Body and Blood of Christ

See Commentary on Luke 9:11-17 in Luke 9:1-17

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.

Homily 2 - 2010

It is important to note the setting of today’s Gospel. Luke introduced the feeding by showing Jesus doing three things: he was welcoming the crowd; he was speaking to them about the Kingdom; and he healed those who needed it.

Who were the crowd? Throughout the whole Roman Empire at the time of Jesus, about 70% of people lived just on or under the poverty line, many of them going to bed hungry each night, and, as a consequence, acutely prone to sickness and disease. 

These were the ones to whom Jesus was speaking about the Kingdom. Luke had already summarised Jesus’ teaching about the Kingdom: Blessed are you who are poor, the kingdom of God is yours. Blessed are you who are hungry now, you shall be filled. That revolution would take place to the extent that people took seriously Jesus’ injunction to everyone (as spelt out in the Sermon on the Mount) to love your enemies, to do good, and to lend, expecting nothing in return. In short, to the extent that people chose, as Jesus said, to be merciful just as your Father is merciful.

Jesus’ feeding of the 5000 was simply another illustration of the message he was proclaiming and of the dream that animated him – a world where people cared for each other, respected each other, welcomed each other and shared what they had with each other … and, where, consequently, the poor were no longer excluded, the hungry were filled and those who wept at last could laugh.

Here we are today, 2000 years later, remembering what Jesus was up to, at a time in our own nation when the issue of asylum seekers has made the political agenda once again. I don’t want to look at the political intricacies, but at where those decisions might come from, and at the attitudes that determine them.

To Jesus’ earlier preaching of the beatitudes, Luke had added a series of warnings: Woe to you who are rich, Woe to you who are full now, Woe to you who are laughing. 

Jesus wasn’t necessarily annoyed with them. He wanted to show them how to enjoy something better – the Kingdom.

There is nothing necessarily evil with wealth, healthy and adequate meals, or enjoying yourself. It depends on the context. Where other people are poor, hungry and oppressed, people who are blind, insensitive, unwilling to share and unresponsive to those in dire need are missing out on something – are missing out on the possibility of real, deep happiness.

And a society that is blind, insensitive, unwilling to share and unresponsive to need is fragile – violence always simmers close to the surface. As was the case with the victims of sexual abuse, it is so easy for us, in our comfort, not to see suffering. We can be intent on maintaining business as usual.

When we see asylum seekers, do we see suffering people fleeing persecution and possible death? Certainly, they are not the only refugees. But they are people in profound need. Do we see that first? Do we treat them with particular sensitivity? Do we approach them with respect? If we don’t, what might it say of us? Are we missing out on something that Jesus yearns to give us?

What has all this to do with Eucharist? When describing the feeding of the needy 5000, Luke deliberately chose to use Eucharistic language: Jesus took the loaves, raised his eyes to heaven and said the blessing, broke them, and handed them to his disciples. Luke’s point was not to say that that feeding was a Eucharist but to emphasise that every Eucharist reflects that feeding. Like that feeding, every Eucharist is a celebration of welcome, of reclaiming Jesus’ vision of the Kingdom, and of meeting, and responding to, people in their need.

Today we celebrate the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ – the body of Jesus broken, the blood of Jesus shed because of his unshakeable commitment to a new and better world. Next Friday we shall focus on the Sacred Heart of Jesus – the quintessential “bleeding heart”. For us, as followers of Jesus, to be called “bleeding hearts” has become a badge of honour.

Homily 3 - 2013

Every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you proclaim his death until he comes again.  Is that what you are doing? Is that why you’re here? - proclaiming his death? - the most publicly degrading way they knew to kill a person.  For Jesus, though, his death had another meaning.  He saw his death as his life deliberately laid down for us, his blood bringing about a whole new relationship with God – not new from God’s point of view, but, certainly, from ours.  We believe that it worked – we believe that his death met with God’s response of raising him from that death.  They got rid of him; but he will come again.  That is what we are proclaiming here, now, today.  That is why we are here! We’re remembering.  As Paul said in the Second Reading, we’re doing this in memory of him.  We believe that his blood is the blood of the new covenant, the new relationship between God and me, and you, and the whole of humanity, that is, with each other.

Covenant is Paul’s language.  The Gospels hardly speak about covenant at all. They speak more about the Kingdom – as we heard today.  When the Gospel writers told today’s story from the life of Jesus, they deliberately pushed the buttons that remind us of Eucharist, of what we are up to here today: he took the bread, said the blessing, broke the bread and handed it over.  

But not just those words; the whole story reminds us of Eucharist. He made the crowds welcome. Who were the crowds, by the way? Where do you find a crowd of 5000+ on a weekday? They must have been out of a job – unemployed, some, probably unemployable – the ones doing it hard, out on the edges, struggling to eat, even to survive, discounted nobodies, always missing out.  He made the crowds welcome.

