June 22, 2014: Corpus Christi
SOLEMNITY OF THE MOST HOLY BODY AND BLOOD OF CHRIST
Deuteronomy 8:2-3, 14b-16a: Moses said to the people …. “Not by bread alone does one live, but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of the LORD.”
Psalm 147: Praise the Lord, Jerusalem!
1 Corinthians 10:16-17: Because the loaf of bread is one, we, though many, are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf.
SEQUENCE: Laud, O Zion
John 6:51-58: Jesus said to them … “For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him.”
June is the month of the Sacred Heart
Scripture Notes from the Sourcebook:
ABOUT THIS SOLEMNITY: Today we celebrate Corpus Christi, the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ. In the Eucharistic feast, the gifts of bread and wine really and truly become the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Christ. Through this covenant of love, God draws us into his divine life and offers us food for our earthly pilgrimage to continue with the faith and hope, confident in God’s ability to transform our weaknesses and sufferings into life and joy.
THE FIRST READING: Remember … do not forget what God has done for you! IT’s a message repeated throughout the stories of Israel’s desert wanderings – and it’s a message that we should take to heart as well. When they lacked food, God gave them manna to eat (see exodus 16:4-35). The manna was but the sign of God’s providential care for them made known through the words he spoke to them and the deeds he wrought for them. His word – his commands to them – was the source of their life (see Psalm 119).
RESPONSORIAL PSALM 147: The themes of word and food are continued in this hymn of praise to the Lord for all the manifestations of his providential care. Note the reference to the “best of what” I n the second stanza. Even more emphasis is given to “word” – occurring twice, in addition to its synonyms: statutes, ordinances. It is through these that God’s providential care is made known.
SECOND READING: Chapters 10 and 11 of First Corinthians is the earliest commentary we have on the Church’s celebration of the Eucharist. Paul stresses how the Christian community is united as one through its participation in the Body and Blood of Christ. The word “participation” (koinoia) is important, signifying a communion not only with the Lord, but with one another. Is that our realization and experience today?
THE GOSPEL: Jesus speaks of himself as the “living bread” – true manna from heaven – the food that nourishes unto eternal life. The identification of the bread with his own flesh and blood is startling for many of his hearers. And what about those who hear today? Do we realize the great mystery in which we share? Do we recognize what – who – is offered to us in each Eucharist?
PASTORAL REFLECTION: How often do you choose to nourish yourself with the physical sustenance of God’s unfailing love in the Eucharist? If Sunday Eucharist is your norm, consider going to daily Mass at least once this week. IF you are already a daily communicant and do not know the Anima Christi prayer, find and then memorize this as part of your prayer to Jesus for the gift offered in Eucharist. The living bread and wine must be part of one’s most basic routine so as to live fully in God. Go deep within today and this week, and share with God your understanding of, or struggle with, the true meaning of the Eucharist. As St. Augustine shared, “Be what you receive,” with God living in you, how can this love radiate more fully? --2014 Sourcebook for Sundays, Seasons & Weekends
CORPUS CHRISTI: The Eucharist was instituted at the Last Supper, and so the natural time to celebrate its institution is Holy Thursday. But in the middle ages it was felt that some aspects of it were overshadowed by the sorrow of Holy Week, so in 1264 a special feast of 'Corpus Christi' was instituted. This dislocation suggests of course that it was being taken out of its context and undergoing a change of significance. But the feast has survived and has always been a popular one, celebrated with much colour and pageantry and outdoor processions. At one time it became in practice the principal feast of the Church, and was celebrated with an octave.
Nowadays the celebration of Corpus Christi is much less spectacular than in the past. In many countries it has been moved from Thursday to the following Sunday. Some Catholics wonder if Eucharistic devotion is being downgraded. They become convinced of this when they see that in many churches the tabernacle is removed from the sanctuary and placed elsewhere -- sometimes in a setting that suggests it is being discarded.
It is necessary to find balance. The reserved Sacrament is still a central focus in the spirituality of most Catholics. It would be hard to exaggerate the comfort and reassurance it has given to countless people through the centuries. But it is true that the Eucharist is primarily something we do rather than something we have. It takes its meaning from the Mass; or rather it is the Mass. Initially the only reason for keeping consecrated hosts after Mass was to bring them to people confined by illness. Then, from the 12th or 13th century onwards, they began to be kept for adoration by all. When it was thus detached from its context in the Mass, Eucharistic piety sometimes took strange turns, and there were mawkish devotions where Jesus was thought of as a prisoner in the tabernacle, held there by his love for ungrateful humanity, and longing for consoling visits from his devotees. Clearly there was a need to recover the Church's liturgical roots. This was one of the great achievements of Vatican II. In the Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy we read, “The liturgy is the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed. At the same time it is the fount from which all the Church’s power flows” (no.10). In subsequent documents there was an emphasis on bringing Eucharistic devotions back to their source in the Liturgy. "Those who prepare eucharistic devotions need to be careful that everything within them clearly brings out the meaning of eucharistic worship in its correlation with the Mass, the source and culmination of the whole Christian life” (Order of Solemn Exposition of the Holy Eucharist, nos. 4 and 7).
