The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life

 Therefore many of His disciples, when they heard this, said, "This is a hard saying; who can understand it?"  When Jesus knew in Himself that His disciples complained about this, He said to them, "Does this offend you?  What then if you should see the Son of Man ascend where He was before?  It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing.  The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life.  But there are some of you who do not believe."  For Jesus knew from the beginning who they were who did not believe, and who would betray Him.  And He said, "Therefore I have said to you that no one can come to Me unless it has been granted to him by My Father."

From that time many of His disciples went back and walked with Him no more.  Then Jesus said to the twelve, "Do you also want to go away?"  But Simon Peter answered Him, "Lord, to whom shall we go?  You have the words of eternal life.  Also we have come to believe and know that You are the Christ, the Son of the living God."  Jesus answered them, "Did I not choose you, the twelve, and one of you is a devil?"  He spoke of Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon, for it was he who would betray Him, being one of the twelve.

- John 6:60-71

In recent readings in John's Gospel, the current theme began after Jesus fed 5,000 in the wilderness.  The people wanted to make Him King by force, but He escaped them, eventually coming to Capernaum.  The people followed Him there.  He spoke in the synagogue about the food which endures to everlasting life.  He taught them that He is that bread of life. The religious leadership quarreled among themselves, asking, "How can this Man give us His flesh to eat?"  Jesus taught, "The bread that I shall give is My flesh, which I shall give for the life of the world."  In yesterday's reading, He said to them, "Most assuredly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you.  Whoever eats My flesh and drinks My blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.  For My flesh is food indeed, and My blood is drink indeed.  He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood abides in Me, and I in him.  As the living Father sent Me, and I live because of the Father, so he who feeds on Me will live because of Me.  This is the bread which came down from heaven -- not as your fathers ate the manna, and are dead.  He who eats this bread will live forever."  These things He said in the synagogue as He taught in Capernaum.

 Therefore many of His disciples, when they heard this, said, "This is a hard saying; who can understand it?"  When Jesus knew in Himself that His disciples complained about this, He said to them, "Does this offend you?  What then if you should see the Son of Man ascend where He was before?  It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing.  The words that I speak to you are spirit, and they are life.  But there are some of you who do not believe."  For Jesus knew from the beginning who they were who did not believe, and who would betray Him.  And He said, "Therefore I have said to you that no one can come to Me unless it has been granted to him by My Father."  From that time many of His disciples went back and walked with Him no more.   Jesus' difficult sayings have an effect, and He loses disciples:  many of His disciples went back and walked with Him no more.  Even His disciples feel this is a hard saying, impossible to understand.  The sacrament of the Eucharist, of the Body and Blood of Christ remains a profound Mystery that is still disputed in different ways, be it with rational explanations for the saying or making His teachings purely metaphorical.  The ancient early Church had instituted the Eucharist right away; by the time of the mid-second century Church writings show that it was a core of worship.  It was considered a sacrament and a Mystery, and remains so.  Throughout history, it is part of the witness of Scripture and the unanimous teaching of the Church.

Then Jesus said to the twelve, "Do you also want to go away?"  But Simon Peter answered Him, "Lord, to whom shall we go?  You have the words of eternal life.  Also we have come to believe and know that You are the Christ, the Son of the living God."  Jesus answered them, "Did I not choose you, the twelve, and one of you is a devil?"  He spoke of Judas Iscariot, the son of Simon, for it was he who would betray Him, being one of the twelve.  Here is Simon Peter's answer to the ultimate question about Christ's identity.  There is nowhere else to turn, nowhere else to go: He is the one whose words have eternal life.  This is the answer of faith, and the confession of faith.  In the Gospels, it is Peter who speaks for all the disciples.  It is Jesus who brings up -- here at this juncture of a crucial question of faith -- the one who will betray Him, the one without such faith, even one chosen by Himself.

Here we come to a crux in Jesus' teaching, a turning point.  His saying is hard, how are they to understand it?  The sacrament of the Body and Blood of Christ, of the Eucharist, is still a hard saying, so to speak.  It remains a disputed Mystery.  But perhaps that is just the point.  Faith is not concerned only with the purely rational, but rather with information from Sources far beyond what our understanding of the rational, and of facts at hand, can explain away.  Faith, we remember, really means that we put our trust in something -- or rather in Someone.  And faith works at such a depth in us that it becomes not about choosing which brand of soap we want to use based on "information" we have about its ingredients, but rather about trust, a deeper level of knowledge or information that can't come through purely intellectual understanding.  It involves the heart, the center of who we are.  Moreover it involves our capacity for relationship with Persons who are not 'only' human beings who live on our level of comprehension, but of Divine Persons.  God's full substance or essence isn't comprehensible to us.  We can't understand what it is to be the Son or the Father or the Holy Spirit in the same way we can understand, for instance, who our brother is, or our spouse.  (And here's a mystery about what it really means to be a person:  if you think carefully, you will find that you don't fully know the depth of another person either, no matter how deeply you know them.  As persons, we're not completely quantifiable.  This is part of the nature of personhood which makes us something "like" God and created in God's image.)  Just as we choose to put faith in or trust in certain people, so we have faith in Christ and faith in what He teaches.  Here are His words about eating His flesh and drinking His blood.  We know how He will give His flesh for the life of the world.  We know of His voluntary death on the Cross, and we know of His Resurrection.  But the depth of these mysteries, the mystical reality of the work of God, isn't something we can know fully and rationally.  It isn't something we can prove in a lab -- and it's not something whose meanings and myriad values in our own lives, touching on all kinds of circumstances in which we may find ourselves, we are ever going to exhaust.  This is the nature of Mystery:  it continues to unfold on depths we hadn't suspected even existed.  Even within ourselves and in our own experience of our faith, we won't exhaust the possibilities, for instance, of just how the Cross may uplift us or give us life when we experience something of "death."  Mystery is a crucially important reality to accept even though we can't fully understand it.  There are simply things that any educated and intelligent person of faith must accept to which the answer really is, "I don't know."  It's an important answer that acknowledges not only the limits of our knowledge, but in fact the only answer that acknowledges the fullness of the things we don't know.  It is the only truly wise answer to the fullness of life and existence.  But in faith, we find we're on a voyage of discovery.  It is an internal journey that will involve all the things we experience outside of ourselves as well.  In this Mystery of sacrament we find a depth of relatedness that touches on all things in ourselves:  past, present, and future.  We may find ourselves reviewing old hurts in light of the Cross, and resolving conflicts we hadn't managed to deal with that are years old.  We may find ourselves with the courage to face something we've hidden from ourselves or others.  That is just the nature of Mystery:  it keeps giving what we don't know; it is inexhaustible in its Truth.  Let us accept His words of spirit and life without limiting them.  Let us know and experience the truth of faith, the perception of something so deep within us we don't really know its Source.