HOMILY FOR THE SOLEMNITY OF THE BODY AND BLOOD OF CHRIST (CORPUS CHRISTI)

Rev. Fr. (Dr.) Osmond Anike

Readings:

First Reading: Deuteronomy 8:2-3, 14-16 – He fed you with manna, which neither you nor your fathers had known.

Responsorial Psalm: Psalm 147:12-15, 19-20 – O praise the Lord Jerusalem.

Second Reading:1 Corinthians 10:16-17 – That there is only one loaf means that, though we are many, we form one body.

Gospel: John 6:51-58 – My flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.

After the celebration of the mystery of the Holy Trinity, we are confronted today with the mystery of the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist. In my homily for the Holy Thursday mass of the Last Supper, I traced the origin and the evolution of the Eucharist in the Jewish Passover rituals, and how Jesus changed the ritual meaning that night by changing the Jewish haggadah (you may wish to go back to that homily in order to refresh your memory). The Christian Eucharist that evolved retained the original Jewish elements of being, first, an ecclesial meal. Like the Jewish Passover, it is not a private meal even when it is being celebrated in private homes. In the same way, the Eucharist is always a community meal; a meal of unity. Secondly, like the Jewish Passover, it is a memorial meal. However, while the Passover celebrates the memorial of God’s great exodus action, the Eucharist celebrates the memorial of His wonderful works in Jesus Christ. Thirdly, in the Jewish Passover, an unblemished lamb is sacrificed on that night; in the Christian Eucharist, Christ is that sacrificial lamb. He is both the victim and the priest, with the earthly priest only acting in persona Christi.

The Eucharist is celebrated daily and, especially, every Sunday. It has been at the center of the church’s life since the post-resurrection apostolic practices of the breaking of bread. As a feast, however, today’s solemnity has its origin in the vision of an Augustinian nun – Juliana of Liège (Liège is a city in Belgium) – who saw a vision of full moon, glistening and almost perfect but for some hollow dark spots. She was told in the vision that the dark spots represented the absence of a feast of the Eucharist. Consequently, the celebration of the Corpus Christi was introduced in the church’s calendar in 1264. A celebration like this affords us the opportunity to understand the critical issues involved in the mystery of the Eucharist.

Over and above the elements of the Eucharist as an ecclesial, a memorial, and a sacrificial meal, the most consequential issue involved in the Eucharist (at least from the perspective of Catholic doctrine), is the issue of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. The doctrine teaches that, after the consecration by the priest, the wafers of bread and the wine change into the real body and blood of Christ. This is called transubstantiation: the elements of bread and wine remain, but the substance change. The Eucharist, therefore, does not just represent the body of Christ; the Eucharist is really the body of Christ. In this sense, the Catholic idea of transubstantiation differs from the Protestant idea of trans-signification. Some Protestant theology teaches that the Eucharist signifies or represents the body and blood of Christ, as opposed to it being really the body and blood of Christ. However, Catholic teaching does not subscribe to this idea. It anchors its doctrine from the words of Christ during the Last Supper when he handed his apostles the Passover bread and wine saying, “take and eat, this is my body; this is my blood”. He did not say “this represents or signifies my body”. In the lengthy Eucharistic discourse of John 6:22-58, part of which was recounted in the gospel of today, Jesus was even more forceful in discussing the relationship between the bread and his body. Among other things he said: “I am the bread of life came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world”. He went on to say: “My flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him” (cf., vs. 48-58). It was in the light of passages like this that the Catholic Church developed the idea of transubstantiation. One can legitimately read this idea back to exactly what happened on the night of the last Passover meal Jesus had with his apostles. It was the ordinary Passover unleavened bread and the ordinary wine which they used to drink that Jesus gave them as his “body and blood”. The elements, no doubt, remained the same; but at that very moment, the substance changed. They were no longer eating bread and drinking wine; they were eating the body and drinking the blood of Christ. The bread and wine did not just signify the body and blood of Christ; it was the body and blood of Christ. One of the objections of some Jews during the Eucharistic discourse centered on their trying to make sense of what Jesus just told them. They questioned in vs. 52: “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” This might as well be the type of questions that come into our minds when discussing the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist.

