In a wonderful little book, entitled The Last Temptation of Christ, written by a fellow named Nikos Katzanzakis . . . we find Jesus suffering the agonies of His crucifixion while the Blessed Virgin and John, the Beloved Disciple, are standing at the foot of the Cross.  Suddenly, this angel comes running up Calvary hill and leans against John to catch his breath, and he says to Jesus, “Thank God you’re still alive!  I’ve been looking everywhere for you.  The Almighty has sent me to tell you He’s changed His mind.  Look at these people!  They’re so ignorant and willful that they’re unable to comprehend the great sacrifice You’re making here.  They need more time.  Prophesy is beyond them.  So, the Father wants you to come down, Jesus, and teach His beloved children by becoming truly one of them.  Then they will come to their senses and want to be like you and so, come into the Light.”  And then the story gazes upon the incarnate mind of the son of Mary, Who sees the superior sense to this new approach to defeating human sin.  “Bring them along,” Jesus thinks, delirious with pain.  And His heart turns to Mary Magdalene, whom He loves; how they might marry and live by the shore of the Sea of Galilee.  Jesus tenderly gazes with His mind’s eye upon the erotic image of Mary Magdalene in their marriage bed and upon the saintly children who will be the issue and the joy of their life together.  “Bring them along,” Jesus thinks, “Go into old age living an ordinary life conformed to the extraordinary life of Heaven … and then everyone will understand what I came to teach them.”  And with this thought Jesus sees the deception.  Recollecting that the Father had willed redemption . . . and not simply enlightenment, Jesus sees that the angel before Him is the Dark Angel, whose most terrible temptation is not to power, like the three temptations in the wilderness; . . . Jesus upon the Cross sees that the Dark Angel’s last and most terrible temptation is not to power . . . but to be ordinary.  This, Katzanzakis suggests, is the meaning of Christ’s agonized cry from the Cross.  The Lord’s agony was not the pain of the nails; . . . the Lord’s agony was this Last Temptation.

    Because, you see, it’s the devil’s very convincing deception that you should use your flesh to satisfy your ordinary wants.  After all, isn’t that how God made you?  It’s the devil’s very convincing deception that you should raise your eyes no higher than ordinary happiness.  After all, isn’t that what God gives you?  It’s the devil’s very convincing deception that our minds should be challenged with nothing more than what we can comprehend.  After all, isn’t your mind the thing which God created in His Image?  And because Satan’s deception is so convincing; because we so long to use our powers to be ordinary . . . Jesus came to us to reveal and become the way for us to attain to an extraordinary Life . . . and to use our powers to become the people we were created to be.

    This is why, for a very brief while, on the other side of the world from here, near the northern tip of the Sea of Galilee, in a town called Capernaum, . . . for a very brief while the synagogue there was radiant with light, like a city on a hill; . . . this is why for a very brief while the synagogue at Capernaum was effulgent with the glory of God.  . . . Because the men who gathered there to study the Holy Scriptures and to pray were afire with the joy of Heaven.  . . . They were afire with the joy of Heaven because the rabbi who had come from Nazareth had given them a vision of light!  The rabbi from Nazareth had lifted up their eyes to see that they were a people entrusted with the sacred Law of Moses not as a means of governing their ordinary lives(!), but that they were an extraordinary people to whom God’s sacred Law had been entrusted in order that they might have a window into Heaven, . . . in order that every morning the breeze of Heaven’s sweetness might refresh them with it’s life; . . . in order that every morning the glory of God might cast its effulgent smile upon them so that their lives could have a clarity and a freshness which was extraordinary and holy . . . so that their lives were poised to walk through a door which the Lord God Almighty would open for them; . . . so that their lives had the purpose of eagerly inviting the world to walk through God’s door with them.  . . . And so, Jesus says to the men of Capernaum . . . and to all of us . . . Jesus says,

Truly, truly, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you; he who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.

    In the Hebrew language, to speak of flesh and blood is to speak of the whole person.  And so, Jesus tells us, with these words, . . . Jesus tells us that in order to live, . . . in order to be, literally, a whole person and not someone passing through this life as if it were a dream, . . . a person who will evaporate like a snail in the sun when the dream is over, . . . in order to live . . . we must become Jesus.  It is not enough to remember God on Sunday; . . . it is not enough to remember God when you are afraid.  It is not enough to invoke God to bless the unmanageable moments of your ordinary life.  If you want to live, Jesus says, . . . then you must become a son of God; . . . you must become God’s daughter, . . . not figuratively, mind you; it must not be for you “as if” you were a son of God . . . or “as if” you were God’s daughter; . . . you must be the flesh and you must be the life of Jesus.

