Body and Blood of Christ - Homily 5

Homily 5 - 2024

We Catholics celebrate today as the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ [or Corpus Christi, as we Catholics used to call it in Latin]. It is like a re-run of Jesus’ Last Supper that we celebrated on Holy Thursday, the day before Good Friday. On Holy Thursday we focussed more on the event of Jesus’ Last Supper. Today, we focus on its meaning. And what a rich meaning it has!

Jesus’ Last Supper was the ritual Paschal meal commemorated annually by all good Jews, when they remembered and celebrated the original liberation of the unorganised Hebrew slaves from their captivity in Egypt many centuries previously, and their formation, during their forty years of wandering in the Sinai desert, into an organised national group under the leadership of Moses.

It is fascinating to ponder what we heard in today’s Third Reading, taken from the Gospel of Mark — how Jesus had reshaped and reinterpreted some of the traditional symbols of the Jewish Passover. Firstly, when he had taken the loaf of bread, and broken it into small pieces so it could be shared by all present, and as he was explicitly thanking God, his always-liberating Father, He said over the pieces of the now broken, single loaf, totally unexpectedly, “This is my body, which is for you”.

Jesus was anticipating what would happen on the following day — when his beaten-up, bloodless body would be hanging on the arms of the cross, until it could no longer sustain his spirit — and he died. Jesus accepted his tortured death as the willed consequence of his personal integrity and his determined love for his disciples, and indeed for the whole world. The brutality served to highlight the intensity of his gratuitous love for all.

That is whom we eat when we receive Communion. Jesus added, “Do this as a memorial of me” i.e. “To remember me, you do this”— “love others, everyone, always, whatever it costs you.”

But Jesus went further. During that last meal with his disciples, Jesus celebrated not only God’s liberating action for his ancestors. He also remembered a series of broken and renewed Covenants between God and his recalcitrant People over their long history. The prophet Jeremiah, as he had looked into the future six or seven centuries before the eventual coming of Jesus, spoke of a New and definitive Covenant that God would finally make with his People.

At that Last Supper, according to the Jewish ritual, the final cup of wine was shared by all. But this time, as he had done with the bread, Jesus reshaped and reinterpreted the wine in the cup: “This is my blood, the blood of the covenant, which is to be poured out for many”. Our drinking from that cup expresses our personal “Yes” to God’s long-foretold offer of the new covenant between God and humanity. It gives meaning to the whole life of Jesus — to his teaching, his activity, and his eventual death. Jesus sealed this covenant, not with the blood of bulls [as we heard about in today’s First Reading] but with his own blood.

Jeremiah had so beautifully articulated God’s offer: “… Deep within them I will implant my Law, writing it on their hearts. Then I will be their God and they shall be my people… They will all know me, the least no less than the greatest… since I will forgive their iniquity and never call their sin to mind”.