Sermon Blog
Attendance on Holy Communion
October 19, 2025
It might seem like our coming to Christ would make life much smoother and easier, but this is seldom true. Even the disciples thought that Our Lord would set up a political kingdom that would finally make things right. They had no idea that He and they were progressing toward martyrdom.
Christ does not offer an easy life, but life itself. As Scripture tells us, “He who has the Son has life; he who has not the Son of God has not life.” To live for anything other than Him is to not live at all; it’s to recede into nothingness. As Christians we know this, but so many of us still refuse to come to Jesus. In his homily “Attendance on Holy Communion,” St. John Henry Newman, the next doctor of the Church, explains what is holding us back from full commitment to Him.
It can’t be, Newman says, that we refuse to take up our cross because we are content with our material possessions. Neither can we claim that a life of sin has satisfied us, for while “[sin] seduces us, it stings us with remorse.” Rather, we rightly fear that if we follow Jesus, he will not ask us to make a few minor adjustments to our way of thinking and behaving; he will ask for everything. He wants an exchange: our life for true life. Christian author C.S. Lewis captures this conflict in a passage from Mere Christianity:
“Imagine yourself as a living house. God comes in to rebuild that house. At first, perhaps, you can understand what He is doing. He is getting the drains right and stopping the leaks in the roof and so on: you knew that those jobs needed doing and so you are not surprised. But presently he starts knocking the house about in a way that hurts abominably and does not seem to make sense. What on earth is He up to? The explanation is that He is building quite a different house from the one you thought of – throwing out a new wing here, putting on an extra floor there, running up towers, making courtyards. You thought you were going to be made into a decent little cottage: but He is building a palace. He intends to come and live in it Himself.”
We are content with a little bit of Christ in everything we do. We are okay with some prayer before meals, some mention of Christ in our political opinions, some effort to be charitable with our money and time, and we pride ourselves on our weekly attendance at Mass. But do we come to His altar fully prepared and contrite, ready to eat of his flesh and drink his blood? In receiving him, do we surrender to him? According to Newman,
“The true reason why people will not come to this Holy Communion is this,—they do not wish to lead religious lives … there is in most cases a reluctance to bear, or at least to pledge themselves to bear, Christ’s yoke; a reluctance to give up the service of sin once for all; a lingering love of their own ease, of their own will, of indolence, of carnal habits, of the good opinion of men whom they do not respect; a distrust of their perseverance in holy resolves … This is why men will not come to Christ for life; they know that He will not impart Himself to them, unless they consent to devote themselves to Him.”
Newman is not addressing unbelievers, dissenters or nominal Christians. He is “speaking of some of those who now hear me” as he addresses his congregation. We should not be surprised. Christ himself had hard words for those who truly wished to follow him. He told the rich young ruler to sell all that he had. He urged the man whose father died to not turn back but to “let the dead bury the dead.” And when many left him because he told them that to have life they must eat his flesh and drink his blood, he turned to his closest disciples and said, “Will you also go away?”
There is only one way to follow Jesus: unconditionally. If we want to hold onto anything of this world, our hands will not be free to hold onto him. If this saddens us, it is because we do not understand the gift. We think only of selling all that we have, but we forget that we gain the pearl of great price. If we understood that we go to the altar to receive life itself,
we would never take the Holy Mass for granted. As Catholic professor and author Peter Kreeft puts it: “If you have God plus 10 million other things and if I have God alone, you don’t have a single thing more than I do.” Do we get that?
If we are guilty of wanting to hold on to our life as it is, we need only to ask for Christ to open our eyes so we can see the real life he brings. We would do well to pray: Lord help us to see you and desire you with a jealous love. Let nothing come between us and you and give us the courage to abandon anything and everything that prevents us from coming to you.