--- Donagh O’Shea for the Dominicans of Ireland, Today’s Good News ________________________________________________________________________________
THE BODY AND BLOOD OF CHRIST: Today’s solemnity was first called Corpus Christi, which is Latin for “the Body of Christ.” People in the Middle Ages wanted a joyful ay to celebrate Jesus’ gift of the Eucharist. They created today’s feast at a good time of year for processions and street fairs and other outdoor events. The processions on this day were fantastic. In many towns the streets were lined with flowers. Often flowers and herbs were arranged into pictures and intricate designs. The bread of the Lord’s Body was carried outdoors under a canopy. Bands played and many people joined in singing hymns of praise. These processions still take place in some towns in Latin America and in Europe.
Today, many Christians think that the best way to celebrate Jesus’ gift of the Eucharist is to put heart and soul into celebrating the Eucharist well. That way every Lord’s Day is a feast of the Body and Blood of Christ. – Mary Ellen Hynes, from Companion to the Calendar _____________________________________________________________________________________________
Let all mortal flesh keep silence and stand in fear and trembling, and meditate nothing earthly within itself. For the King of kings, and Lord of lords, Christ our God, comes forward to be sacrificed, and to be given for food to the faithful. —Liturgy of St. James
A person’s head bends over what looks like an ordinary piece of bread – over what in fact merely looks like a semblance of real bread – a hand reaches for a cup such as usually contains merely the drink of this earthy life, and then there happens what is the innermost goal of everything that happens. God and the believing heart, each from their own side, break through all the sinister walls which at other times so infinitely separate them. They meet in One who is both, in whom such a unity already occurred; in the Lord, who in one Person is the eternal Word from on high and the Son of the earth from the Virgin’s womb. – Karl Rahner.
This morning I received the sacrament I still believe in: At 7:15, the priest elevated the host, and then the chalice, and spoke the words of ritual; and the bread became flesh, the wine became blood, and minutes later I placed on my tongue the taste of forgiveness, and of love that affirmed, perhaps celebrated, my being alive, my being mortal. – Andre Dubus
More about the history of this Solemnity: Pope Urban IV first extended the feast of Corpus Christi to the universal Church in 1246. It originated during a time when reception of the Eucharist was practiced infrequently among the people. This gave rise to an already growing sense of devotion to the Eucharist, as the host was viewed by the faithful during the elevation at Mass. Over time, this came to be regarded as a principal means of obtaining grace – i.e.., seeing (adoring) the Eucharist rather than receiving Holy Communion. Today’s solemnity combines this medieval feast of the Most Holy Body of Christ with the nineteenth-century feast of the Most Precious Blood of Christ (Sanguis Pretiosissimus Christi). In doing this, the Church holds up for us the ideal regard that we should have for both species of the sacrament in Holy Communion. When Holy Communion is distributed under both kinds, it has a “Fuller form,” wherein the Eucharistic banquet is more clearly evident and clear expression is given to the divine will by which the new and eternal Covenant is ratified in the Blood of the Lord, as also the relationship between the Eucharistic banquet and the eschatological banquet in the Father’s Kingdom” (GIRM, 281). – From the Sourcebook for Sundays and Seasons,
I would feed you with the finest of the wheat, and with the honey from the rock I would satisfy you. – Psalm 81
If we believe in the Incarnation, there should be no one on earth in whom we are not prepared to see, in mystery, the presence of Christ. – Thomas Merton __________________________________________________________________________________________
Blessed are you, Lord, God of all creation. For through your goodness we have received the bread we offer you: Fruit of the earth and work of human hands. It will become for us the bread of life. Blessed be God for ever. Blessed are you, Lord, God of all creation. For through your goodness we have received the wine we offer you, fruit of the vine and work of human hands. It will become our spiritual drink. Blessed be God for ever. – Eucharistic Prayer
"And just as He appeared before the holy Apostles in true flesh, so now He has us see Him in the Sacred Bread. Looking at Him with the eyes of their flesh, they saw only His Flesh, but regarding Him with the eyes of the spirit, they believed that He was God. In like manner, as we see bread and wine with our bodily eyes, let us see and believe firmly that it is His Most Holy Body and Blood, True and Living.
