Summary from Fr. Mark Goring’s homily on April 24th, 2021

St. Peter is attributed to some impressive miracles in the name of Jesus Christ, and notice Luke, who is the author of the Acts of the Apostle, includes names and details. Why is this important? Because he’s not making this up. This writing was read openly, publicly, at the time of these events. Those who didn’t believe what he wrote could talk to the people.

People were being healed, people were being risen from the dead, and the witnesses were seeing the power of the risen Lord Jesus at work.
Before His ascension, Jesus said, “I am with you always”.
Jesus rose from the dead and the Gospel tells us that He continued to work with the disciples, even though they couldn’t see him with their physical eyes. Jesus is with us, and He’s still working His power among us. In chapter 10 of John, the Lord said that even if you don’t believe him, believe the works.

We have to accept as human beings that we have a spiritual dimension, we have a soul which will live on forever. Jesus came from heaven to give us basic instructions on how to get to Heaven and proclaimed our identity to us because with the fall of our first parents, it’s like we somehow hit our heads and forgotten who we are, who we belong to, and where we are going.

God’s word is alive and active. Jesus words are spirit and life, and as children of God, even though we’ve become blinded and confused and disoriented because of the fall of our first parents, when we hear the words of the Lord Jesus, the Word who became flesh (the One sent by the Father), when we hear His words, which are spirit and life, something resonates inside of us! Kind of like a caterpillar.

If you take a caterpillar aside and say, “Hey listen I have good news for you, one day you won’t be stuck on this tree crawling around, you’re going to be flying in the big blue sky traveling all around”, something inside of the caterpillar resonates. The caterpillar knows it’s true, and so do the words of the Lord Jesus, something resonates inside of us, we know it’s true.

Like Peter, we can say to the Lord, “to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life”. The Lord Jesus came to give us instructions, He said, “very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you”.

The Jewish listeners would have said, “wait a minute, we’re Jews, we don’t drink blood.. it’s in the mosaic law, Moses said never drink blood”, and there’s a reason they were told not to drink the blood of animals because it was known that the life is in the blood and an animal has a dignity but a lower dignity than a child of God (made in the image and likeness of God). For us to take the life of an animal inside of us, who has a higher dignity as a child of God, would have been a debasement.

So again, “very truly I tell you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you”.
Did you catch that Jesus isn’t offering us the blood of an animal, he’s offering us His Blood, the life is in the blood. He’s offering us His divine life, it’s not a debasement, it’s a raising of our dignity. The life of Jesus is eternal life, so when He gives us His most precious blood, He is giving us His life and we have to drink His blood if we want to have His life and live forever.

“These are instructions from the one sent [by] the Father, and that’s why—I don’t know about you, but I’m going to listen to him! I believe in Jesus, I’ve encountered Jesus, and you better believe by the grace of God, I’m going to do everything I can to follow His instructions. That’s why I believe in the Holy Eucharist, that’s why I celebrate the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, I eat His Body, I drink His Blood. Why? Because in His Blood is life.”

Father Mark Goring

Watch the Full Homily here: