The Body & Blood of Christ: Cycle A 22-23
The Body & Blood of Christ
Exodus 34:4b-6, 8-9 | 2 Corinthians 13:11-13 | John 3:16-18
Oh God, who in this wonderful sacrament have left us a memorial of your passion, grant, 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 God the Father in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God forever and ever, amen.
I want you to think for a few moments about Jesus the man, like us in everything, weaknesses, doubts, fears, anxieties, and for 30 years he spent time reflecting and studying and wondering about life and about who he was and about what he was here for. And then it came time for him to have this burning desire inside of him, this desire to teach and to preach and to open people to something that he knew now and was convinced of, and that is God dwelling inside of him. He was God, but he never acted as if he was God. He acted as he was, a man filled with divinity, and so we have to suspend some logical, “How does this happen? How does that work?” Suspend all that, and stay with the image. And the image is this presence of God inside Jesus gave him the ability to do everything that he did, teach everything that he taught, perform every miracle that he performed with one intention. “I want people to understand who this God is and what he wants from them and what he wants to give them.”
That first reading talks about the early time that God called a people together and took them on a journey. It’s the archetypal journey of going from slavery to freedom. We are called into a world where we are not burdened by a law and rules and regulations that go against what we really want. No, we’re on a journey transforming us so that the things that we’re called to do are not commands we have to follow but the only choice we believe is the right choice. We begin to live in the truth that the law calls us to live in. And so in those early days, what it was about was God had to work with us where we were, and we were pretty low on the scale of consciousness, and so basically it turned out that God was taking them on a journey. They didn’t know where. They had to trust in him, and so the beginning is do you trust in God and the plan that he has for you. He’s going to invite you into that plan, and so what they were experiencing in the plan is that it was not something that was comfortable or easy. What they left seemed to be more comfortable at times, and so they have this resistance consistently through this journey. We don’t like this process. We don’t like evolving and growing and changing, and so what we sense in this is there is this way in which he says, “Look, I want you to trust in me on this journey, but you’ve got to trust. That is, I’m not going to zoom you to the goal and say, ‘Now here it is. Now do you believe in me?’” No, he said, “I want you to trust in the process.” And so one of the things he promises to do in this journey of ours is to feed us and to make sure that we have what is essential for life: food and water. You can see the images in these things as we look at the whole story of salvation history. Water is all about cleansing and about quenching the longings in our heart, and food is about having the strength and the power to do what we’re called to do or to endure what we’re called to endure.
So in the very beginning of this journey that we share with God, he revealed to the people that he is there to nurture so that we can do the work, do the work. And what is the work? Well, Paul brings up something interesting. Nothing is more essential to the teaching of Jesus than the whole notion of his body and his blood being offered to us on a regular basis. That is the thing we need. That’s the nurturing we need in order to do the work we’re here to do, and so Paul is very aware of that. And what he’s saying is something that goes beyond just saying, “We are here to receive from God his presence, and it nurtures us and it feeds us.” But then Paul adds, “Know this work of being fed and nourished is something we have to learn to participate in.” And if you’re participating in it, it doesn’t mean that you’re feeding yourself, but then you’re realizing that you’re being fed with that which gives you strength, and this blood that is so clearly an image of being there for other people, forgiveness, having a stance towards the needs of others, these are things that we are fed, but then we have to feed them to others. So the idea of God giving us what is necessary, he then says, “And if I’m doing that with you, and I’m doing it for everyone, but I’m going to do it often through another person. I’m going to be using you to be my body and my blood to other people, because I am in you, and you share what’s in you.” When you think about all of that, it’s hard to grasp what that really is like, and we believe, as Catholics, in the Eucharist. We use it every day in our ministry to communities. We celebrate it, and then yet what we realize is that, according to the statistics that are out there, asking the average Catholic, “Do you believe that this bread is really the body of Christ? Do you believe this wine is really the blood of Christ?” Supposedly only about 30 percent of Catholics believe in transubstantiation. What do they believe in? It’s a beautiful, rich symbol, a symbol. There’s nothing wrong with having symbols that point to a reality, but why was Jesus so insistent in saying, “Unless you believe in this, you can’t have life.” And what does he mean by life? He means that ability to be engaged in the life that God has created for you and for me, to believe that all of it is interconnected, that we’re part of something much bigger than we are, and we’re living out something that is moving toward life and growth and change and something wonderful. That’s hard to believe in sometimes.
So what do we have to do in order to be more in touch with this incredibly core issue of our Catholic faith or Christian faith, Jesus living inside of us as Spirit, the Holy Spirit, God the Father Spirit, his Spirit in us, flowing out of us, doing the same thing that Jesus did on this planet? Now, if you’re waiting for signs, that’s a little dangerous, because I don't know how Jesus dealt with his humanity and the ability that he had to make God’s presence felt through him through signs and wonders and miracles and driving out demons. I don’t think any of us could endure that kind of egocentric food without getting caught up in it. So it has to be done in a way that is not so literal, but at the same time, it is absolutely real. It is his body that we take into us. It is his blood that is coursing through our veins. How else can we imagine God in us, that he’s ⎯ we can imagine that he’s in our heart. He stays there, but he’s in our flesh. He’s in the essence of who we are. What a beautiful image to believe in, and the thing that keeps us is our logical mind that says, “Well, if it’s bread, it can’t really be the body of Christ.” Even miracles around the blessed sacraments, the reality of it is the host bleeds, or somehow the host takes on a quality of flesh, as if to say, “If we believed it really was the body of Christ, by experiment, by science, we would believe it.” Well, I don’t think so, because if you look at science now, science is in a very different place than it was, say, 50 years ago. Quantum physics has changed our whole idea and understanding of what matter really is, and we find out that matter is not made up just of atoms but of tiny particles. And these tiny, tiny particles have the ability to do things we never thought was possible, because a particle can be both something that you can measure and see and weigh, and it can also just be energy, just power, just a force. Reality can be both material, and in a sense, we would say non-material to our eyes. That’s not super-unusual, unnatural. It’s the way the world works. If the world works that way, then the idea of this presence of God in the world that is, to us, invisible, has every right to be there in a sense. Science says, “Yeah, there’s a Spirit in the world that is goodness, that is him, that is God, that is truth, and it’s as real as the person you’re looking at or the chair you’re sitting on.” And that probably doesn’t really work to say, “Well then, I believe,” because even the disciples had a hard time believing.
In fact, it’s encouraging to me, when you listen to all those stories after Easter, how many times Jesus had to say, “I was with you. You saw this. You saw that. Why do you still not believe. Believe, believe.” That’s the key. Can you believe that this issue that Jesus made such a big deal about, “You’ve got to believe that I’m in you. My Father’s in you. The Holy Spirit is in you. We’re working with you. Everything is working together. You’re on this path. Without that, we can just spiral down into something very dark.” So make a choice. Believe in Christ’s presence. Believe in the food that we find in each other that is him, the nourishment, the power to forgive, to love. We find it through other people, because he’s in them, and he flows to us, and he’s in us. It changes my life. It has changed it, and I hope it changes yours. Amen.
Father, everything we long for, everything we ask for, you promise to work it so that we will receive that gift. Help us to trust in your promise. Never let it diminish our desire to ask over and over and over again for all that we need to live the life you’ve called us to live. And we ask this in Jesus’ name, amen.