Body and Blood of Christ

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Homily 1 - 2006

Mark told us in his Gospel today: While Jesus and the disciples were eating he took some bread, and when he had said the blessing he broke it and gave it to them. Take it, he said, this is my body.

They were having a meal together. Why did Jesus choose a meal setting as the means by which he wanted his disciples to remember him? Why food? Why bread? Wouldn’t a picture, or a statue, help us to remember him better? Why sharing together a loaf of broken-up bread?

When we do what Jesus asked us to do - when we remember him in the Eucharist - Jesus is present with us. But he is present, not as in an upper room in a street in Jerusalem. He is not present as in a place – locally. He is present sacramentally.

Sacraments are sign language. Jesus uses signs to carry his presence. The meal shared together, the bread, are telling us, better than words do, something about who he is, and what he is doing. The meal, the bread, are signs.

Last Thursday, when celebrating the Corpus Christi Mass in Rome, Pope Benedict said: On the feast of Corpus Christi we contemplate above all the sign of the bread. What did the sign of the bread tell Pope Benedict about who Jesus is, and what he is doing? Benedict called the bread the food of the poor, the bread of the poor.

He went on to talk about the mysterious bread-like food, the manna, which nourished what he called the pilgrimage of Israel during the forty years in the wilderness.

He invited his hearers to, as he put it: Look at suffering humanity, anxiously wandering among so many uncertainties; look at the physical and mental hunger affecting them. 

He prayed to Jesus: Give them bread for the body – Give them work! Give them bread for the soul – Give them light – Give them yourself!

He talked about the Eucharist as the fruit of the earth and of the work of human hands – (the way we refer to it in the prayer at the Preparation of the Gifts). The work of human hands: farmers’ hands, transport operators, bakers’ hands, retailers’ hands. He called it fruit of the earth, a gift, the gift of the heavens: sun and rain.

We call the bread of the Eucharist the Host. The word Host comes from a Latin word that means victim. Before we eat together the Eucharistic loaf, it must first be broken into pieces. That thought led Benedict to remark: When, in adoration, we contemplate the consecrated Host, the mark of creation is speaking to us. Then we discover the greatness of the gift, but we also discover the Passion, the Cross of Jesus and his resurrection.

Our contemplation takes place against the backdrop of our own time in history. That led him to reflect on our own times – as he said - when we hear of farming lands becoming desert, and there is much more talk of the danger of people and beasts dying of thirst in those regions without water.

To turn around the process by which farming lands are becoming desert will mean suffering for the followers of the Eucharistic Christ – challenging unjust structures of trade and the careless exploitation of natural resources and perhaps putting up with no more than our present standard of living. As Benedict said: we discover the Passion, the Cross of Jesus and his resurrection.

Benedict finished his reflective homily on the Feast of the Body of Christ with a prayer to the Lord: Guide us along the roads of our history! Always show the Church and her pastors the right path! Look at suffering humanity, anxiously wandering among so many uncertainties; look at the physical and mental hunger afflicting them! Give people bread for the body and the soul! Give them work! Give them light! Give them yourself! Purify and sanctify us all!

Bring us to understand that only by participating in Your Passion, by saying ‘yes’ to the cross, to sacrifice, to the purification you impose upon us, can our lives mature and reach their true fulfilment. Gather us from all the corners of the earth. Unite your Church, unite lacerated humanity. Give us your salvation.

Homily 2 - 2015

[Today was a School Mass with young children attending. The homily was an interactive discussion with them.]

What is the Eucharist for? to celebrate and to remind us that Jesus is with us all the time. While his friends were having that last meal together, he said to them that He would be in them and they would be in him. He says the same thing to us. Why would He want that? Why in? because he loves us, and would love us to love him.

There was an unusual word in all three readings today: Covenant. A covenant is an agreement between people to be friends, to support each other, to be prepared to forgive each other. That is what it is like between Jesus and us. But we don’t see Jesus and we don’t touch Jesus. So Jesus uses real things that we can see and touch – real things – to remind us: food – bread and wine. Just as our food becomes part of us, becomes us, nourishes and strengthens our life,and we cannot separate them… Jesus becomes us and no one can separate us. His life nourishes and strengthens our life.

It is worth thinking about. Through Jesus, who is really God as well as man, God is with us; God is in us. God who is love, God who loves us is in us making us more alive! Where is God? in everything created. Where does God like being most? in us. What is it like when someone loves us and when we love them back? How does it help us feel? And when we feel loved, we find we have more energy to be in a good mood, even to be kind and to love others. When we really believe that God loves us, it makes such a difference. We are never alone. And God [God the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit] are the sort of persons who, whether we have been good or bad [and we are bit of both most of the time], never stop loving us – never!

What is a really good way to remember that God who loves us is with us? We can celebrate it at Mass. When we are not at Mass, and that is most of the time, we can spend time with God. We don’t even have to say anything. We do not need to know any prayers by heart - [though often they can help us].

Meditate…

Homily 3 - 2018

The image that has stayed with me all this past week has been the obvious jubilation on the faces of the Irish crowds after the abortion referendum. I wonder if their rejoicing reflected a sense of freedom from the power of the Irish bishops over both governments and the faithful in general.

I can understand that rejection of the Church’s power. What the bishops there, for far too long, seemed to be interested in was to control people’s behaviour by manipulating governments. Yet enforced behaviour is not morality. Legally enforced conformity is far from personal conversion. I do not think God is interested in mere conformity.

