The Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ: B 23-24

The Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ
 Exodus 24:3-8 | Hebrews 9:11-15 | Mark 14:12-16, 22-26

 Oh God, who in this wonderful sacrament have left us a memorial of your passion, grant us, we pray, so as 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 in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever. Amen.

In the very beginning of the church, as it became more and more what God intended it to be, there was a time when there was a decision made about how we would gather together to remember the great gift of God’s redemption through Jesus, and there was a way in which we decided very early on that there would be a gathering over and over again where we would celebrate this mysterious thing that happened that we recorded in this feast, that evening where Jesus, with his disciples, initiated what we call the Eucharist.  And that has always been the center focus of our worship, but one of the things that had to develop eventually was how are we going to do that.  And then there was this thing called the ritual of the church in terms of how we celebrate on a regular weekly basis, and it evolved into a very beautiful process of reliving, reenacting over and over again salvation history through a set of readings.  And always when we read the readings and pondered them, we would celebrate and do what Jesus told us to do.  Whenever we gather in his name, we should remember him, and to remember him is to engage in the very core of his ministry, his redemption, or maybe I should say, our redemption given to us by him.  To be redeemed, what does it mean?  Why is it the heart of the whole story of salvation history?  Well, I’m praying that in this homily today that focuses on that event that changed the world in terms of a way of relating to God, I want to see if I can get to the heart of what it means and what we’re really celebrating.  

So let’s go back, as we did during this liturgical season, and that’s what I’m talking about earlier when is said the church sat down and decided how it would celebrate throughout a year these Sundays.  We have what we call the liturgy of the word.  It’s the story, told over and over and over again of salvation history.  And I’ve said this to you many times, and I believe with all my heart that that is not just the story that happened to people thousands of years ago.  It’s our story.  It’s the human story, the story of God relating to humans, humans responding to God’s invitation to be a part of his life, to be engaged in something that we were meant to be engaged in.  If you go back to the earliest story of God’s encountering human beings, however you want to imagine it, whether it happened over centuries of evolution or whether it happened in a moment, doesn’t matter.  But we have the story of when God first encountered human beings, and he invited them into a relationship with him where they would be gathered together with him to tend the garden, to tend the world.  And he said, “You may do this with me.”  The emphasis is “with me”.  “So you’re engaging in this work that I’m inviting you into.  I want you to be careful not to fall into a trap that is more egocentric and self-centered, and that is symbolized in the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”  And what that tree represents is nothing other than the autonomy that every human being feels they need and must have in order to fulfill their longings.  That story is not a story about the original sin in so much as disobedience as the original problem, which is human beings prefer to do things on their own.  We know the next two stories about human beings in the early days of the whole story of salvation history.  We have not only autonomy is a problem but also jealousy and competition, Cain and Abel.  We also have that very interesting story of hubris, people gathering together, deciding they can do anything they want.  So that’s the dilemma.  That’s the beginning, human beings wanting to be on their own, God wanting to engage them in a relationship of cooperation, partnership and doing work. 

So we have in the beginning a way that first God decides he’s got to enter into these people, because they’re stiff-necked, to say the least.  So he says, “What I’ll do is I’ll establish a relationship with you.  I’m going to make you a people that are mine, and so the way I will gather you around me is to give you a law.  You’ll be responsible for fulfilling all the things in the law, and then I will be your God, stronger than all the other gods.  I’ll protect you, but you must do what I tell you to do.  You must do what I ask you to do.  That’s the relationship I want with you.”  When you think about it, when you have a strong, autonomous kind of streak in you, all right, you might say, “Well, this may be working for me.  So if you’re going to take care of me and keep me safe from my enemies, I’ll do whatever you say, but I’m doing it because I want to do it for me.  I want to be protected, so yeah, I’ll accept you, God, as the God who protects me and takes care of me.  And what I’ll do on my part is I’ll do whatever you say.”  And so the law was established, and that’s what we have in the first reading, God proclaiming to the people a relationship based on what they are asked to do.  And that’s what’s called the Old Testament or the old covenant.  It’s a simple covenant in a sense.  “Do what I say, and I’m your God.  Don’t do what I say, and I separate from you, and you’re on your own.”  So the relationship is based on obedience, doing what you’re told, and that, in a sense, never worked if you look at the story.  There is something that humans being have deep inside of them, this autonomous streak or whatever — just to be told what to do by a power greater than themselves and to do it in order to get something back just doesn’t seem to be enough for us human beings.  We want more than that, and so this old covenant, Old Testament, was in effect ineffective.

