Sunday Homilies with Fr. Mike Schmitz - 06/02/24 Gift and Mystery: His Very Self

Episode Date: June 1, 2024

Homily from the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ. Do I not know? Or do I not care? The Eucharist is truly the Body, and Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus Christ. Beyond all of God's other gifts, this gift stands alone. Because it is the gift of His very Self. And yet, too often our hearts are cold and indifferent to this Greatest of Gifts. Mass Readings from June 2, 2024: Exodus 24:3-8 Psalms 116:12-13, 15-18Hebrews 9:11-15 Mark 14:12-16, 22-26

Welcome to Sunday homilies with me, Father Mike Schmitz. I hope today's homily inspires and motivates you, and I also hope that it leaves you hungry for the one who gave everything to feed you. If you want to get this in other Sunday Mass resources sent straight to your inbox, sign up at ascensionpress.com slash Sunday, or by texting Sunday to 33777. You can also follow or subscribe on your podcast app for weekly notifications. God bless. The Lord be with you.

reading from the Holy Gospel according to Mark. Chapter 14 verses 12 through 16 and verses 22 through 26. On the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, when they sacrificed the Passover lamb, Jesus as his disciples said to him, where do you want us to go and prepare for you to eat the Passover? He sent two of his disciples and said to them, go into the city and a man will meet you carrying a jar of water.

Follow him. Wherever he enters, say to the master of the house, the teacher says, where is my guest room where I may eat the Passover with my disciples? Then he will show you a large upper room furnished and ready. Make the preparations for us there. The disciples then went off, entered the city, and found it just as he had told them, and they prepared the Passover.

While they were eating, he took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them, and said, take it, this is my body. Then he took a cup, gave thanks, and gave it to them, and they all drank from it. He said to them, this is my blood. of the covenant, which will be shed for many. Amen. I say to you, I shall not drink again the fruit of the vine until the day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God. Then after singing a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives. The gospel of the Lord. Praise to your Lord Jesus Christ. Wait you to have a seat. So the question is, what is worse?

Which is worse? Ignorance or indifference? Because Ignorance would be like, you know, it's a darkening of the intellect, right? It's a lack of knowledge. Obviously, that's ignorance. But indifference is often a cold heart. So indifference is when I say, I don't know, and ignorance is I say, I don't know, and indifference is when I say, I don't care. And which one is worse? I just go back to, like, when it comes to the Lord, when it comes to God, which is worse?

Is it worse to not know or is it worse to not care? Because we can know all we want. I mean, I think in some ways, I think in some ways indifference is the poison. I think indifference in so many ways is the culprit for all of us. I mean, go back to the very verse stories of the Bible. You have, here's Adam and Eve. And in the garden, they know, they know God is, they know God is good. They know that God wants to feed them, right?

That's, he puts them in this garden and you can say, yeah, eat all of these fruits of all these trees. The one tree you can't have. That's basically it, right? There's one rule. So they know. And then along comes a serpent. And, you know, it says that Eve looks at the fruit and she saw that it was

pleasing to the eyes, desire for gaining wisdom, and it's going to taste good. And even though she knew, she wasn't ignorant, at one point, she, like all of us, said, I don't care. And this becomes the pattern for all of us. I mean, later on, through scripture, again and again, is the pattern. So here's the people of Israel. They're slaves in Egypt for 400 years. God sets them free, right?

He fights to set them free, leads them into the wilderness, and he feeds them. Again, this is one of the themes, too, is God wants to feed us. He says, let me feed you. So he feeds Adam and Eve, but they're like, I know that, but I don't care. Here in the wilderness, God says, let me feed you, and let me give you bread from heaven. I mean, just how crazy is it?

He wants to give them bread from heaven every single day. They get up and they get fed by God himself. They know this. They're not ignorant of this, but at some point they just don't care. Yeah, God, I know you're giving us bread from heaven, but we want the leaks and the onions and the melons, and we want the garlic, we want all the things that we can't have. And so for us, just like for the Israelites,

So often, we know exactly what God wants to do. We know exactly what He wants from us. We know exactly what He wants for us. I just don't care. And then even when it comes down to it, here is Jesus today. And what does he do? At the Last Supper, it makes it incredibly clear. Again, here is God saying, let me feed you.

And so at the last supper, he takes bread and says, this is my body. Give him for you. Eat it. Takes a chalice of the wine. So no, actually, this is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and eternal covenant. do this in memory of me. And so for so many of us, like, no, I know.

