Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, June 2, 2024 - Exodus 24:3-8; Hebrews 9:11-15; Mark 14:12-16, 22-26

So, I bet you picked out the word, right? The word was blood. It appears prominently in all three readings. Blood. Our archaeological anthropologists - people who study ancient civilizations - tell us that some sort of sacrificial gesture is among the oldest practices of human beings. They find evidence of altars and utensils going back thousands of years before the Israelites. It’s almost hot-wired into the human psyche to want to offer some sort of gesture to some higher power. And that gesture almost always involved the shedding of blood in some form because the blood is the life and, in shedding the blood, it was understood that you were rendering it unusable to yourself or anyone else, except to the deity and, in doing so, making a contract, a covenant, with that higher power to do something for you if you would do something for that higher power.

Let’s set that aside for a moment. I am standing while I am talking instead of sitting down because I wanted to model these vestments for you. The first time I wore these vestments was 55 years ago yesterday, on June 1,1969. At the first Mass I ever celebrated as the main celebrant. In a little church called St. Ann’s, in the Bronx. And, the next weekend, I celebrated another first Mass right here in this building. And there are some people in our congregation who were there at that first Mass.

1969 was an incredible year in many different ways. It was the year of the space walk and Woodstock and the Amazing Mets. And it was also unique in the history of the Catholic Church. Because it was the first year in which Catholics throughout the world celebrated Mass entirely in their own language. And we were the first class of priests ever to do that. And, moreover, we were the first class of priests - whoever got ordained that spring - to be ordained in a ritual that was in entirely in English.

The purpose of the Church’s changing so much of the Liturgy, instructed by the Second Vatican Council to do so, was to bring forward a part of our doctrine that was lagging behind. And that part of doctrine was that gathering for Mass was a sacramental meal meant to create community. But all of us who were ordained that day were very clear about something else. It was a doctrine that was taught to us in the Second Grade. We had to memorize this definition. Somewhere between my grammar school and the mid-seventies, this definition - not the doctrine, the definition – disappeared in the teaching of our young. And so, three or four generations of Catholics have grown up without having to recite these words by rote.

“The Mass is a sacrifice and the same sacrifice as the sacrifice of the Cross, in which Christ, through the instrumentality of the priest, is offered again to the Father in an unbloody manner under the appearances of bread and wine.”

That’s a mouthful, especially when you’re seven years old. But it is a fundamental doctrine of Mass as the same sacrifice as the sacrifice of the cross. Which means that, when we receive Holy Communion, that Christ is one with us, and we with Christ. For just a moment, we are hanging there on Calvary Hill, offering ourselves and our lives and the world in which we live, along with Christ’s offering to the Father, for the salvation of us and our whole world.

But in the intervening years, because of renewed accent on community meal and celebration, something has been lost. The Mass has become the traditional boiled frog. Anybody know about the boiled frog syndrome? For those who don’t, if you put a frog in a pot of cold water - which they like, they like cold water - and you turn on the gas, the frog will continue to sit in the water as it warms up, until it’s boiled to death, rather than jumping out.

We, somehow or other, started to change the way we approach Mass. In 1969, when I was ordained, this is what things were like in Catholicism. When you came into a Church building, you sat quietly. If you talked, you talked in low tones to the person next to you, not to disturb the person on the other side of you, who might be saying his or her prayers. You wore what they used to call back then your Sunday Best, something nice to wear to Church. And you went to confession more often. Sometimes the stuff you told in confession was silly, not real sins at all.  You talked about using foul language. That’s not a sin, that’s just bad manners. You talked about telling white lies. White lies are called white lies because they are meant for a higher purpose, to protect somebody else from embarrassment or insult. You said all sorts of things that God really doesn’t care about at all because you wanted to be your best self when you came to Communion. And slowly, like a boiled frog, those sorts of things have sort of disappeared from our understanding of Mass.  

Let’s try to be a little more mindful that Mass is still a sacrifice. The same sacrifice as the sacrifice of the cross. A community activity and a sacred meal, no doubt, but also one of the most intensely sacred moments of each of our lives.