The presence of Christ in the Eucharist is not like the presence of pews in the church, for instance. The pews, the candles, the tables, etc., are juxtaposed in the church. They are physically present and placed side by side or beside one another. Sometimes, one might be physically present or besides another person without ever encountering the person or even noticing the person’s presence. But real presence is different from juxtaposition. We do not place Christ and the bread side by side. This is not what is meant by real presence. The only real presence is interpersonal presence, i.e., presence of two or more persons actively interacting. Personal presence requires interaction, caring, attending to each other. When we talk of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, we are talking more of such active interpersonal presence than a mere juxtaposition. This is what Edward Schillebeeckx often refers to as “interpersonal encounters between the believer and Christ” when he discusses the Sacraments (cf., E. Schillebeeckx, Christ the Sacrament of the Encounter with God; and also, E. Schillebeeckx, The Eucharist).

When one says: “This person is in my heart” or “I hold so and so person dearly in my heart”; of course we are not talking of a juxtaposition of one person inside the other person’s heart. We don’t have to verify the veracity of such statement by insisting that the person’s heart be dissected to find out whether really he has the other person in his heart. No scientist conducts such experiment because at stake here is not juxtaposition but rather personal or real presence which is not subject to scientific experimentations.

From the element of the Eucharist as an ecclesial meal, a meal of unity, it is important for us to mediate on how this unitive aspect of the Eucharist should shape our lives as Christians. In the “first Eucharist” celebrated during the Last Supper, it was clear that at least one of the apostles failed to understand the unitive dimension of what Jesus was giving them. The gospel of John tells us that as soon as Jesus gave Judas Iscariot his own morsel of bread, he took it and left at once. We were not actually told whether he ate it or not, only that he took it. He left because he was thinking only of himself and what he stood to gain for betraying Jesus. When you are obsessed with your personal gain at the expense of the general good of the community, Satan can enter you (as it did Judas) even if you have received your own morsel of the Eucharistic bread. St. Thomas Aquinas made it clear in the sequence of today that both the good and the guilty receive the Eucharist; but while the good receives immortal life, the guilty receives death. But when we get out of ourselves and focus on the general wellbeing of the entire community, the Eucharist serves as a unifying factor just as the breaking of bread served to unify the early Christians. In every morsel of the Eucharistic bread, everybody receives the full Christ and not a part of Christ (cf., the sequence). There is therefore no question of who receives “more” Christ than the other. This is where the Eucharist differs from a loaf of bread. If a morsel of ordinary bread is given to one person, less of it is left for others because, at each cut of a chunk, it reduces in quantity. But the Eucharistic bread does not function like the ordinary loaf of bread. In every morsel of the Eucharistic bread (no matter how minute it may be), Christ is fully and entirely present.

It is in this respect that the Eucharist becomes a symbol of love. Love is not like a loaf of bread; love is like Eucharistic bread where everybody receives the whole Christ. When Jesus says, love your neighbor as yourself, he means to say that when one extends love to neighbor, it does not thereby reduce the “quantity” of love remaining with which one can love oneself.  Therefore, one can perfectly love one’s parents with his whole heart, and at the same time love his co-workers, neighbors, friends, children, etc., equally with his whole heart. That love has not diminished at all. The person can still go ahead and love God with his whole heart, and even love himself with his whole heart. None of these love extended to the other reduces the quantity of love left for one to love oneself. If we understand love “eucharistically”, perhaps it will help us to stop withholding our love to other for fear that less of it will remain for our own private use; it will help us to get out of ourselves and work for the common good of all.

Finally, the best place to meet Jesus is in the Eucharist. If you want to be intimate with him, he tells us: “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him”. Our most intimate moment with Jesus is when we receive him in the Holy Communion. As Ludwig Feuerbach once said that we become what we eat, when we receive Jesus into our very bodies, we become one with him.