Sunday Sermon for August 11, 2024, the Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
Readings: 1 Kgs 19:4-8; Eph 4:30-5:2; Jn 6:41-51
In the second reading today, St. Paul instructs us not to grieve the Holy Spirit with Whom we were sealed for the day of redemption. He then goes on to give us some examples of the kinds of things that would grieve the Holy Spirit: bitterness, fury, anger, shouting, reviling, and malice. The opposite, which we can assume would be pleasing to God, the Holy Spirit, is listed by St. Paul as being kind, compassionate, and forgiving. More than that, St. Paul goes on to say we are to live in love “as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us as a sacrificial offering to God.”
If this is the case, one could easily argue that what would grieve the Holy Spirit the most would be denying the sacrificial offering of Jesus and failing to love Him. There are many today who would not deny the sacrificial offering of Jesus on the Cross, but refuse to accept the sacrificial offering of our Lord on the altar at Mass. In refusing to accept the sacrifice of the Mass, these people are also failing to love our Lord truly present in the Most Blessed Sacrament.
In the Gospel reading we hear about the Jews murmuring about Jesus because He said He was the Bread come down from Heaven. They could not accept that Jesus came down from Heaven because they knew His earthly parents. They could not accept that one must eat the Flesh of Jesus and drink His Blood because they were unable to understand how this could be done without committing the grave sin of cannibalism.
Today the problem is a bit different, but in fact, it is actually deeper and more disturbing. It is not a matter of knowing our Lord’s family or misconstruing the teaching regarding transubstantiation. It is a matter than we are unable to accept the reality of spiritual truths. The Holy Eucharist is rejected by most people who call themselves Catholic and everyone who call themselves Protestant. The main reason for this, I believe, is because we cannot grasp this mystery with our senses.
It is quite amazing because we will readily acknowledge our believe in God, Who is pure spirit. We are specifically told not to grieve the Holy Spirit, but we cannot see or feel Him because He is purely and merely spiritual. Somehow most of these people will accept that God is real, although we cannot sense Him. They will acknowledge that God is the Creator of everything both spiritual and material. In other words, they believe God created this world and that He keeps it in existence. They believe He has not separated Himself from the world, but continues to be very active within the world.
However, with all this as a foundation, when God intervenes in a particular way in the world, we do not believe. Everyone who is true to the name of Christian believes that Jesus is God, the second Person of the Trinity, Who took our human nature to Himself in the virginal womb of our Blessed Mother. They believe in His miracles of healing, walking on the water, feeding throngs of people with a few loaves of bread and a handful of small fish. They believe that He rose from the dead and ascended into Heaven. But they refuse to believe His own words regarding the reality of the Holy Eucharist.
We have been given the greatest gift possible, a gift that is infinitely beyond our wildest imagination. No one would ever have the audacity to ask God to become man, but to ask Him to humble Himself to be with us and allow us to receive Him into our own person in the form of bread would far exceed the audacity of asking Him to become one of us. Yet that is what He has done, not because we asked Him to do it, but because He loves us so much that He is willing to demonstrate that love in the most extreme forms.
All this is done for our sake because we are so slow to believe. In the Old Testament God makes this clear in the most striking ways. He says the people were obtuse, they were stiff-necked, they were hard of face and obstinate of heart. Unfortunately, human nature has not changed and we must admit that we are guilty as charged in even more ways!
This is what grieves the Holy Spirit. He loves us and wants us to receive His love. Because we doubt and because we think God does not really love us, our Lord went to the extreme to prove His love. Please, open your heart and receive His love. There is nothing more real. Do not grieve the Holy Spirit; doubt no longer, but believe!
Fr. Altier’s column appears regularly in The Wanderer, a national Catholic weekly published in St. Paul, Minn. For information about subscribing to The Wanderer, please visit www.thewandererpress.com.
