How Jesus presented the Eucharist in the face of dulness and antagonism from the crowd
The temperament of the crowd is intrinsic to the way Our Lord taught them about this mystery.
The temperament of the crowd is intrinsic to the way Our Lord taught them about this mystery.
Editor’s Notes
In this piece, Father Coleridge tells us:
Why Our Lord rebuked those who sought earthly bread instead of faith
How the miracle of the loaves prepared men for the Holy Eucharist
What the crowd’s dullness teaches us about receiving difficult doctrine.
He shows us that faith must rise above earthly motives to receive the mysteries of God.
For more on this series, see Part I.
The Discourse in the Synagogue
The Training of the Apostles, Part IV
Chapter IV
St. John vi. 25–72; Story of the Gospels, § 74
Burns and Oates, London, 1885.
(Read on Corpus Christi)
How Our Lord gradually unveiled the doctrine of the Holy Eucharist
How Jesus used the loaves to explain his doctrine to the people – and to us
How Jesus presented the Eucharist in the face of dulness and antagonism from the crowd
Defective temper of the audience
The discourse begins with the question of the people to our Lord, how He came to Capharnaum.
Our Lord, as has been said, does not answer this, but He begins at once to blame them for the motives which have led them to Him, motives of temporal comfort and support, rather than the high and ready faith which the miracle ought to have awakened in them.
Thus we have at once a kind of antagonism between our Lord and His audience, an antagonism which is at work all through the discourse, and to which He more than once alluded. He wished to raise their hearts and minds to a gift very far transcending that miraculous food which they had received. In the instruction which He wished to impart to them concerning this food, great faith was needed, and this great faith ought to have been generated in them by the miracle.
On the other hand, the effect of the miracle on them had been much more to make them desire and hope for a continuance of such temporal benefits and nothing more, than to make them desirous of the instruction He had to give, and the marvellous promise He was to make. Nor was their faith as yet high enough for them to receive this promise.
Dulness of the people
The antagonism of which we have here an instance is not that which our Lord had to deal with in the case of the Scribes and Pharisees in Jerusalem. In that case there is a decided hostility and captiousness almost from the very first.
In the case of this multitude, our Lord has to struggle against dulness, deadness, pettiness of mind, the grovelling thought that cannot soar, the limited intelligence that cannot penetrate, the cold heart that cannot take in the wonderful goodness and power of God. This multitude represents the poverty of the intelligence of man, left almost to himself, in his present state of exile, rather than the malice of which the human heart is capable when Satan gets a footing in it and rouses it into enmity to the truth.
Even without the influence of the cunning enemies of God, the world stands staring and gaping, as it were, at the marvels of Divine love, and has neither eye nor heart for them. Our Lord deals with them with infinite patience and gentleness, though He speaks as if He were surprised at their dulness.
Our Lord reproves this dulness at the very outset of His discourse, and He says many things as He proceeds which show how much it is in His mind as the great impediment with which He has to contend. But for this, we may suppose, He would simply have proposed to their faith, enlightened and kindled by the miracle which they had witnessed, the doctrine which this passage contains concerning the Blessed Eucharist.
And it might have been expected that they would not at once understand it, especially as He said nothing on this occasion concerning the manner in which He was to make them feast on His own Body and Blood in the great Sacrament of His Love. This truth would have been to them as so many of the things which our Lord spoke of to His Apostles—hidden and incomprehensible until the time came for the Holy Ghost to illuminate their understandings concerning our Lord’s words, but not the less full of light and doctrine when that time did come.
But, as a matter of history, we can trace this dulness working in their minds all through, and notice our Lord’s constant reference to it as He goes on.
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