A MILLION DOLLAR QUESTION!

If you were to appear on the popular ITV quiz show, ‘Who want’s to be a Millionaire?’ and get through all fifteen questions using your lifelines of: 50-50, ask the audience, and phone a friend; what would you do with that million pounds? Would you spend it on the good life? Maybe buy a mansion, and a desert island; or perhaps spend the million pounds on a fast sport’s car and speedboat. The true story is told of a woman named Robinson Kate who lived in the early 1900’s. She found herself to be worth over $5,000,000. Kate could have led an easy life with that amount of money, but she chose to live as a vagrant, wearing horrible clothes, begging for food, and living in an unheated, dilapidated apartment. In the neighbourhood where she lived she became known by her thrifty ways. The phrase ‘as cheap as Kate’ soon became a catchword and a misprint in publication turned it into the expression that is still with us to this day: cheapskate!

Many of us would love to have a million pounds. That is why we play the lottery, we buy scratch cards; we purchase premium bonds and sweepstakes. We tell ourselves that we will buy the best things that money can buy – if we win. We all have said about famous millionaires: "I know what I would do if I had his kind of money!" With a million pounds, yes, we probably would have a lot of fun. But would we be happy? That is the million-dollar question. Wisdom tells us that the only way to be happy is to have the gift of faith.

Today’s Gospel centres on the "bread of eternal life." Jesus tells the Jews that he is the "living bread, which has come down from heaven." He offers his flesh as food and his blood as drink, and promises eternal life to those who partake of his body and blood. Jesus does not speak of mere physical immortality. He speaks of another life: the very life of God, a life of total joy and happiness. Since he has lived the life of God, he can communicate God’s love to men and women. And so he invites us all to share in his meal.

The Jews could not accept Jesus’ claim. How could anyone offer his body and blood as food and drink? That is cannibalism, they told each other. They found his claim too fantastic to think about. But Jesus is offering his body and blood in faith. Anyone who feeds on Jesus gains eternal life, which is God’s life.

This is the very lesson of the Eucharist. We may have everything in this world that money could buy, but we will still have nothing of value in the world to come.

To offer our flesh and blood as food and drink is to die. And so Jesus dies on the cross. In complete self-giving Jesus empties himself. In that act of self-sacrifice, life with God is made possible for us all.

Through his sacrifice, the bread and wine we put on the altar become the body and blood of Christ. To participate in the Eucharist is to practise self-surrender. We have come to the table and die to our own selfish concerns. In doing so we find ourselves in the presence of God and discover the love that he has for all of us. Jesus offers us a connection to the Father through the food on the altar.

We long for fulfilment and meaning. Jesus offers himself as a gift. He is life and so we must eat of his flesh. From him flows the water of life that we must drink.

Life is a banquet, but we must choose wisely the table from which we choose to partake. We all want something that lasts, a party that never ends. Wisdom has built her house and now invites us, in our First Reading, to: "come and eat my bread, drink the wine I have prepared! Leave your folly and you will live, walk in the ways of perception." To leave the table of Wisdom is to cheat ourselves – and to die as cheapskates!