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Homily:
The Most Holy Body and Blood of Jesus – Cycle A
I can’t remember if I first
heard this on a visit to Haiti or if it was on a visit I made to rural
Guatemala, but it is a story that is nonetheless emblazoned in my mind. It’s the story of what poor children do in
that country when they have to go days without substantial food. As I was told, children who become
desperately hungry will begin to make mud cakes—literally putting water on dirt
and forming it into a cake—and that they eat them. Even though there is no great nourishment for
them in them, they do it just so that they can put something in their stomachs
to ease the hunger pangs. Fortunately, I
never saw a child doing that.
Fortunately, because I think that I would be traumatized by it. Nonetheless, even the thought that children
might do that saddens my heart.
I bring this up today because
it is a truth about our human nature—that is, about our human instinct to
survive: that threats to our lives will make us do things that we otherwise
would never consider doing. Food is so
essential that our bodies are literally hard-wired to generate pain when we go
long periods of time without food so that we never neglect our bodies’ need for
food. This pain, as we see in the story
about impoverished children, can make us look even to the dirt of the ground as
a way to alleviate it.
Today, on this great feast of
the Body and Blood of Jesus—Corpus Christi—we heard from John’s gospel, chapter
6: more specifically, the end of chapter 6, which is the climax of this “Bread
of Life” discourse. In it we hear Jesus
declare that his flesh is “living bread” and that his blood is “true drink” and
that those who eat and drink of it will live for eternity. This is an absolutely ludicrous statement and
the “Jews” in the passage tell us why: “How can this man give us his flesh to
eat?”, they ask. Jesus doesn’t answer
them directly, but we know the answer, don’t we? At the Last Supper, Jesus takes bread and
says, “This is my body... take and eat” and he takes a cup of wine and says,
“This is my blood... take and drink”.
Connecting these two passages, Catholic Christians have always concluded
that the bread and wine that we offer on the altar is transubstantiated into
the Body and Blood of Jesus so that we might eat and drink them. They are not completely “transformed”: meaning
that their “forms”—that is, the appearance of bread and wine—don't change. Rather, they are transubstantiated: meaning
that their substance—that is, what they are in their essence—is changed. No longer bread and wine, in their essence,
they become the Body and Blood of Christ under the appearance of bread
and wine.
Perhaps we’ve never asked this
question, but it may be worthwhile to ask: Why did Jesus do this? Why did he say that one must “eat his flesh
and drink his blood” in order to have eternal life? Well, because he knew our human
condition. He knew that hunger is a fundamental
human experience and that, if he didn’t connect our fundamental desire to go on
living indefinitely with the thing that is most closely connected with ongoing
living—that is, with hunger and satisfying that hunger—we would look towards
worldly ways alone of satisfying our hunger and would miss the one thing that
could sustain us into the eternal life: life for which we instinctually know
that we are made. And because we are
human and live in time—meaning that we’ll continually return to the experience
of hunger throughout our time living in time—Jesus made this eating of his
flesh and drinking of his blood something that we could do over and over again.
This is what we celebrate
today: but only secondarily. The first
thing that we celebrate today is the fact that the Second Person of the Holy
Trinity, God the Son, united himself to a human nature (body and spirit). Even if Jesus hadn’t given us his flesh to
eat and his blood to drink, it would still be necessary to honor the Most Holy
Body and Blood of Jesus: simply because God lowered himself to be confined to
our human nature and walk among us. Secondarily,
but no less importantly, we celebrate that Jesus has given us his human/divine
flesh to eat and his human/divine blood to drink so that we might overcome the
limitations of this world (in which all persons inevitably die) and live, like
he lives, forever. This great sacrifice
for us (made effective by the suffering, death, and resurrection of Jesus) is
so great that we continually offer it back to the Father as an act of Thanksgiving
for so great a gift.
We were in a bad spot, though,
these past few months. This awesome food
(and I mean that literally: this food that is awe-inspiring)… this awesome food
was kept from us. Better, we were kept
from it. The coronavirus pandemic meant
that nearly all of us were deprived of this living bread and true drink for
over two months. This, as most of you
noted, I’m sure, was a very serious thing.
If the Body and Blood of Jesus is our “food for the journey” towards
eternal life, then to be deprived of it for months at a time puts us at great
risk of starvation. A number of you
reached out to me and said over and over again that you are literally starving—that
is, feeling hunger pangs—to return to the Eucharist. We encouraged you over and over again to make
“spiritual communions”: to invite Jesus into your heart spiritually until you
could receive him in the fullest way that you can receive him in this
world—that is, under the form of bread and wine—again. “It’s not the same”, many of you said. And you were right. If it was “the same”, then what Jesus said in
John chapter 6 was ludicrous and what he did at the Last Supper was
pointless. Our bodily reception of the
Body and Blood of Jesus is essential.
So why did God allow us to
experience this great hunger? I mean,
many of us could have died of starvation, right? Yes, that’s true! Or worse yet, many of us could have turned to
the mud and made cakes to eat just to try and satisfy those pangs. Many of us did just that: we turned away from
God and towards the lower things of this world to try and placate our hunger,
since God didn’t seem to want to give his “true food” back to us. Worse, I say, because it’s possible to stay
alive on mud cakes and because of that we begin to believe that we no longer
need the “true food” of heaven. So,
then, given all of these risks, why did God allow us to experience this great
hunger? The first reading tells us.
In it, Moses is giving his
“farewell” speech to the Israelites on the cusp of entering the Promised
Land. Moses reminds them that “[God]
therefore let you be afflicted with hunger, and then fed you with manna, a food
unknown to you and your fathers, in order to show you that not by bread alone
does one live, but by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord.” Just before this, Moses said that God
afflicted them for 40 years in the desert “so as to test them... and to find
out whether or not it was their intention to keep his commandments”. The affliction was a test and a teaching: a
test to see if they’d remain faithful to him; and a teaching to show them that
he will sustain them by his word.
For these months of separation
from our bodily reception of the Body and Blood of Jesus, we have been tested
to see if we would remain faithful to him and, hopefully, we have learned that
God’s Word is always with us to sustain us, even when the “bread from heaven”
becomes unavailable to us. Too often, I
think, we overlook the Liturgy of the Word at Mass and see the Eucharist only as
receiving Holy Communion. That’s
incredibly important, for sure; but it ought never be separated from the whole:
that is the proclamation of the Word of God that also sustains us on our
journey. This is part of the reason why
Bishop resisted distributing Communion outside of Mass: so as not to separate
the Word, which sustains us, from the Body, which also sustains us.
Friends, it is truly good that
we are back here together to celebrate this great feast that speaks to the
lengths that God took to bring us, his greatest creation, back into communion
with himself: going so far as to unite his divine nature with our human nature. May the joy that we feel in this
celebration—the joy of a restoration of our unity with him, spirit and body—sustain
us and inspire us to lead others to this same fullness of unity; so that, as
Jesus prayed at the Last Supper, we all may be one in the one body of Christ.
Given at Saint Mary’s Cathedral: Lafayette, IN – June 13th
& 14th, 2020
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