Blessed Pier Giorgio Frassati, pray for us!
Verso l'alto!
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Homily:
The Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ – Cycle B
Young boys will often form deep friendships with one
another. Given the chance, a boy will
latch onto a cousin or another boy from the neighborhood who is about his same
age and become inseparable from him.
These boys will often find ways to share adventures together. Given enough freedom, they will seek out
adventures in places and situations that their mothers would be horrified to
discover. The survival of these kinds of
exciting experiences deepens their bond and the boys become even more
inseparable.
If either of the boys has a healthy imagination, or if
either of them discovered an interest in books—particularly the types of
adventure books that young boys like to read—there’s a good chance that one of
them will come up with the idea of ritualizing their bond by making some sort
of pact. If not already brothers by
blood, one of the rituals they might enact is the “blood brother” ritual. In its simplest (and, I suspect, most common)
form, the boys will head out to a secret place, one of them with a needle or
straight pin. Once there they will
solemnly declare to each other that they “will be brothers for life”, after
which they will each prick a finger with the needle so that a little blood will
flow and then press their fingers together, thus mixing their blood and
“sealing” the bond between them.
This type of blood ritual is nothing new, of course. Throughout history and across many different
cultures, rituals involving blood have bonded men, families, and even nations
of people together. In one Norse legend,
the men who wanted to enter into alliance together would cut open a patch of
grass and then each man would cut himself and let blood drip into the
earth. Then the patch would be closed,
thus sealing the bond of blood between them.
Blood has even been used to seal the bond between God and
his people, as we heard described for us in our first reading today. Our reading, from the book of Exodus,
describes how Moses “related all the words and ordinances of the Lord” to the
Israelite people, which he received from God on top of Mount Sinai. These were the “terms” of the agreement
between God and his chosen people. As we
heard, the Israelites all agreed to these terms. This was more than a simple contract,
however, this was a covenant; and a covenant created a bond much deeper than
any contract: it created a familial bond that had to be sealed in something
more than a simple agreement to terms.
Thus, the next morning, Moses ordered that holocaust
sacrifices would be offered to God and that the blood from the beasts that were
sacrificed would be preserved and set aside.
Half of the blood he splashed on the altar, which was symbolic of
placing it on God. The other half was
sprinkled over the people, thus sealing the covenant that God had made with
them in a bond of blood. This participation
in the blood of the sacrifice sanctified the Israelites and, thus, made them
holy: that is, set apart for God; and the blood of this covenant sealed a
covenant of law: the words and ordinances of the Lord. The blood of another covenant, however, would
seal a different kind of covenant: a covenant of redemption through which man
would be made free from sin.
The blood of this different kind of covenant comes from the
sacrifice that Jesus offered of himself on the cross—the sacrifice in which he
is both priest (the one who offers the sacrifice) and victim (the sacrifice
that is offered)—and our participation in the blood of this sacrifice happens
here, in this Holy Eucharist. We know
this because in the Gospels it is recorded for us that Jesus instituted this
sacrament in which bread and wine become his Body and Blood by saying “this is
my body” and “this is my blood of the
covenant”, and that he commanded that this be done in remembrance of him,
so that we all could participate in this covenant and thus be made sharers in
the eternal inheritance that has been promised to us.
Therefore, every year on the second Sunday after Pentecost,
we commemorate this by celebrating this feast of the Most Holy Body and Blood
of Christ as a way of reminding us that our participation in this Eucharist is
more than a religious ritual; rather, that it is a renewal of our blood bond
with Christ: a bond that not only unites us, but also demands something of
us. In the “blood brother” ritual of
young boys, the mixing of their blood meant that they would give their lives
for each other. In the covenant that God
formed with the Israelite people, the sprinkling of the blood from the
holocaust meant that the Israelites would make of themselves a holocaust to God
by following all of his words and ordinances.
And in the Eucharist, our participation in of the Body and Blood of
Christ from this altar means that we are called to go out and make sacrifices
of ourselves for the sanctification of others, even as we are sanctified by it.
My brothers and sisters, Jesus is inviting us to renew our
“blood pact” with him today. And so, let
us do so with our whole lives, committing ourselves to the service and
sanctification of others: for the promise of an eternal inheritance in Christ
Jesus awaits us.
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