
Mass Readings for The Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood Christ (Corpus Christi):
Genesis 14.18-20 Psalm 110.1-4 1 Corinthians 11.23-26 Luke 9.11b-17
The last couple of weeks we’ve been talking about community – the Church constituted at Pentecost by the coming of the Holy Spirit to dwell within the community even as he alights on individuals; the Trinity celebrated last week as a dogmatic breakthrough of the early Church; it’s not just an explanation of the mystery of God in three persons, but an ideal upon which our community is to be based, and for us as sons and daughters of God, the image of an inner harmony we strive after by grace.
So, this week we come to consider the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ; the Blessed Sacrament, the Eucharistic communion to which we are called as a community of disciples. The Spirit has made us the Church, the Trinity shows us what we are to be as a community of persons made in the image of God; today we celebrate how the Blessed Sacrament makes this real, feeding us spiritually and so, nourishing us in our growth toward that perfection we see in God; and again, as both a community of believers but as individuals also.
Without the Holy Spirit, there is no Church, without the Trinity we have lack the guiding vision for our life together; without the Body and Blood of Christ, we starve and die both as a community and spiritually, as individuals.
So, it’s a mystery to me why some people don’t seem to want it. Now, I’m not talking about non-believers; nor those outside the Church who have a definite (if uninformed) opinion about this. No, that’s a matter of evangelization. My concern here is those Christians, Catholic or not, who have either read or heard the teaching of Jesus about the nature of the sacrament, that it is, as we hear in the prayer of consecration: ‘this is my body given up for you, this is my blood poured out for you,’ and yet clearly doubt it – because if believed, what could keep them away?
So, what is the source of this doubt? What or who is telling them that this can be put aside, for now or forever, that it is discretionary, a matter of personal opinion as to its reality and its necessity? Nothing Jesus or his apostles said would affirm such an attitude; nothing the Church Fathers or any Pope or Patriarch wrote or preached would endorse such a stance. They were all agreed upon the necessity of this for life: whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has life, and there is no life apart from it.
Well, who put doubt into Eve’s mind in the garden of Eden? Who is it in the world who tries to the utmost to convince us that what God says and promises cannot be trusted, cannot be held as true? Well, it’s the devil, Satan, the deceiver, the enemy, the prince of this world, Christ’s own interlocutor who tried to tempt our Lord away from God by doubting the Father’s care for his Son. Yet Jesus never yielded, hungry as he was in the desert.
Yet, for many, the sceptics seem so reasonable. The basic argument is simple enough: it is ridiculous to believe that a priestly incantation can make this bit of bread into the body and blood of Christ. Indeed, it in no apparent way changes – where’s the blood, the chewy flesh. Well, what a horror that might be for us if we were to see that happen and then be told to eat up! When Jesus spoke of the need to eat his flesh and drink his blood, the gospels tell us that people were repelled by the thought of it; many disciples abandoned him. There’s good reason for Jesus inaugurating the Eucharist at the Last Supper in the breaking of bread aside from it’s being a great deal more palatable. For one, it makes communion a true matter of faith as it teaches us not to rely on appearances; and in consuming this bread of heaven, we are connected to the stories of the Bible, the feeding miracles, the story of Exodus when wandering Israel was fed with manna, heavenly bread, in the desert. When old and mysterious Melchizedek brought out bread and wine to Abraham to celebrate a victory.
Communion incorporates us into Christ, and it makes us part of the great story of salvation; it makes us spiritual kin of the slaves escaping Egypt, it puts us in the crowd fed by five loaves and two fish, it reminds us of the continuity of faith that reaches all the way back to Abraham. And we need to be a part of that, because if we are not, then we are lost in the wilderness, or worse, heading back to bondage in Egypt in whatever form that takes today: social media, drugs, porn, politics.
Our patron St. Augustine is rightly celebrated for preaching some of the most beautiful reflections on the Sacrament of the Christ’s body and blood given in the consecrated bread.
Speaking to newly baptized members of the Church he said, “The Body of Christ is what you are told, and to this you all say ‘amen.’ Be members then of the Body of Christ so that your ‘amen’ may be true. Why is this mystery accomplished with bread? …Understand and rejoice. Unity, devotion, charity! One bread: and what is this one bread? One body made up of many. Consider that the bread is not made of one grain alone, but of many. During the time of exorcism (your preparation for baptism) you were, so to say, in the mill. At baptism you were wetted with water. Then the Holy Spirit came into you like the fire that bakes the dough. Be then what you see and receive what you are… So has the Lord willed that we should belong to him and has consecrated on the altar the mystery of our peace and our unity.”
If we look around the world today it is understandable that there are doubts about the human capacity to ever have unity, peace, charity and devotion to the good. This talk of one bread, one body is just so much pie in the sky. Don’t we think our St. Augustine lived in the same world we do? Was it not filled with division, callousness and cruelty? When Augustine preached the words I just read, he did so amidst a world changing at a remarkable pace – the Roman world yielding to something new, chaotic, threatening, being overtaken by barbarous forces – in a few years the very city in which he lived would be surrounded by Vandals – I mean the original Vandals, the barbarian tribe that overthrew much of the western Roman empire. Within the North African community he served, there was a profound spiritual divide – there was a rival schismatic church that by some estimates had more members than the Catholic Church for whom they had nothing but contempt.
And yet Augustine affirmed these qualities because they are found in the Eucharist and in the Church that feeds upon it. Yes, disunity out there, lack of charity out there, a sometimes cold and cruel world out there. But in here, as in a mother’s womb, something is being readied for birth, or rather rebirth; and week after week that renewed life goes out those doors empowered to make this world little by little better than it would otherwise be. The Church is our mother, we say. Perhaps, in keeping with imagery of bread, this is a great oven (and on hotter summer days, so it might be if not for the air conditioning in here!). Here we are the grain, milled and pressed into shape for baking. The gifts we bring up to the altar, the ciborium, that vessel filled with little communion hosts – the idea is that is us. That is all of us, as we are, with all the joys and disappointments of the past week brought to the altar to be transformed: consecrated by the Holy Spirit as we were at baptism and confirmation; and so, becoming the Body of Christ to be fed back to us, allowing us then to incorporate Christ into our bodies. There are words of the mass referring to this holy exchange and our participation in it: we as the Church are real, because of reality of the Eucharist.
I guess the second argument is about its necessity. Why do we need it? We have the Bible, we have prayer.
Yes, we have these, and they are of great help. The greatest evidence that the Blessed Sacrament is indispensable as well as being what Jesus Christ says it is, is that Church has survived for two thousand years feeding on it. We have survived vicious state persecution both in ancient and modern times; our community was all that was left standing when civilization collapsed; the Church’s martyrs spill their blood continuously for two millennia, and never more than in recent years, and yet the Body of Christ never bleeds out and dies. Account for that. Explain that in worldly, rational terms; solve the mystery of how we are still here while all about us others fall who no less, and maybe more, claim to be righteous, on the right side of history, and so on.
This self-gift of God is a pure product of a perfect love. And love never ends, it never dies, but renews, restores, revives, resurrects all who accept their need of it, feed on it, grow in it and so, thrive.
Amen.