I'm not ignorant. I just don't care. So, you know, we're in the middle of the Eucharistic revival right now. I think it started, at least in this region, it started a couple weeks ago. And in preparation for this, I heard a talk by Monsignor Shea. He's the president of U.Merry and Bismarck. It's just awesome because everything he says is awesome.

And at one point, he said that people were writing to him, knowing that he was going to talk about the Eucharist, and they were saying, Father, or Monsignor Shea, he just have to, we just need more priests to talk about the reality of the Eucharist. We just need more priests to talk about that fact that Jesus truly is present, body, blood, soul, and divinity, and the mass. We just need more people to do that. Well, more priests to do that. And he said, I read these articles, I read these letters and read these emails. And he said, I don't know one priest who doesn't believe that. Like he says, I don't know

one priest who doesn't talk about the Eucharist. He said, I don't know. I don't know if there is a priest in our country. I don't know if there's a priest in our diocese here in Duluth, at least, who isn't in love with Jesus in the Euchar. And talks about him in the Eucharist all of the time. So maybe it's not so much a matter of ignorance. Maybe it's not so much a matter of, I just didn't know. Now, that happens, because you're on campus. We'll meet students all the time, whether they were raised Catholic or not,

who don't realize, oh my gosh, that really is Jesus. And that transforms their lives. Sometimes going from ignorance to knowledge is that elimination. Sometimes going from I didn't know to I do know has been enough to change someone's life. But I think I look at myself. and I think, I don't know that I actually went from ignorance to knowledge, I might have gone from indifference to something else.

Because whenever I tell my story about here's Jesus truly present in the Eucharist, I mean, I was raised Catholic and I had went to a Catholic elementary school and I didn't care, I didn't like the Mass, I didn't like church, I didn't like praying, I didn't like any of the stuff. I might say I hated it, but that's a little strong, but I'll probably say I hated it. I just, it was no good. And then I had this moment where I remember, as I've described it so many times, I had an encounter with the Lord in confession.

And that opened up my heart to like, wait a second, maybe God matters a lot. Because he just actually, he melted my heart, right? So it went from cold indifference to like, maybe I should care about him. And I remember reading a book. And actually I just found the book yesterday. I was reading through it again. I remember reading a book just of a collection of stories about different articles of the faith. and one chapter is dedicated to stories about the Eucharist.

And I remember being struck in that I was reading into my bedroom and I was like, oh my gosh, that really is Jesus. Like, for example, for example, to be able to go back to like John chapter 6 and realize that not only at the Last Supper when Jesus said, this is my body, he didn't say this is a symbol of my body or this reminds you of my body. He actually said this is my body. In fact, St. Charles Borromeo at one point was in a debate with a Protestant who was saying that this was a symbol of Jesus' body.

wasn't really, the Eucharist really isn't him. And the guy got done with his whole spiel about, like, there's only a symbol of Jesus, only an image of Jesus, only reminder of Jesus. And Charles Bormillo, who's kind of a jokester at one point, he gets up and he says, okay, let me just get this straight. You say, the other debater, like, you say, this is not his body. But Jesus said, this is my body.

Question, if you are me, who do you think I should believe? Because if Jesus said this is my body, then maybe he meant it. And not only maybe he meant it, but he actually. makes it absolutely clear in John chapter 6 where he says the flesh the bread I will give is my flesh for the life of the world. Now people at that time, they took him literally, not symbolically. And if Jesus only meant this symbolically, if he only meant this figuratively, this would have been an incredible opportunity for him to correct them. But he doesn't correct them. When they say these words, after he says, the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world. This is John

chapter 6 verse 52 it says the Jews called among themselves saying how can this man give us his flesh to eat rather than Jesus correcting them he actually doubles down he triples down he quadruples down he septuples down and he says amen amen I say to you unless you eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood you have no life within you whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and I'll raise him on the last day for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I and him and the Lastly, he says, just that the living father sent me and I have left because of the father. So also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me.

