The Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ- Cycle A 2019-2020
Deuteronomy 8:2-3, 14b-16a | 1 Corinthians 10:16-17 | John 6:51-58
Oh God who in this wonderful sacrament have left us a memorial of your passion, grant us, we pray, so to revere the sacred mysteries of your body and blood that we may always experience in ourselves the fruits of your redemption who lives and reigns with you, with God the Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.
This is the last of our special feasts for a while. We start next week with ordinary time. I always like to mention there’s nothing ordinary about ordinary time other than instead of focusing on one or two very special teachings of the church in a homily, in a liturgy, we’re focusing on a particular gospel and the story of Jesus as revealed in that gospel. So this ends, in a way, what I would consider to be the kind of checking out for everyone. When we look at all these feasts we’ve been celebrating since Ash Wednesday to this one, what we’re looking at is the essential teachings of our religion, and nothing is more important than, as members of a particular religion, we understand the heart of that religion, the thing in it that gives life and gives success, in a way, to what we long for as human beings.
And I think this is interesting to end this whole section, from Easter to Pentecost and Holy Trinity and now the Body and Blood of Christ, because in a way, it’s almost like we get closer and closer to the heart of what it is that we as, particularly, Catholics gather around. But it’s essential to, I think, the Christian message, the message of Jesus giving to his disciples a promise that he would live inside of them, that he would be the source of everything they were going to do, that he was giving himself to you and to me in a way that goes beyond logic. And without that, he’s saying, we can’t do this thing that we’re called to do; we can’t live the life that God has intended us to live, in terms of participating with him in the salvation of the world. Now, one of the things that has struck me often in these last — I don't know, this last year, I guess. It was 2,000 years between God’s call of Abraham and the coming of Jesus. So in a way, it was 2,000 years when we were focusing on the heart of the Old Testament, and the heart of the Old Testament is a story about God entering into a people. He was going to lead them through a process, and the process was going to bring them to a place of freedom, a place of wholeness. And the overarching metaphor for the whole journey was he wants to take us out of a way of life that feels like slavery into one that feels like the fullness of life. And what is the heart of that image of slavery? Well, it’s the fact that, in the beginning, religion was, to a great extent, a way of God entering into our lives and telling us how to behave, how to work, how to do the things that he called us to do. In the process, he said, “If you do these things, you’ll have life, and if you don’t, I will punish you, or I will pull away from you.” That was the way it began. So in a way, there’s something in the Old Testament that was necessary to be what it was at the time, but it was something that was temporary, because it was going to evolve into something much more according to our nature. We have the capacity to be told what to do and to follow that because of the threat of punishment. That’s an easy way for people to be motivated, and that’s perhaps, maybe all we could basically muster up 4,000 years ago. But we’ve evolved well past that.
So this first reading that we’re listening to in this set of readings is about this promise that God made in the beginning. He said, “I will be with you. I’ll be your God, and I want you to follow me. And I’m going to test you to see if your heart is in the right place. I’m going to put all kinds of obstacles there for you.” And really, when you look at the obstacles, they really weren’t anything other than the obstacles that are in life. The image of scorpions and plagues and all that kind of stuff — scorpions, is that a virus that poisons? It’s always been a part of life that there are things in it that challenge us to see whether or not we’re going to get past these things and realize these things are there for us to grow and to evolve, and that evolution is what that Old Testament story is all about, God entering into a person, saying, “I’ll take you on a journey. I’m going to take you out of a world of laws and regulations, and I’m going to get you into a place of incredible freedom. And you’re going to find that place with me, and when you find it, you’re going to enter into the world that I’ve always intended for you to be in.” And that’s the world that Jesus came to teach us about and to show us what it would look like. The ultimate freedom was not just to get to a place of milk and honey, a place where life was easier. No, it was all leading us to this amazing promise of God to do something that’s so extraordinary that it took 2,000 years of evolution before he was able to say, “All right, I’m going to show it to you.” And now we’ve had 2,000 years of Christ, and we’ve really focused on this figure, Christ. And who is he? He is us, incarnate God in a human being. So what we see in this person Jesus is the fullness of what was at the heart of the freedom that God planned from the beginning for us to experience. We are invited to be in participation with God dwelling inside of us, and that belief and that trust and that miracle of God’s indwelling presence radically changes religion from a religion of control with punishment as its motivation to something so much more mysterious, so much more exciting and so much more attuned to our nature. We have been told that we will live with a power called God, and that God living in us will do two things. It will transform us and enable us to transform other people. What an incredible gift. We will be able to participate in the same life that Jesus participated in, and just as he realized the power that he had to do that was not from him but from his Father who dwelt in him, so we’re being told, “Believe that you have that same destiny that Jesus had, and you are there enabling others to receive this great gift through your intention and then through your action.”
