In the first reading, Joshua summoned the people of Israel and asked them to decide whether to serve God or the idols of their pagan neighbors. Sensing his imminent death, he wanted the people to make a solemn recommitment to the covenant for he was aware of the real danger and temptation of idolatry surrounding them. In response, the people unanimously chose to serve God.
The gospel presents a parallel scene wherein Jesus also made his disciples decide whether to believe in him or to leave him. This happened at the end of his long discourse on the Bread of Life in Capernaum. Many of his disciples found his words too hard to accept. First, he claimed that he was the bread that came down from heaven. “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph? Do we not know his father and mother?” Then he declared that the bread he would give them was none other than his own body and blood. (Ugh!) Finally, he asserted that unless they eat of his flesh and drink of his blood, they would not have life eternal. This was just too much for them to take and so many began to leave him.
Turning to his apostles, Jesus asked, “Do you also want to leave?” Simon Peter answered him, “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.”
While many of the disciples left Jesus, the apostles who formed his inner circle decided to remain. Having stayed with him for some years now, they knew him up close and personal. The people of Israel did not leave God to follow pagan idols because they experienced God’s power and mercy in freeing them from slavery and bringing them to the promised land. Like Israel, the apostles too must have experienced Jesus’ special predilection in calling them to be his apostles. As the responsorial psalm expresses, they tasted and saw the goodness of God.
Yet we know that the apostles too abandoned Jesus eventually. They succumbed to the scandal of the cross and in their fear of ending up like him, they left Jesus. They did not really know him well enough. But when Jesus rose from the dead, the apostles started to understand him more deeply. They realized that he had to die as foretold by the scriptures so that they (and the world) may live. Only then did they comprehend what he spoke of in Capernaum about the bread of life and what he did at the last supper, when he said, “Take this all of you… for this is my body which will be given up for you… this is the cup of my blood which will be poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.” All this foretold and prefigured his greatest act of love on the cross. “Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” (Jn 15:13)
Indeed, the teaching of Jesus is hard, not only about the Eucharist. In fact, all his teaching is hard for it demands a radical response. When God asks, he asks for nothing less than our all. He asks us to have no other gods but him alone (first reading). He asks us to love him with our whole heart, our whole soul and our whole strength, and not just with a piece of our heart, or a portion of our soul, or some of our strength. He asks for total giving. Is this possible?
It is when we truly know Christ as the apostles came to know him after his resurrection. They finally understood the reason why Jesus died on the cross. He gave up his life that they might live. With this new awareness and enlightened by the Spirit, they took to the road once more to follow Christ all the way to their own crucifixion and death.
We too will have the courage and the joy to commit ourselves to Christ when we experience his self-giving love that saves us. He is the all-bestowing God who continues to give himself totally in the Eucharist: body and blood, soul and divinity. He is the self-emptying God who assumes our humanity in order to fill us with his own divinity (Ph 2: 8)