Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, June 14, 2020 - Dt 8:2-3, 14b-16a; 1 Cor 10:16-17; Jn 6:51-58

Our churches were suddenly shut down in the middle of Lent, and all of a sudden, instead of the things we planned to give up for Lent, we gave up the way we were used to living, both in our private lives and in our life as a parish. It became a true Lent of tremendous drastic abstinence. Many of us entered into our own Gethsemane, where we cried out to a seemingly absent God, “If it is your will, let this cup pass me by.” But it didn't. So many of us then found ourselves - like Jesus on the night before he died - alone, seemingly abandoned or forced to abandon, those who we loved and things that we loved. And so it was a kind of crucifixion. And there were those, sadly, who like the women watching the crucifixion from afar, were only able to wave up at windows to loved ones in a nursing home or hospital, unable to touch, unable to speak. And we were entombed, all of us, in our own homes. 

But now there are rumors of a resurrection. Not everyone feels it. Not everyone has seen Him. Not everyone is sure that we will rise again. But we will. And that's why the three readings we have for this Feast are so important. The Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ celebrates three things at once. The first is the Incarnation. Jesus, the eternal second person of the Blessed Trinity, became a body. He lived in a certain place at a certain time, with certain facial features and genetic characteristics, a certain voice and a certain language, and a certain way of doing things, certain tastes and pleasures. He became one of us. 

The second thing it celebrates is this man found a way to leave himself here in a physical way, under the form of bread and wine. We celebrate the mystery of the Eucharist.

The third thing we celebrate is that, as St. Paul told us in the second reading, “By this eating and drinking of His body and blood, we become one body.” Over the centuries, the church coined the phrase, "The Mystical Body of Christ" - Christ as the head, we the members - but all of us working together. 

So let's look at these readings. I asked you before the first reading to listen for the imperative verbs, there were two of them. And they're the opposite sides of a coin. The very beginning of the paragraph, God tells Moses to tell the people, "Remember, remember." And then he lists all the good things that God had done in the midst of crisis. Remember. Then halfway through, He says "Do not forget." Not forgetting is not the same as remembering. He says, "Do not forget the obligations, responsibilities that come to you because of my goodness to you. That's the first message of Corpus Christi for us during this time. But now is a good time to remember all the good things we have had and still have in our lives. Our lives may be changed, but they're not devoid of meaning. They're not absent of good and of joy. Remember. And in remembering, recognize what your responsibility, what our responsibilities are now as human beings in order to preserve the good and minimize the bad.

St. Paul’s second reading talks about the consequence of Holy Communion. Because the loaf is one, we, though many, are one body because we consume the one loaf. That doesn’t mean that community is recreated every time we go to Mass, although it is. It means that once we share the bread, we become forever a community. There have been many times in the life of the church when, for months, perhaps even years, nobody saw a priest, nobody could receive the Eucharist. There just was too much distance, too much trouble, too few priests, too much upheaval for that to take place. But because people somewhere at some time all during history had had the opportunity to receive the Body and Blood of Christ, the community was preserved, and it’s still preserved now.

Listen to what Jesus says in the midst of this long discussion in today’s Gospel. “Whoever eats my flesh and eats my blood remains in me, and I in him.” There is a result of the presence of Eucharist in the church that is that Christ remains in us, and we in Him.

We are awaiting a resurrection. We don’t know what our new life is going to look like, but there will be one. But no matter what it looks like, the one thing that will remain true for all of us, from the day of our Baptism on, is that Christ remains in us, and we in Him.