And so there comes a moment when God realizes it’s time to reveal not just that part of his desire, meaning, “I want a people of my own to do what I say.”  He goes even further and in a way that’s absolutely unexpected said, “No, what I really want is not a relationship with people where I control their behavior but where I enter into them and I change their behavior.  I awaken something in them that is deeper than their autonomous streak, and I open something in there that is intended to be opened eventually as they grow and mature.”  And they end up realizing that this invitation, on the part of God, is not just to just do what your told but to become who you were meant to be.  You feel the difference?  If somebody comes up to you and says, “You must to this in order to keep the relationship,” that makes kind of one relationship.  But if you comes up and said, “Look, I would like to enter into you, because my intention is to awaken in you, by my relationship with you, who you are really meant to be.  And that thing that you’re meant to be is an intimate relationship with me.  So it’s no longer me asking you to do something for me but we doing something together — we doing something together.”  That’s the mystery of the New Testament, the new covenant.

Now, the old covenant had the weakness.  The biggest weakness of the old covenant was you had to follow the rules and laws, and if you broke them, then you broke the relationship.  That’s the first covenant.  It was based on obedience, and what the covenant — when you see it established in the Old Testament, it was an interesting covenant, because it was something that was done in blood.  And the blood image is this: the relationship you have with God is going to be God taking care of you, and without his care, you will self-destruct.  In a sense, you will die.  So what God in the Old Testament was promising is, “If you follow my ways and my rules, you’ll find life, but if you don’t, there will be death.”  That’s why blood was used as a statement or a way of expressing this covenant.  An animal was cut in half.  The blood was taken, part of it sprinkled on the victim and part of it on the person, and so that whole image of, if you break the covenant, you have killed something.  Then something has to be done to make up for that, and the fascinating thing about the Old Testament is what fixed you, when you had broken the law, what reestablished you with God was the killing of an animal, which seemed strange to me at first.  What is that doing?  Well, it’s expressing that something had to be sacrificed.  Something had to be shown, I would say, by sacrifice, as to what you were doing when you broke the law.  You were cutting yourself off from this God in your life, guiding you and taking care of you and protecting you.  And so if you offered a sacrifice, if you killed something, it was this — to me it seems like it was a strong reminder of how essential this relationship was if you’re going to continue to live the life that you would like to live, being protected by a greater power than yourself.  But again, it had to be done over and over again, and people kept failing and kept being asked to do what they’re told and kept failing.  So it never produced anything that made a major difference in the relationship or the capacity, let’s say, of human beings to have a relationship with God. 

So something had to change, and then we come to the new covenant.  And so it’s interesting to me.  This whole review of salvation history that started with Ash Wednesday and ends this Sunday ends with this incredible moment when Jesus does something that changes everything in terms of our relationship with God.  No longer does it depend upon human beings offering a sacrifice to make up for their fault to be reestablished with God.  Jesus said, “I will be that sacrifice.  I will give my life.  You will not give just an animal’s life in reparation, but I will give my life for you.”  Now, without trying to get too far into understanding exactly how the mechanics of that works, just believe this: there was something that you had to do to fix the relationship that you had broken, when you broke the law, that is no longer necessary.  It’s been done for you.  So every debt that you’ve ever owed to God or anybody else, in that sense, because of your self-centeredness and your autonomy, your competitive jealousy, all those terrible things we do to one another, they have all been made up for, removed by this one act of Jesus offering his life for the people, for us. 