So when Jesus, when there's the question of like, was this a symbol of you or is just figurative language? Jesus makes it absolutely clear that no, no, no. This bread that quote unquote bread I will give, this wine I will give is actually, truly, substantially, and really my body and my blood, the very soul and divinity of Jesus himself. So I'm reading this book. and that truth just like it changed me it changed my life i remember running downstairs i get to my siblings in the kitchen like you guys did you know that like jesus is really truly present in the euchreist and i like yeah

of course like no no you guys like that's really him like at the mass that at the mass that's jesus and like yeah we know like no you guys that's him and they're like yeah moron we went to catholic school too and i always thought it was simply a matter of i didn't know but they were right i went to catholic school too. Like I went to every Mass they went to. Why would they know that and I had no idea? I don't know that it was not a matter of me not knowing. I think it might have been a matter of me not caring. Which is one of the reasons why I think that sometimes God breaks through because we might have a church full of people who, yeah, yeah, I know Jesus is in the Eucharist. I know that's important. I just don't care. I think sometimes because of that God breaks through and does some of these

Eucharistic miracles. You know there are so many remarkable Eucharistic miracles. miracles. One of the oldest ones is from the year 700 goes, it's in Lanziano, Italy. And they actually in that, so it's 1,300 years old. But it's still there. The miracle is still visible where you can see that the host and you see the blood that at the mass, 1,300 years ago, as a priest was offering mass, he was doubting whether or not Jesus was truly present in the Eucharist. And in his very hands, in that very chalice, the host literally turned to flesh. and the wine literally turned to blood. And in the 1970s, 1980s, they did experiments on this,

and they found something remarkable. They found that that is true human blood, type A-B, really rare. Only 5% of the population of the world has a type A-B blood. That host actually is human flesh. And not just from any part of the body, but it's from the myocardium, which is the heart muscle. Not only from anywhere, it's from the left ventricle of the heart muscle, which is the part of the heart that pumps out oxygenated blood to the rest of the body.

And every other Eucharistam, and it's still there. And you can see this. And every other Eucharistic miracle, this is remarkable. From Buenos Aires in the 1990s to even Poland, Sokolka Poland in 2008. Sokoka Poland, there was a host that had fallen to the ground. And so the priest picked it up and he put it in a thing of water and put it in a safe, and back in the sacristy, back in like the changing room for the priest. and it was in the safe for about a week or so,

and then the priest asked the secretary, could you check that out? Because what you do is you allow the host to dissolve and it ceases to be bread, therefore it ceases to have the appearance of bread, therefore it ceases to be the Eucharist. So she opens the safe and she had this, she got this smell of,

like a kind of a gentle smell of unleavened bread. And she looks at the host in the water and she noticed that it's changed, that it seems to be bleeding from the center of the host. And so this priest, the secretary tells the priest, the priest tells the other priest he lives with, they tell the bishop, they keep it under wraps for a couple years. At one point, they take it out of the water and I put it on a purificator, right?

On a cloth. And they realize that you can see this. Now, they did experiments where you can see this. Part of it is bread. And part of the host has completely changed to become human flesh and blood. Where the bread and the human flesh, meat, it's bonded in this remarkable and inexplicable way.

And that blood is also type A-B. Two different scientists have examined that miracle from 2008 and have concluded the exact same thing. That is heart tissue from a man who is dying from torture, or some kind of trauma. And every one of the Eucharistic miracles have those same markers. It's always a heart tissue. It's always type A, B, blood.

It's always consistently this thing. And why? Because I believe that God knows us, and he knows that so often we're not ignorant, so often we're simply indifferent. So often, it's not a matter of I need to know more. Oftentimes it's a matter I need to care more. So I look back on my life and think, wait a second,

that night when I was reading that book, did I learn something new or did something awaken? And I realized, as I was looking through the book just yesterday, I was realizing it wasn't just about this teaching on the Eucharist that really is Jesus, that he meant it when he said, this is my body, this is in my blood. What I was reading, I was reading stories of people who would do anything for the Eucharist. That's what happened. That's what changed me.

I read stories of people who would die rather than give up the Eucharist. I read stories of people who were laid down their lives rather than walk away from Jesus in the Eucharist. I read stories of people. It's crazy. It was stories of like emperors and kings and whatnot who'd be in their carriages as a priest was walking by with the Euchar. and they would make the carriage stop, they'd jump out of the carriage, they kneeled down as the King of Kings came by. I remember as a 15-year-old, 16-year-old,

hearing those stories, I remember thinking, this is, this matters. Like, this is something, it's not just true. It means something. This isn't just an objective fact. This is something that it should change my life because I was reading stories of people who this changed their life. Whether it was because they had read Scripture

or because they had heard of the miracles, didn't matter. They weren't moved from a place of ignorance to place of knowledge. They're moved from a place of indifference to a place where this matters. I care. And I realize that's what I needed. Maybe that's what we need. Maybe that's what we need as a church.