For in this way our Lord is ever present among those who believe in him, according to what He said: "Behold, I am with you all days even to the consummation of the world." (Mt. 28, 20)
- St. Francis of Assisi
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"In each of our lives Jesus comes as the Bread of Life - to be eaten, to be consumed by us. This is how He loves us. Then Jesus comes in our human life as the hungry one, the other, hoping to be fed with the Bread of our life, our hearts by loving, and our hands by serving. In loving and serving, we prove that we have been created in the likeness of God, for God is Love and when we love we are like God. This is what Jesus meant when He said, "Be perfect as your Father in heaven is perfect." -- Mother Teresa of Calcutta
We awaken in Christ’s body
As Christ awakens our bodies,
And my poor hand is Christ, He enters my foot, and is infinitely me.
I move my hand, and wonderfully,
My hand becomes Christ, becomes all of him…
I move my foot, and at once
He appears like a flash of lightning…
Open your heart to him and let yourself receive the one
Who is opening to you so deeply.
For if we genuinely love Him,
We wake up inside Christ’s body…
And He makes us, utterly, real,
And everything that is hurt, everything
That seemed to us dark, harsh, shameful,
Maimed, ugly, irreparably
Damaged, is in Him transformed
And recognized as whole, as lovely and radiant in His light:
We awaken as the Beloved in every last part of our body.
-- Symeon the New Theologian
“It became obvious why Catholics had built such beautiful cathedrals and churches throughout the world. Not as gathering or meeting places for Christians. But as a home for Jesus Himself in the Blessed Sacrament. Cathedrals house Jesus. Christians merely come and visit Him. The cathedrals and churches architecturally prepare our souls for the beauty of the Eucharist.”
― Allen R. Hunt, Confessions of a Mega Church Pastor: How I Discovered the Hidden Treasures of the Catholic Church
At the heart of Galatians 2 is not an abstract individualized salvation, but a common meal. Paul does not want the Galatians to wait until they have agreed on all doctrinal arguments before they can sit down and eat together. Not to eat together is already to get the answer wrong. The whole point of his argument is that all those who belong to Christ belong at the same table with one another.
The relevance of this today should be obvious. The differences between us, as twentieth-century Christians, all too often reflect cultural, philosophical and tribal divides, rather than anything that should keep us apart from full and glad eucharistic fellowship. I believe the church should recognize, as a matter of biblical and Christian obedience, that it is time to put the horse back before the cart, and that we are far, far more likely to reach doctrinal agreement between our different churches if we do so within the context of that common meal which belongs equally to us all because it is the meal of the Lord whom we all worship. Intercommunion, in other words, is not something we should regard as the prize to be gained at the end of the ecumenical road; it is the very paving of the road itself. If we wonder why we haven't been travelling very fast down the road of late, maybe it's because, without the proper paving, we've got stuck in the mud.
― N.T. Wright, For All God's Worth: True Worship and the Calling of the Church
Why did Our Blessed Lord use bread and wine as the elements of this Memorial? First of all, because no two substances in nature better symbolize unity than bread and wine. As bread is made from a multiplicity of grains of wheat, and wine is made from a multiplicity of grapes, so the many who believe are one in Christ. Second, no two substances in nature have to suffer more to become what they are than bread and wine. Wheat has to pass through the rigors of winter, be ground beneath the Calvary of a mill, and then subjected to purging fire before it can become bread. Grapes in their turn must be subjected to the Gethsemane of a wine press and have their life crushed from them to become wine. Thus, do they symbolize the Passion and Sufferings of Christ, and the condition of Salvation, for Our Lord said unless we die to ourselves we cannot live in Him. A third reason is that there are no two substances in nature which have more traditionally nourished man than bread and wine. In bringing these elements to the altar, men are equivalently bringing themselves. When bread and wine are taken or consumed, they are changed into man's body and blood. But when He took bread and wine, He changed them into Himself.
― Bishop Fulton J. Sheen
“I was once, five or six years ago, taken by some friends to have dinner with [a woman who] is a Big Intellectual. … Having me there was like having a dog present who had been trained to say a few words but overcome with inadequacy had forgotten them.
Well, toward morning the conversation turned on the Eucharist, which I, being the Catholic, was obviously supposed to defend. [Mrs. Broadwater said] she thought of it as a symbol and implied that it was a pretty good one. I then said, in a very shaky voice, ‘Well, if it's a symbol, to hell with it.’ That was all the defense I was capable of but I realize now that this is all I will ever be able to say about it, outside of a story, except that it is the center of existence for me; all the rest of life is expendable.”
-- Flannery O’Connor, letter to a friend
As for me, I know of nothing else but miracles. – Walt Whitman
Reflection for June 22, 2014: Body & Blood of Our Lord
Last week, when I was trying to make sense of the Trinity, I thought about how God tries to speak to us in whatever voice or form or language we are able to hear and understand at any given time. I think today’s feast – the solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ – is also about communicating with God, another amazing way in which God reaches out to us. The extraordinary sacrament of the Eucharist: There’s no doubt it’s a mystery – maybe the greatest mystery of all, even in a Church that is pretty much woven out of mysteries of one sort or another. This church of ours is just crammed with mystery, you know, from the very tip-top of the roof down to the ground underneath the floor of the basement. But the Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist? That is the Mystery of Mysteries – the real McCoy, the Thing Itself.