So the heart of that teaching was conveyed to the disciples by the theme of this set of readings, this feast. Jesus said, “Unless you eat my body and drink my blood, unless I am in you, and you remain in me, and you participate in that mysterious indwelling presence that I’m modeling for you, unless you do that, you’re not going to have what I planned for you. You’re not going to have life.” And I love — when you think about — the image of eating somebody’s body and drinking blood is very, very bizarre, but when you think about what it’s pointing to — it’s pointing to, I think, something all of us basically know. You know what it’s like when, say, you love someone, and you know they’re a part of your life. You know that, if you have someone who believes in you and really trusts in your goodness, it enables you to be more who you want to be, the goodness that you long for. We know what it’s like to have somebody’s presence in us as a positive and also as a negative. We know, if we have people criticizing us and judging us and putting us in a bad place, it affects us. So is it that hard to imagine that the God who created you and created me would like to have a relationship with you where you feel him inside of you? And what you feel is his passion to transform and change the world into a place that it was always intended to be by God, and what he’s saying to you and to me, “Would you like to join me in this? Would you like to help me do this?” Yeah, yeah, I would. I really would, because I both want what you promise, and I want to share it with people.
So how is he going to convince us of this great mystery? Well, he created something that’s at the heart of, I think, most people’s religious life that believe in the Eucharist. It’s communion. It’s this ability to gather in a ritual and to reenact this moment in Christ’s life when he announces to his disciples a mystery that is so difficult for us to engage in. Last year the Pew Trust — it’s a research fact tank. It’s nonpartisan, and you can hire them to go and say, “What are people thinking about this issue? What are people thinking about that issue?” And last year they did an evaluation of Catholics as to whether or not they believed in the real presence, meaning that the Eucharist really is — the bread is the body of Christ, and the blood is the blood of Christ. So what do you think the results were? 30 percent, only 30 percent of Catholics believe that this is more than a symbol. I find that amazing on one level, since the church is so clear in its teaching, but at the same time, I understand it human nature wise, because how do you explain it? This piece of bread is now the body of Jesus? This blood is really his blood? But if you can’t go into that world of the mystical, of the unimaginable of — that’s something you can’t explain. Unless you’re willing to get into that, you can’t really engage in this thing called redemption. Redemption is the promise that this miracle happens, and the ritual empowers it and strengthens it.
Ritual is so interesting. We have it everywhere. Usually rituals, whenever anything is beginning or ending or anything really significant is happening — we have funerals for when people die. We have weddings when people start a relationship. We have baptisms for a new child entering into the world. We have birthdays, anniversaries. I think we all know the effectiveness of that. I had a birthday party last night for my sister. We took time and prepared the nice meal, and then we had gifts, and we had a little toast and told her how much we love her. And is that powerful? Yeah, I think so. I think rituals are enormously powerful in engaging us in something that is ethereal and not easy to describe, and that’s certainly at the heart of what the Eucharist is.
I love the second reading because of the word that is used. It said — Paul is talking about this mystery, and it’s brand new to him and brand new to everybody. I can’t imagine what it must have felt like to believe this in the very beginning because — I’ve known about it all my life. I took it for granted. I don't know if I really sat down and thought, as a child, what it really means, but when I read Paul, he said, “This miracle of redemption is a participation in the blood of Christ and a participation in the body of Christ,” not just thinking about him, that he existed, and not just a memorial service, but it goes way, way beyond that. And it means that — let’s use the images. First of all, the gift of God’s presence inside of us is a kind of connecting with his passion, his love, his desire to see the world become all that he intended it to be, to see people flourishing, becoming who they are, free, self-aware, authentic, all of that. And so when you see that that’s his passion, then you say, “Okay, I want to participate. I want to receive it, but in receiving it, I also want to give it.” That’s what’s so beautiful about the Eucharist. It’s for us, but it’s also for everyone else. We receive its gifts, but then it empowers us to send those gifts into other people. So what does it mean to participate in blood? Well, blood is this mysterious thing in our bodies that the minute it stops doing its thing, we die, because it carries everything to every cell, life, oxygen, immunity, everything. So there’s a beautiful image of what it means to have this force inside of us, in terms of its effect on our body. Without it, the body dies. Without it, it’s not nurtured. It’s not healthy. So this is Spirit. This is God’s Spirit in us that does this incredible, life-force work. It animates everything, and then his body — participating in his body is participating in his work and what he did, how he walked the earth and through his intention, through his touch, he would heal people, transform people, awaken them. His preaching was so effective and his miraculous power so beyond imagining, and I don’t think I still don’t fully understand and believe that that’s possible for human beings. But it is. I know it is, and I’ve experienced it. But still, it seems I’m more prone, like most of us, to take religion on the most superficial level, which is the church telling us what we’re supposed to do, and if we don’t do it, we’re punished. But how different it is in the New Testament to see something so radically different than following rules and regulations in order not to be punished but to be participating in an action of a loving God who said, “I am the source of everything you’re able to do. Unless you remain in me and I remain in you, unless you drink — unless you feel my blood coursing through your veins, unless you feel the energy that you have in your body to do the things I do, you haven’t really entered into what we call the church or spirituality. It’s an amazing teaching, and I long for more and more and more people to really feel it and believe in it. Yet if you make it into a nice, easy, “Explain this for me, please, Father, how this bread is the body of Christ and this wine is his blood,” you can’t. It’s not something you explain. It’s something you participate in.
Father, the gift of your presence within us is difficult to comprehend, to understand and to feel sometimes. What we pray for on this feast is that you would awaken us to this incredible gift and let us feel it as we surrender to this work of participating in the same work that you were given by your Father. Open us to our dignity, our worth, our value, in terms of this work, and let us be effective by our trust and our belief and our confidence in this great promise. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.