You have the message of eternal life, and we believe; we know that
you are the Holy One of God.'" So far, Saint John.
As often as we have read and heard these verses from the beloved
disciple and as often as we may have been impressed by the studied
effort of the Evangelist to bring out the necessity of believing in
Christ as really present in the Eucharist, we may not perhaps have
been sufficiently impressed with the logic of it all. It all ties in
together. Thematically, this means that our faith in the Real
Presence of Christ in the Eucharist is the touchstone of sanctity.
We shall be saved if we believe in this Presence and believing, act
as those who do believe. We shall be sanctified too if we believe.
We shall be effective in winning souls to Christ if we believe in
this mystery, neither more nor less. The deeper our faith in this
presence, the more surely we shall be saved; the more securely we
shall be sanctified; and the more effectively, beyond our wildest
dreams, shall we bring not hundreds but thousands of souls to the
Heart of Christ.
But then we ask ourselves, "What is it, or better, who is it we
believe in, when we believe in the Real Presence?" We believe it is
the same Jesus who was conceived in the womb of His Mother Mary. We
should not tire of reminding ourselves, that the flesh in the
Eucharist came from Mary. It is the same Jesus who was born at
Bethlehem; who fled and stayed for a while in Egypt; who lived at
Nazareth; who began His public life and preached to the people. It
is the same Savior who worked miracles; who raised people from the
dead; who forgave sinners and who reconciled the Magdalene. It is
the same Christ who suffered and died and by His divine power raised
His body from the grave. This is the same Christ who ascended into
heaven, is now at the right hand of His heavenly Father and is also
in our midst. This, in the profoundest sense of the word, is heaven
on earth. This is what we believe, when we believe in the Real
Presence.
We believe therefore that He is here on earth not only as God but as
Man. That bears much more emphasis than we can ever give it because
it means, faith assures us, that while before the Incarnation God
was on earth which He made, with the Incarnation God became man. It
is the man who is God who is really present! We believe that this
humanity, which really means this human being, is capable of working
the same wonders now that He worked in Palestine.
Let us follow this through. Recall the many times during His public
life when Christ was asked to work miracles, to heal and to cure,
but that on some tragic occasions we are told He could not work the
miracles because of the lack of faith among the people. The needs
were there, desperate bodily and spiritual needs; the power was
there, infinite power. We don't explain this; we accept it, we
believe it: Omnipotence is bound by our faith. How is it that the
Almighty, who brought the world into being out of nothing; who made
us out of nothing; who sustains the universe, symbolically, in the
Palm of His Hand - that this God's Omnipotence is conditioned by our
faith! We don't understand, but we accept it. It is both wonderful
and terrifying, isn't it?
It is this human nature that, we are bidden to believe, has done two
things. First, in the womb of Mary it was substantially united with
the Eternal Word of God so that the child she bore in her womb for
nine months was her Creator. That's the first article of faith and
the substratum for the second. Secondly, we believe that in ways
beyond our comprehension, this humanity has decided to remain thus
substantially united with the divinity and that this humanity united
with the Word of God is here on earth. Is it any wonder that the
Fathers of the Church speak of the Real Presence as the acme of the
Faith? It is at the peak of the pyramid of all that we believe
because the Real Presence subsumes everything else.
Now there is a further refinement that I think bears some emphasis.
After all, having made the world and, for reasons best known to His
Infinite Wisdom, having allowed the world to sin, in deciding to
redeem the world God did not have to become man to achieve this
redemption. Clearly, He did so because He wanted to. But once God
made that decision, that the world would be redeemed by the humanity
assumed by the Son of God, that humanity remains for all time the
source of all grace to mankind and in eternity, the source of all
heavenly glory.
This is the mediatorial channel through which all the treasures of
heaven come to the human race. That human being is the indispensable
link between God and sinful man. Consequently, whether it is the
Real Presence whom we come to receive, in all cases it is the human
Jesus who is our God, who through His humanity channels to us the
treasures of His divinity. So when we who are so pathetically human
come to Him, who is so gloriously human, it is a human heart
speaking to a Human Heart; It is a human mind thinking about a Human
Mind and, in ways that we cannot conceive, that Human Mind and Human
Will radiates to us the wisdom and the strength we need even to be
saved and surely to be sanctified.
There are so many things that the mystery of Christ's humanity in
the Eucharist teaches us, because there is no limit to what we can
expect to receive from Him. He is here. Everything else is up to us;
it all depends on our faith. While there are many things that faith
leads us to beg from this Eucharistic Jesus (even if need be, to
work miracles in our favor), there is no grace that we need more and
that we should more earnestly beg Him to give us, than the grace to
experience in our humanity what He experienced in His. Whatever
other reasons He had for becoming man, this is the fundamental one -
He became man, assuming our human nature, in order that like us, He
might be able to endure. God as God could have done everything else
in our favor except suffer. This He could not do.
There are myriad favors and countless petitions we ask for; There
are desires, dreams, hopes, and ambitions that we want Him to
fulfill. And provided they are good for us, He will answer all our
prayers, if only we believe. But there is one petition we must not
omit making, because this is the whole reason for His being here as
the human being who suffered and who now wants us to join our
sufferings with His. But we need grace strength and courage; that's
the missing link. It is essential that we beg this human God in our
midst to help us live out our humanity faithfully, meaning that He
will enable us to be patient with others and with ourselves, and
patient with Him; that we might bear up with our crosses, especially
with that heaviest burden we have to carry - ourselves.
We need grace to be resigned even as He, as man was resigned to the
Divine Will, so that like Him we might be able to offer ourselves
daily and perhaps many times daily, being sure that it is especially
in that way that we grow in His likeness. After all the learned
books have been read and all the reudite sermons have been heard, we
actually become most like Christ, we become most holy, when we have
learned how like Him to suffer. Anyone who preaches another gospel
is not a true prophet. I trust we have long learned this secret.
With the strength that He gives us and the courage that we obtain
from Jesus, who is here with us, this cross that we carry with Him
and for Him becomes lighter and sweeter to such an extent that,
strange though it seems, the more we endure with Him the more we
shall be consoled by Him. There are two kinds of joy: one that comes
from this life born of earth - the other that comes from God. The
price we have to pay to obtain a foretaste of heaven on earth is to
embrace the cross.
I still have a short epilogue. In the light of all that we have
seen, is it any wonder that all sanctity in the Roman Catholic
Church is said to be derived from the Eucharist; that all saints
have become sanctified because they believed in the Eucharist and
lived out their belief; and that our greatest joy on earth is to be
present to Him? Words almost lose their joy on earth is to be
present to Him? Words almost lose their meaning when we use them in
this way - we are to be present to Him who makes Himself present to
us. The Beatific Vision is simply the Eucharist unveiled and enjoyed
for eternity.
This page is the work of the Servants of the Pierced Hearts of Jesus and
Mary
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