Homily for the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi)

Over the last few weeks we watched the Lord ascend into heaven, saw the descent of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost, and turned finally to the contemplation of that mystery of all mysteries, the Holy Trinity. But if we imagine, through this progression, that the Catholic faith was moving us in the direction of pure intellectual vision and disembodied spiritual life, think again: “For my flesh is meat indeed: and my blood is drink indeed. He that eateth my flesh, and drinketh my blood, abideth in me, and I in him.”

John 6 hides nothing of the horror felt by many of the Lord’s hearers on this occasion. Indeed he tells us in vs. 66, “many [of] his disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied him.” This was not because, as some of our Protestant friends suggest, they took his words too literally. I am not sure why anyone thinks that a metaphorical eating and drinking of human flesh and blood would be all that much less scandalous. Certainly it wouldn’t have been for a pious son of Israel who knew well the Torah’s prohibition against eating blood. The blood is the life, and to share the blood of an animal is to share its life, to commune with its being — such is an offense to the dignity of human nature. Likewise to drink the blood of another human being is a perversion of nature. Even the pagans largely understood this latter part, and the early Christians were often accused of atheism, for refusing to offer sacrifice to the gods, and cannibalism, for having secret “love feasts” where they were said to consume the flesh and blood of a man.

To understand that the Eucharist was not cannibalism required above all an understanding of who Jesus Christ is. He is God as well as man. Ascended into heaven, he brought his human nature to the right hand of the Father. The substance of the Lord’s flesh then is not mere human nature, but a human nature divinized, fully united with eternity. Like the burning bush that Moses saw on Mount Sinai, human nature was aflame with the divine nature without being burnt. To consume this mysterious substance then is somehow to consume God — to receive and commune with the life of God. To those who understood it, this claim may have been even more scandalous than the idea of sharing the life of a person or animal. But what the Church came to understand, in reflecting on the Incarnation, the Ascension, and Pentecost, was that the God in himself, the Holy Trinity is eternal self-gift. All creation flows from God’s sovereign decision to share his goodness beyond himself. This sharing is utterly gratuitous and unnecessary; yet he created a world for his own glory and good pleasure, and he created man, made in his own image, to stand at its apex.

We threw away that grand vocation, of course, in the Garden of Eden. Through an act of eating we declared that communion with other creatures was more important to us than communion with God; as a result we do not even have that lesser communion, but a world of disorder and death, a world of broken communion. How fitting then that God’s mercy invites us to regain communion, to regain eternal life, through an act of eating. And again it is fitting that we celebrate this mystery in that great chain of glory begun at Easter, for this sacrament is the ongoing sign for us of God’s love.

Some of us who used to be Anglican may remember the Reformation objection to Corpus Christi: that the sacrament was meant to be eaten, not “carried about, lifted up, or worshiped.” This objection was in some important ways true, especially in an age of very infrequent Holy Communion. But it was reductive. The sacraments flow from God’s abundance, not scarcity. He is not stingy with his gifts.

And the graces of this gift multiply. If the fundamental purpose of the Eucharist is unite us with Christ and with one another, Holy Communion is just the beginning, even while at the same time it is the end. For it is precisely in learning to see Christ, by faith, in the sacred Host, that we train our spiritual eyes to the life of heaven. It is by learning to see him veiled in the Host that we learn to see him veiled in our neighbor. It is by believing his presence in the Host we see and receive that we learn to see his work in our own hearts. The prayer for today, and at every Benediction, speaks of how our reverence for the Sacrament — not just our reception of it — helps us “perceive within ourselves the fruits of redemption.”

The very public nature if a Corpus Christi procession is, absolutely, a celebration of Christ our King. But it is even more fundamentally an expression of deep gratitude for his overflowing love for us, that he would stoop even to this gift of his own self. The carrying about of the Sacred Host is, finally, a reminder that the whole world is the altar of God. The purpose of creation is the worship of God. We can glimpse that, ever so slightly, behind the veil of sight, in these moments.

Let us then with gladness not only receive our Lord but follow him. We pray, as in the sequence which St. Thomas Aquinas composed for this feast:

Very Bread, good Shepherd, tend us,

Jesu, of thy love befriend us,

Thou refresh us, thou defend us,

Thine eternal goodness send us

In the land of life to see.

Amen.