Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, August 18, 2024 - Proverbs 9:1-6; Ephesians 5:15-20; John 6:51-58
For the past two weeks, I’ve spoken rather directly about the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. So, today I am going to take a slightly different approach as Jesus continues to talk about his being true flesh and true blood.
Graham Green, one of the most famous authors of the 20th century, became a Catholic after he was an adult. And, after he converted to Catholicism, he wrote several novels that had truths of the Catholic faith as their pivotal structure. The most famous of them, by far, is a novel called The Power and the Glory. It’s about a little-known piece of history in Mexico called the Cristero War. If you want to learn about the Cristero War entirely, there is a good movie out called, For The Greater Glory, and it stars and was produced by Eva Longoria, from Desperate Housewives, and Anthony Garcia. So, just a thought, alright? But anyway.
I won’t tell you the whole plot of the book because that would keep us here until the 11:00 Mass. Basically, what happens is this. There is a priest who is ministering in a little county in Mexico, where the law is that the Catholic Church is illegal, and priests are punishable by death if they minister. So, this guy, who is known throughout the novel only as “the whiskey priest” because he is an alcoholic and because, in the village where he was ministering before all of this stuff happened, he fathered a child, and he was looked upon with great ridicule and contempt by the villagers.
Anyway, we find him in the queue of people waiting to get on a steamship to escape from all of this, when someone in the crowd comes up and tells him that there is an old woman who needs to be anointed. And so, he leaves the line to go and do that. By the time he gets back from anointing her - giving her what they used to call Extreme Unction - the ship has sailed, and he is stuck in an unsafe place.
So, he finds safety in the home of a very rich merchant and wants to say Mass for the people who come to him secretly, but he needs altar wine. So, he goes to a bootlegger - because alcohol is also illegal in this district - and he buys a bottle of wine. He also buys a bottle of brandy because, because why? He’s an alcoholic. And the person who sells him the liquor twists his arm into sharing the bottle of wine with him. By the time they’re finished, they’re both drunk and the wine is all gone.
He still manages to celebrate Mass because brandy is simply re-fermented wine. But, as he’s saying Mass, the military are coming in the front door to arrest him. He escapes out the back door with the help of friends and escapes to the next county, where Catholicism is not illegal. He thinks he’s finally free, except that someone comes across the border and says there’s a serious bandito right across the border who is dying and needs absolution for his many sins. So, he goes. As you might suspect, it was just a trap. The moment he enters the house, he is arrested by the local police. The next morning, he is executed by firing squad.
Everybody in the novel has a name except the whiskey priest. Keep that in mind. Notice how each crisis in the book centers around the administration of a sacrament. There is Extreme Unction, which we now call the Sacrament of the Anointing of the Sick, Holy Eucharist in the Mass, and absolution for grave evil. But there is a fourth sacrament that you don’t really notice. The fourth sacrament is the sacrament of Holy Orders. That’s why he is never named. He’s simply a priest. As a matter of fact, a sinful priest.
He and I are exactly the same. We are ordinary, sinful human beings who, at one point in our lives, offered ourselves to the service of the Church. But none of the other three sacraments can happen without a priest. And so, four sacraments are being championed in the story. And, in each of the stories, it is not the ritual that is described. You never see the anointing. You never see the absolution. You never see the Mass. What’s described is the fact that there is such a thing.
We tend to limit ourselves to symbols. Jesus is not in the bread; Jesus is the bread. The body of Christ is not on our altars; Jesus is with us on our altars and in our bodies. It is not oil that has been blessed that makes us maybe feel better; it is Jesus by our bedside that makes us feel better. It is not the priest waving his hand over us and saying the words that makes us feel forgiven; it is Jesus, coming to us sacramentally, telling us, “I understand, and I forgive you.”
The reason why the book is called The Power and the Glory is because that’s what the sacraments convey. Power and glory. We never know what’s around the next corner, but we always know who is around the next corner.