Body and Blood of Christ - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2007

Embryonic stem cell research has been in the news recently with parliamentarians having recently voted on its introduction in Victoria, and now in New South Wales and Western Australia. A lot has been written and spoken about it in the media. People obviously are divided: a lot don’t know what to think; others have taken up opposed positions. I presume that there are intelligent and thoughtful people in both categories.

Those in favour of it see it as a source of hope in fighting debilitating diseases. Those against the project base their attitude on their deep, instinctive sense that human life, and human identity, are sacred. They see humans as unique in all creation through their openness to the transcendent and their capacity to relate to mystery, to understand and to love and ultimately to find God.

There is something uniquely special to being human. While being an eminently reasonable attitude, and, as far as I can see, instinctive, to accept it may yet be an act of faith – which may explain why so many don’t.

Embryonic stem cell research involves human cloning, which, in turn, involves the artificial manufacture of a human embryo, experimentation on the embryo, and then the eventual destruction of that embryo. Any possible medical advance would come only at the price of destroying the radical sacredness of humanity.

Most (though possibly not all) who see human life as sacred, see it also as a gift of the creating God: something to be received, appreciated and nurtured, but something beyond their right to take away or to destroy. It’s not theirs to do with as they choose.

It is a continuing gift of God.

We Christians see something even more. We appreciate a further specialness in being human because we believe that God became human. In Jesus, as Jesus, God became a human embryo. He grew up like us - one of us in every way -as human as we are. Such is the uniqueness, the specialness, the greatness and the sacredness of being human.

Jesus wants us to be mindful of this. He loved being human; he loved his human capacity to reach out beyond himself to his Father, to love, to love us in all  our humanness and our messiness, even in our sin. He didn’t come among us in some sort of germ-free, insulated capsule. He dirtied his hands. He even let us torture and kill him.

He is one of us. He wants us to remember this – not just for his sake, but in order to understand our own incredible dignity as humans. He even left us his crucified and risen flesh and blood in the Eucharist. It is this that we celebrate especially today on this Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ.

I wonder if our familiarity with Eucharist is one reason why we Catholics seem to be the loudest in saying NO to the whole embryonic stem cell research project. Our opposition is not some blind opposition to progress. It is not insensitivity to those who suffer and yearn for further breakthroughs in the treatment of debilitating diseases. 

Our opposition springs from our unwillingness to see the continual wearing-down of the sense of the sacredness of the human. We applaud further research but we are concerned that it enhance, not compromise, the very basis of human uniqueness and dignity.

Proclaiming what is right or wrong may sometimes be helpful. More difficult is to open people to recognise and embrace the sacred – ourselves and others.

Yet it is the same flesh and blood of ours that Jesus made his, and that now, transformed by resurrection, we receive sacramentally in every Eucharist – as today’s feast so eloquently reminds us.