For residents of Jerusalem, weekends can be quite complicated. Muslims celebrate Friday as their day of special prayer, the Jews keep the sabbath on Saturday, and Christians celebrate the Lord’s Day on Sunday. Down through the years Friday has, of course, been a special day in the Christian calendar as well. If Sunday is the day we remember the Lord’s resurrection, Friday is the day dedicated to remembering His suffering and death. Catholics were known for going to Mass on Sunday and abstaining from meat on Fridays. At present we go to Mass on Sundays still – but maybe not with the same regularity as in the past – and since our acts of penance on Fridays have become a matter of personal choice, there is perhaps not such a clear sign given by us as a community to the world.
In the Gospel it is Jesus who claims to come from God and to feed us. How can this man, whose human origins people know, come from God? But Jesus is insistent. The prophet’s promise that the people will be taught personally by God is being fulfilled in Him. The Lord has fed His people in the past: He fed His people in the desert with manna, and He fed Elijah in the wilderness. This food is different because it is a sharing in God’s own eternal life. St. Paul invites us to follow Jesus in this act of sacrifice, loving others as He has loved us, giving up our lives as a fragrant offering and sacrifice to God.
We try to bring both elements of Christ’s gift to us into our worship and into our lives. The Eucharist we celebrate is by definition an act of thanksgiving. We open ourselves to all Christ wishes to give us. We listen to His word, we see His peace in each other, we receive Him in the bread and in the wine. Yet we also are called to enter into Christ’s suffering and death, in our own lives but also in our worship. We can use Friday as a day to keep in touch with how Christ’s giving is tied to His suffering and passion. In our prayer we strip away all that binds us to illusion and sin. We can try to give a shared witness to the world through our fasting and abstinence. We give of ourselves in imitation of Christ in our almsgiving and in commitment to each other, especially to those who are poor. The gift of Christ’s life becomes the gift of our lives, and as He rises from the dead so we too rise to new life in Him.