Of course, we need to know the fact. The truth is in the Eucharist that truly is Jesus, body blood, blood, soul, and divinity. But maybe what we need even more is we need a heart that has melted. A heart that actually being touched by the Eucharist. the heart that has been transformed by people who are willing to do anything for Jesus. And one of those stories that maybe melted my heart more than any, I had heard when I was in college, so even years later. And this is the last little story, last little thing.

When I was in college, there was a, the way they did Mass, where I went to school is they had unleavened bread, but it wasn't like hosts, it was like unleavened bread. And so when we went up for communion, they'd like rip off a piece of unleavened bread, Jesus and the Eucharist and Body of Christ, Body of Christ, which was kind of cool because that's how it probably would have been at the last supper, the early church. The problem was that after that, all these crumbs of Jesus would be on the floor. And so after Mass, all four of my years in college, there's a man in my class. And he would, after Mass, everyone cleared out and he would go up into the sanctuary and he'd go on his hands and knees and he eat the Eucharist off the floor.

I remember thinking like, that's kind of weird. Like, I mean, I believe too, man, but like, it's a little extreme. I remember asking him, like, why do you do that? And he told me this story. He said that when he was in high school, he heard a story that moved him from indifference to a place of caring. And the story was shared by Archbishop Fulton Sheen, who said that back when Communist Party came to power in China, the Catholic Church was in China in a pretty significant way. But the Communist Party, being atheistic and militantly anti-religion, went about shutting their down the church. At one point they went into this village or into this town and they locked up the priest

in his rectory and put them under house arrest and then they just went into the church and ransacked the church where they just tore it on all the statues and broke the crucifix and they turned over the pews and at one point they took the tabernacle and they threw it out the window and the priest could see it crash out the window, hit the ground and burst open and the Eucharist just scatter on the ground. Now the priest had known how many hosts there were and so he just stood there and he knelt there actually at the window, just adoring Jesus, laying there, abandoned in the ground. And as night fell, he kept praying.

But as the darkness came, he saw this shadow, the small shadow that was moving, closer and closer to where the Eucharist was on the ground. And as the shadow got closer, he recognized it was the shadow of a 12-year-old girl from his parish. Now, she had seen what the soldiers had done. She had seen the Eucharist on the ground. And so she waited until darkness came so she could see. sneak in and actually preserve our Lord Jesus. So what she did was she snuck to where the Eucharist was on the ground.

She knelt down and she was taught as a kid that you don't pick up the Eucharist with your hands. And so she bent her face down to the ground and picked up the Eucharist with her tongue. Seafelic communion made the sign of the cross and left. Because she also was told that you'd only receive communion one time a day. And so she just received once, went off into the darkness. And night after night she came back. Night after night after night, she risked her life. Night after night, she knelt down for her face to the ground,

picked up the Eucharist with her tongue and went into the dark. went back into the night. The final night, because the priest had counted how many hosts there were, the final night, he was praying for her just because he knew that she was risking her life every time she came to kneel down and received Jesus. She came, she knelt down, she received,

she got up, as she got up that last time, she knocked something over and made a noise. The soldiers rushed to where she was, saw what she was doing, and beat her to death with the butts of their rifles. He told me that story. And he looked at me and he said, that's why I do this after every Mass. I know it looks a little silly.

I know people cannot understand what I'm doing, eating the Eucharist off the floor. But that girl was not only willing to give her whole life for Jesus and the Eucharist, that girl gave her life for Jesus in the Eucharist. So what is the very least I can do to eat him off the floor? And that's the kind of thing that can moves us. Not from a place of ignorance to place of knowledge, but from a place of indifference to a place where this matters. For a place of I don't care to, I would give my life for Jesus in the Eucharist.

And that's what we need. I don't think we need more knowledge. I think we need more love. And that's what I'm praying for on this Feast of Corpus Christi. That for all of us, For all of us who are so preoccupied with reading the next book or listening to the next podcast or watching the next video about how Jesus is truly present in the Eucharist, that's fine. Those are good.

But why not have more, not more knowledge about Jesus and the Eucharist? But more love for Jesus in the Eucharist.