The Church’s concern should be the formation of mature consciences. That requires much more delicate and patient nurturing of people’s insight into, and appreciation and respect for, the values of human life and dignity. By all means, “Yes” to my life and my dignity - and not just to mine but to ours, to everyone’s. “Yes” to my rights, but not just to my rights - also to my responsibilities to you. “Yes” to my freedom, but not just mine - to ours, to everyone’s.

In the Irish context, after the clerical abuse debacle of recent years, the bishops need to regain credibility if they are to succeed in that mission and to prioritise conversion over power.. The bishops need to listen to people’s concerns, and to listen respectfully and compassionately. They need to allow people time for people’s insights to develop, even to allow them to change their minds. They need genuinely to love people, and to communicate that to them somehow. It is not enough ... it was never enough ... for them or for anyone just to know the law, to know the Church’s teachings and its dogmas. The bishops themselves need conversion, on-going, never finished, conversion.

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ. During Jesus’ discourse at his Last Supper, he invited us to “live in him”, and to allow him to “live in us”. He spoke of a beautiful intimacy that is real now but will be ever more real later, when we enjoy the clarity and intensity of eternal life.

There is more. In the Eucharist we eat the Body of Jesus. That is saying something else. My body is me in my world, my world of people – in all my relationships, living under the same government, in real neighbourhoods, in all the practical nitty-gritty of our lives. With my body, I eat the Body of Christ. We become what we eat; our bodies become the food we eat. I find it fascinating that the risen Christ still carried the wounds of his crucifixion. Through the practical nitty-gritty of his life, he transforms the practical nitty-gritty of our lives, with our various histories, our pasts and our presents. 

At the Last Supper, after Jesus took the loaf of bread and said the blessing, he broke the bread. He then said that the broken bread was his Body. He gave that broken body to them to eat. That is what we say “amen” to at every Eucharist. Likewise we say “Amen” to the blood “shed for many”. His body was broken; his blood was shed - because in Jesus’ case, unconditional love, all-inclusive love, did not go down well with those who were doing well with the status quo and its injustices and inequities. Love had its price; justice had its price; equity had its price.

That, however, is not the whole picture. Loving is not always costly. You may have noticed Jesus’ cryptic remark in today’s Gospel: “I shall not drink of the fruit of the vine until the day I drink it new in the Kingdom of God.” Love is also - especially – life, Kingdom life. It is the life, the mutual loving, of the Trinity God. No wonder that loving is also beautiful, wonderful, fulfilling, enjoyable, sometimes even ecstatic.

If we live each Mass, alert to what we are doing, alert to what we are letting ourselves into, it becomes increasingly relevant to our responsible living in this mixed-up world of ours where, as experience attests, our loving can be costly yet wonderfully fulfilling.

Homily 4 - 2021

Over the past nine weeks we have remembered and celebrated the construction of the infrastructure, or scaffolding, of salvation. It started at the Easter Triduum with the death of Jesus, that was both a murder on the part of the authorities and an act of profound love by Jesus. That was followed by his resurrection from death at the hands of God, his Father, three days later. After six further weeks Jesus definitively moved on from physical life in this world and returned to his Father. This was capped off, ten days later, at Pentecost when he sent his Spirit, firstly to his close disciples and then, through them, to the whole wide world. We recalled that two weeks ago. Everything had been set up for the work of our salvation. Then, last week, as we celebrated the reality of God as Trinity, we paused to reflect how all three Persons in God shared, each in a different way, in that work of redemption. And now, with today’s Feast of Corpus Christi, we commemorate Jesus’ final supper with his disciples. There, he had symbolically anticipated his pending death and rising to life; and we tie it all together and make it present for ourselves in this sacrament of Eucharist.

A sometimes over-looked part of our eucharistic celebration is our sharing together of the cup of wine. We may tend to see it as little more than food plus drink, symbolising Christ’s flesh and blood. But Jesus intended it to tell us much more than that.

As we heard in today’s Gospel, Jesus referred to the cup which he directed them to drink from together, as containing now “the blood of the new covenant”. Many centuries beforehand, the prophet Jeremiah had looked forward to a “new covenant” destined to replace and immeasurably surpass the original covenant made by God with his People Israel as they journeyed from slavery in Egypt to take occupation of their Promised Land and to live there as a freed nation and a saved people.

Over time, that covenant had turned “pear-shaped” as the People lost their enthusiasm. But God remained constant in his love. Jeremiah spoke of God instituting a new covenant to replace the old. It would still be one where God would be their God and they would be God’s people. But, wonderfully, it would be infinitely more. Deep within them God would implant a law, writing it not on slabs of stone but on their hearts. They would all know God, the least no less than the greatest. God would forgive their iniquity and never call their sin to mind.

As the first covenant was sealed by the blood of bulls killed by Moses on behalf of the People, the new covenant would be sealed by the blood of Jesus, shed by his murderers but freely offered in resolute love for all by Jesus himself.

Drinking from the one cup of the covenant, especially when celebrating the Feast of Passover, had become within the Hebrew culture the people’s accepted way of pledging together their commitment to God. Drinking together the freely shed blood of Jesus from the cup of the new covenant would be, in Jesus’ mind, his disciples’ pledge, made together, solemnly professing their heartfelt loyalty to the way of God, and committing themselves together to Jesus’ shared project of shaping the Kingdom of God on earth.

What a wonderful symbol of an even more wonderful reality. Yet so often our Church has been slow to encourage us to participate thoughtfully in this magnificent sacramental gesture. [And the necessary Covid precautions are not exactly helping at the moment.]