Now, here’s the key, I think, that I want you to feel.  There’s a resistance to this gift.  There’s a resistance that is still in all of us.  It’s part of that autonomy, part of that desire to do everything on our own, but we have to realize that this gift of God’s presence entering into us — and it’s not dependent upon performance?  It’s really hard to believe.  It’s like having a relationship where it doesn’t matter how horrible you are.  The relationship never, in terms of the flow of life coming from the other, never is diminished.  That’s the heart of this whole mysterious, Eucharistic gift.  You can’t damage your relationship with God, and he’s promising you two things.  He’s promising you, “I’m going to enter into you,” because in this mysterious thing called the Last Supper, Eucharist, he said two things.  He not only said them, but he acted them out.  He said, “I want you to understand that I am giving myself, my body, my strength, my essence.  I’m giving that to you, and how I give it to you is not simply by dying for you, but in the act of dying for you, I’m telling you that what I’m doing is entering into you.  I’m giving you my body,” he’s saying.  “I’m giving you me.  I’m giving you my presence in your life, no matter how good you are or bad you are.  It doesn’t change my desire to be in you.  So please allow me to enter into you.”  That’s the essence of, “This is my body.  Take it.  Eat it.  Take it inside.” 

It’s funny — not funny but interesting that there’s another feast this week that is kind of connected.  Not kind of, it’s really connected to the Eucharistic celebration, and it’s the Feast of the Sacred Heart.  And there was a devotion that started in the Middle Ages that was really a wonderful image of this desire on the part of God to enter into us, to be a part of us.  It was his heart, his essence that he wanted to say, “I want to come and dwell in your heart.”  And there was a very interesting saint, St. Luthgard, and she had a relationship with God.  She was a mystic in the 12th century, and she had this experience of God answering her prayers.  And so she thought, “Well, gosh, if he can answer my prayers, I could ask for anything.”  So she asked if she could be a part of him, if he would come with her and dwell with her in an intimate way, and she has this vision.  It’s so powerful.  It’s a mystical vision, and Jesus appeared to her, and when he did, when she said, “I want intimacy with you.  I want you to be a part of my life,” he took his hand into her chest and took her heart out and then held it and then took his heart and put it in her and put his [sic] heart in himself.  How’s that for intimacy, heartfulness, connection, and that was part of that whole devotion to the Sacred Heart, the intense love on the part of God to say, “Look, it’s not enough for me to tell you to do something for me in order to establish a relationship.  I realize I want to be more than that to you.  I want to be more than a law.” 

The whole story of the Old Testament is the failure of the law to produce the relationship that we need with God, and the New Testament, the new covenant is based on something radically different, God entering into you and me in our imperfection, our sinfulness, and wanting to dwell there.  And there’s nothing we can do in terms of lack of perfection that will limit his desire.  The desire is that intense — it’s like a fire inside of him.  “I love human beings.  I will offer myself to dwell with them no matter who they are or where they are.”  And then the second part of the Eucharist is that beautiful part where he said, “And this is my blood.  And this blood is the essence of the new covenant, and it’s poured out for your sins, for all your imperfections, meaning I will absorb all the things that the Old Testament system was geared to perform for you, all those rituals you had to pay for and go through, which reinstated you into a relationship with God.  I’m going to do that for you by just shedding my blood.”  So the blood of the new covenant is not the blood, your blood, God blood intermingling over a promise that the minute you break that promise you die and you bleed.  No, it’s a complete different image.  It’s, “I’m making up for every sin you’ll ever commit.”  

Father, your new covenant, your new promise of your presence in our lives is hard for us to still grasp. It holds so much power, but yet we’re afraid of the intimacy. So bless us with an open heart, receptive heart, allowing you to dwell there and to do the work that you’ve called us all to do with you. And we ask this in Jesus’ name. Amen.