The Eucharist is not one of those sacraments that are relatively easy to explain, like marriage or baptism. In fact, it’s not really possible to explain. Extremely smart learned Holy Guys have written entire libraries of encyclopedia-size books in Latin about it, and ultimately what it comes down to is this: At the Last Supper, Jesus got together with his disciples and said a few words. They are the same words we hear at Mass every single day, and they go like this:
“While they were at supper, he took bread, and gave God thanks and praise. He broke the bread, gave it to his disciples, and said: “Take this, all of you, and eat it: This is my body which will be given up for you”… When supper was ended, he took the cup, again he gave God thanks and praise, gave the cup to his disciples, and said: “Take this, all of you, and drink from it: This is the cup of my blood... It will be shed for you and for all, so that sins may be forgiven. Do this in memory of me.”
And there you have it. That’s what we do at Mass, every Sunday. Non-Catholics don’t get it, of course. Even a lot of us Catholics don’t get it. Because it’s pretty wild, when you think about it: Eating the body of Christ? Drinking the blood of Christ? It’s too earthy for some folks, too strange; Non-Catholic friends of me have cheerfully called it a “crazy” idea, and I’ve had skeptics confront me more than once with sarcastic confidence, asking me about the sacrament as if there’s no other possible response to their insistence that “you guys don’t really believe in this stuff, do you?” than a sort of embarrassed mumble that “yeah, I’m afraid you’re right, we don’t really mean it, we’re just sort of pretending.” Even those Christian fundamentalists who work themselves into a tizzy over every single syllable in Genesis – folks who get bent out of shape because most scientists don’t agree with them that trilobite fossils were whipped up by God a couple thousand years ago and artificially “aged” with Carbon-14 just to test our faith – even those kind of literalists stop short at the Eucharist. Which is an odd thing, when you come to think of. Because the accounts of what Jesus said and did at the Last Supper are so very different in tone from the deep philosophical poetry of Genesis or the cinematic visions of Revelation. You don’t have to be a theologian to see what I mean. It’s like the difference between a fairy tale that begins “Once upon a time, a long time ago, there was a beautiful Queen lived in a gorgeous palace” and the kind of statement of direct love that is given to you out loud in the first person, in the bluntest possible language, by someone who knows you very well and is looking right into your eyes as he speaks – looking at you with the kind of love that you know will last a lifetime. That is what Jesus is doing in the Eucharist, looking us right in the eye and speaking in language as stark and clear and perfect as stone and water and light, or flesh and bone and blood: “I am here, in front of you, right now, in the flesh -- and I LOVE you – I love YOU – so much that I am willing to feed you, to keep you alive, with my own flesh and blood.”
The Last Supper, you see, is not remotely like a parable. Jesus did not say: “The Kingdom of God is a lot like the Creator turning bread into his body.” Or “The new covenant of my blood is kind of like a sacrifice, as if you were to drink some wine and imagine that it was like the blood of God or something.” The story in the Gospel does NOT begin: “Then he proceeded to tell the people this parable.” No; Jesus was not telling us a story; Jesus was telling us a truth that only he could have spoke, and doing so in an extraordinarily blunt, down-to-earth, matter-of-fact no-nonsense way: “This IS my Body. This IS my Blood.” He said these things and he did these things and then he went off and got himself horribly tortured and died. And then he rose again.
It seems to me, given all this, that we ought to pay attention to what he said.
Yes, it’s an extraordinary idea: That at Mass we eat the Body and drink the Blood of the One who created the universe. If we’re not occasionally shocked, almost shaken, by the idea, then we’re not paying attention. But then again: Why would God come to us in this fashion? What better way for God to reach out to human beings? What is more basic to a living thing than the need for food and drink? No matter how holy and spiritual we are, we need to eat to stay alive. Church on its own can seem like a kind of accessory to one’s life -- the kind of “extra” thing you can take or leave, saving for when it’s convenient or you feel like you’re in a “spiritual” sort of mood. But eating and drinking is not an option. We have to eat and drink to stay alive – and we have to do it throughout our whole lives, no matter how long they might be. We have to eat and drink, no matter what.
And that is exactly how we need God – whether or not we realize it. We need God as we need water and we need God as we need food.
And therefore God comes to us in the shape of food and drink. It is a mystery beyond all the words that have ever been spoken in history, and it is something that
happens every single time we come to Mass. God stands in front of us and says, “I am here, in front of you, right now, in the flesh -- and I love you.”
What else can a person say in reply, but, “Thank you, Lord. And amen!” In Jesus’ name. -- Diane Sylvain