June 11, 2023
Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, June 11, 2023 – Deuteronomy 8:2-3, 14B-16A; 1 Corinthians 10:16-17; John 6:51-58
The Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ means three things at once. It is, obviously, the celebration of our Sacrament of Holy Eucharist. It is also a celebration of the physical life of the historical person, Jesus of Nazareth. And it is also a celebration of all of us, the mystical Body of Christ – He, our head, we, His members.
I asked you to listen for the questions in each reading. And I said that the first reading, from the book of Deuteronomy, had a virtual question. Because it's Moses speaking, and because this is the book of Deuteronomy, which is about law, we hear this sentence as a harsh rebuke. “Remember how, for 40 years now, the Lord your God has directed all your journey through the desert. Remember that!” But there are no punctuations in ancient languages. Suppose this were a question instead of a command. “Remember? How, for 40 years, your God protected you in the desert?” Very different meaning, isn’t it?
Because it is inviting us to remembrance. And remembrance is a very, very human thing. We all do it. We're not very old before we first begin remembering. Remembering the first birthday we could remember. Remembering the first house we lived in. Remembering our first kindergarten friend. We have all sorts of memories that go back, a long, long time. Most of them are happy memories. Every now and then there's a real painful one that crops up.
But memory is almost essential to the development of the human soul, the human spirit, because it connects us to the past and it leads us toward the future. And, in the time in which the book of Deuteronomy was written, there was a very special remembrance called the Passover Feast. And in the Passover Feast, Jewish people believe that when they gather for that particular dinner, and pass around the cup of blessing, they are back with their ancestors at that climactic moment. First, when they escaped from Egyptian tyranny and second, when they gathered at the base of the mountain and God gave them the law. Or, to put it another way, they imagine that all their relatives are sitting with them at that dinner table, telling them what it was like for them to escape, to be given law, to be bonded into a people. It's a living thing. It's not just looking through a photograph book. It's a living thing.
We turn from that to the rhetorical question in the second reading. St. Paul puts it this way, “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ?” The only answer the people is writing to can give him is, “Yeah, sure, it is. Of course, it is.” Which is very interesting because Paul expects his community to all believe that Christ is really, truly present Body and Blood, soul and divinity, at their banquet. And he's writing, he's writing around the year 50. Less than 20 years after the event of the Last Supper and the Crucifixion. And, you know, because of the way we celebrate Holy Week, for us, Holy Thursday, with its commemoration of the Last Supper, is one day. The next day, we get up in the morning, and we're getting ready for Good Friday. But in the world of Jesus, days began at sundown. So, on the very same day, Jesus both celebrated the Last Supper, telling his friends that these elements at their table would, from that point be Him. And then, the very same day, hanging in agony on the cross, making literally true what He said the night before. “My body will be broken, my blood will be shed for you.” And so, St. Paul is focusing us on the fact that the Eucharist is both a commemorative supper and a living sacrifice.
Then we get to the Gospel, and there is a mistaken question. The irate Jewish people in Jesus’ audience say, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat? How?” They were asking the wrong question. The question they should have asked was, “Why? Why would this man do this?” All during His public life, according to John's gospel, Jesus has given the same answer, basically, over and over to that question, in whatever form it appears. “I have come that your life may be richer, more abundant, fuller.” Most of the time we happen to read this Gospel on funerals. So, in Catholic tradition, it's gotten this life everlasting slant to it. But that's not what Jesus meant when He said it. He meant this life, here on earth, would be more abundant, would be richer and fuller if, if we followed His word, lived his kind of life, stayed close to Him by Eucharistic union. Very, very different idea of a fuller life.
Going back to St. Paul. St. Paul kind of incorporates all of these ideas we’ve been talking about by saying - after asking if this is really not the Body and Blood of Christ – “All of us, then, who partake of the one loaf, are made one body.” Even though we break it up into pieces, it was one loaf. All of us who share the one loaf, are one body. Pope Pius XII named it the mystical body. All of us are Christ moving through all of history, uniting us with our ancestors long ago and our ancestors just around the corner. All of us have moved through history as Christ present in the world.
One way of expressing that is to say, “The Body of Christ makes the Body of Christ.” In order for us to have Eucharist, there must be Christian community. A Christian community is a group of believers centered around someone ordained to serve them. So, the Christian community, the Body of Christ, makes the Body of Christ. But all of our sacraments are celebrated most fully at the sacrifice of the Mass. And so, the Body of Christ makes the Body of Christ. The Eucharist makes it possible that gathering of community and the functioning of community, both in its sacraments and in its charity work.
I’ve been reading the biography of a teenage saint who died in 2005. His name is Carlo Acutis. The biography is written by his mom and it’s all over the place. You know, visiting churches here and talking about obscure Italian saints there. Talking about vegetables in the garden here. It’s all over the place because it’s his mom who’s writing it. But every now and then, she quotes things from his journal. Keep in mind this kid is fifteen years old. Fifteen years old. At one point he wrote this in his journal, “The Eucharist is a question.” The Eucharist is a question. That’s insanely profound. Just incredible that someone so young should have found that in our experience of Holy Communion.
The Eucharist is a question. We are the answer. And we’re expected to give an answer.