    This is the third thing that Jesus wishes for us to understand about Himself in the Bread of Life Discourse He offers us in the Sixth Chapter of John’s Gospel.  … The first is that we must understand that the Lord God Almighty doesn’t wish to improve human life, . . . but that it is the will of God the Father for human life be different; . . . it is the will of God the Father for human life to be sacred and to sanctify.  . . . And so, Jesus says to us, “I am the bread of life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and he who believes in me shall never thirst,” by which saying Jesus wants us to remember that not only is He God’s Son, . . . but that He is the God Incarnate; . . . that I do not make Jesus present when I pray over the Communion Bread, . . . but that Jesus is Present in the Communion Bread when we bless and break it in Remembrance of Him; . . . Jesus is Present because He promised to be . . . and because He is God.  . . . The second thing that Jesus wants us to understand is that the difference His Presence makes in the Communion Bread is twofold:  . . . it is sapiential in that Christ’s Presence conveys a sanctifying Wisdom which overcomes sin, . . . and the Communion Bread is sacramental, as well, in that it organically unites the Communicant to the Son (Who is God, remember) and makes him (and makes her) an eternal creature whom the Son shall raise up to life at the end of history; . . . on the last day.

    And now we have this third aspect to Christ’s Bread of Life Discourse in which He tells us,

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.

. . . In the July 5th issue of a publication called “The Living Church”, there is report that an order of Episcopal nuns, called the All Saints Sisters of the Poor, will shortly be received into the Roman Catholic Church.  This radical step became necessary, their Bishop Visitor explains, because while women were attracted to the mission and ministry of the sisterhood, “most potential aspirants declined to pursue a calling with the order because they found its traditional vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience to be incongruous with what is understood to be the mission and ministry of the Episcopal Church (p. 17)”(!).  . . . I am astonished to hear such a thing.  I am astonished to hear that the Episcopal Church expects me to fulfill its mission by striving for wealth, unchastity, and willfulness.  . . . I am astonished because for two thousand years monastic orders have tried to mirror, for the Church, the common Christian life which every man, woman, and child receives at their baptism.  . . . Because, you see, the life of Jesus by which you abide in Him and He in you; . . . the life of Jesus was communicated to you at your baptism when you renounced the enticements of the world to govern you; . . . when you renounced the disordered appetites of your flesh to control you; . . . and when you renounced the devil for using the world and your flesh to deceive you.  The life of Jesus was communicated to you when you renounced the world, the flesh, and the devil so that you might live in God alone:  . . . simply, chastely, and focused upon the Father Whose son you are; . . . focused upon the Father Whose daughter you have become.  . . . And Jesus is the Bread of Life Who empowers you to retain what He communicates to you.  . . . Any moron can live a profligate, promiscuous, and self-centered life, . . . a life that labors for the bread that perishes, . . . but God the Father has given you God the Son so that your life can be different; . . . so that the mission and ministry of your life might be sacred.

    And so, Jesus says to the men at Capernaum . . . and to us; . . . Jesus says,

As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me.  This is the bread which came down from heaven, not such as the fathers ate and died; he who eats this bread will live for ever.

There are those who will die because they have no life in them.  . . . But whoever lives a life which mirrors the poverty, chastity and obedience of Jesus; . . . whoever lives in this life with utter simplicity; . . . whoever lives in this life free of sexual commerce except as ordained by God in the intimacy between a man and a woman within the covenant of holy matrimony; . . . whoever lives in this life with utter surrender of self to God the Father . . . and to God the Son . . . and to God the Holy Spirit; . . . whoever eats the flesh of Jesus and drinks His blood lives . . . because he is God’s son; . . . because she is a daughter of the Father.
 
    There is a wicked Dark Angel always at your elbow . . . continually enticing you to be ordinary.  But Jesus is the Living Bread Who has come to us to be the sapiential and sacramental remedy for the Dark Angel’s lies.  Jesus has given us His Body and His Blood so that our lives might be extraordinary; . . . so that God might visit us; . . . so that we might have an open window into Heaven so that the life of God might blow on us; . . . so that the light of God’s glory might make of our lives this sacred truth:  that

He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him.