August 25 – Twenty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time

At the first wedding I celebrated, I said to the couple, “Since this is my first time celebrating a wedding, I will probably make some mistakes, but since this is also your first time getting married, hopefully, you won’t be able to tell the difference. But while I hope that I will witness many other marriages after this one, I hope this is your only wedding.”

Over the last couple weeks, we have been working our way through Jesus’ teaching on the Bread of Life, the Eucharist, and this weekend, we have reached the end of the chapter. In conjunction with the Second Reading, we discover a profound connection between the Eucharist and marriage.

In the Second Reading, in speaking of marriage, St. Paul writes, “This is a great mystery, but I speak in reference to Christ and the church.” That word—mystery—was translated into Latin as sacramentum, from which we get our word “sacrament.” The word sacramentum referred to an oath taken by a soldier. This captures an important aspect of the sacraments, that they are our oath of faithfulness to God’s covenant.

A bride and groom seal their vows to each other by saying “I do,” promising to be faithful “in good times and in bad.” When we come forward to receive the Holy Eucharist, we respond “Amen.” Amen means “I believe,” but it also has that sense of sealing the covenant with God.

When Jesus tells the crowd to eat His flesh and drink His blood, many of the disciples return to their old way of life. As a result, Jesus turns to His apostles and says, “Do you also want to leave?” But when Jesus asks this, it is in a time of distress, and that’s what makes Peter’s response so much more impressive: “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

Whenever we encounter a moment of difficulty, when we feel God is far away, Jesus addresses that same question to us: “Do you also want to leave?” And we are called to that same fidelity to Christ in the moments of dryness as when we feel close to Him. In fact, our faith has the potential to grow even stronger in those moments because we are making the choice to love God for Himself rather than for the good feelings He gives us.

I’ve been a witness to many more weddings since then, and one thing I always like to remind the couple is that the wedding is just one day while a marriage is for life. The same is true of our faith. While we have those times of closeness to Jesus where it is easy to say “amen” to God, it is in the difficult moments that we truly live out our faithfulness. As we come forward to receive the Body of Christ at Mass, may we say “amen” to our relationship with Jesus, in that moment, but also in all the moments of our lives.

Father Frank