And then, He talked to them about the coming Kingdom.  He said that things could be radically different, should be radically different, would be radically different if they listened to him, took to heart what he said, and began to live like him.  Remember? Blessed are you poor! Blessed are you who are doing it hard! You won’t miss out – The Kingdom of heaven is yours!  But, the Kingdom won’t just come down, ready-made, from heaven.  “Everyone has to change”, said Jesus – “and I shall show you how.  Like me, give your lives for others.  Everyone has a dignity.  You have a dignity.  Your lives are worth giving, giving in love, giving out of profound respect for anyone, giving – forgiving! Don’t write yourselves off as useless.  And, don’t be absorbed just in yourselves, your needs, your suffering.”

Jesus’ interaction with the disciples is instructive.  They said: “Send the people away! Let them look after themselves.  They can go to the villages and farms round about and find food and lodging”.  [What chance would they have had of that!!!]  Jesus said: “You give them something to eat yourselves”.  They said: “We haven’t got enough”.  Jesus said: “That will do! Give!!”

Give was what Jesus did.  That is what Jesus always did! That is what Jesus is doing today – giving: This is my body, which is for you.  Not much – a broken, crucified body, just like a loaf of bread pulled to pieces so it could be eaten together – but given.  That is what we are proclaiming – and will keep on proclaiming until he comes again!

 Homily 4 - 2016

The recent Synods on the Family put the cat among the pigeons, and the feathers are still flying. One question was how to hold on to Scripture’s beautiful teaching about the permanence, mutual commitment and indissolubility of marriage and at the same time recognise that many Catholics have divorced and remarried, yet are as good and committed as anyone else. 

The answer may lie with mercy, guided by conscience. But mercy is not as simple as it looks. It is a whole other way of thinking, which comes only with wisdom and is the fruit of contemplation – as with Mary, who, as Luke’s Gospel says, “treasured these things and pondered them in her heart”.

Today we celebrate the feast of the Body and Blood of Christ and the institution of the Eucharist. Actually we celebrated them on Holy Thursday. But at some stage in the Church’s history, some “powers that be” seemed to think that the events of Good Friday and Easter Sunday somehow crowded out our focus on Eucharist. They preferred to concentrate on presence, rather than purpose – on who it is rather than what he is doing, and what he is there for. Historically, the Feast became popular at a time when people rarely received Eucharist. They looked at it instead. When I was a child, people still rarely received Communion, and then only if they had scrupulously fasted from all food and drink from midnight. 

Some people still see Eucharist as a reward for goodness. Sinners need not apply! Some as a reward for impeccable orthodoxy. Heretics not welcome! Others take a different stance. They brand all those who go to Communion as hypocrites, so, rather than associate with them and be defiled, they keep themselves aloof. It is the attitude often of the teenager, and parents are not immune from their censure. It seems to me that there are only two ways not to be hypocrites – either to be saints and squeaky clean, or to have no standards or principles to compromise. That leaves little room for most of us. [Where would we put the comedian Groucho Marx who famously quipped, “I would never join a club that would have me as a member!”?]

Seriously, we have to come to terms with mercy. The Church has not been good at that. Somehow, we need to mature, and that begins with self-knowledge. We are all works in progress. We are sinners; and the more we grow, the more we come to recognize, slowly and usually painfully, that there is no end to our sin. To accept that, we need to learn to be at peace with vulnerability, with not being in total control of our lives. That is mercy. And for the good person, it’s scary. It requires that somehow we discover that, with all our sinfulness, we can be loved – indeed, that we are loved, and loved by the God whom we instinctively tend to fear. To hang on to both at the same time, our clear unworthiness and the undeniable reality of love, can be a breath-taking breakthrough!

Rather than keep us at a distance, the eucharistic Christ invites and reassures us. The broken bread becomes His body, broken and given for us, sinners and hypocrites that we are; the wine we drink his blood poured out in love for us, for the forgiveness of sins and the steady healing of our brokenness.  As Paul wrote in today’s Second Reading, “Every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you are proclaiming his death”. We proclaim his death! It was his way of proving he loves us. But not just us, he loves the world. Who are we to restrict his outreach? Precisely because we are not worthy, we need his redeeming love. “Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof. But only say the word – and my soul shall be healed!” Let us not just mouth the words. Let’s mean them.

Homily 5 - 2019

The phrase from today’s Gospel that echoes most clearly in my mind is the comment made by the Twelve, “We are in a lonely place here”. For me, it seems to sum up how many Australian feel today, “We are in a lonely place here” – despite the thousands of ‘friends’ and connections made possible by social media. Lots of connections but not much communication; lots of ‘friends’ but not much love!

What was the real hunger that had led five-thousand-plus Galileans to follow Jesus into the wilderness and be so absorbed as to lose track of the time? The Gospel gave a hint: “Jesus made the crowd welcome and talked to them about the kingdom of God, and cured those who were in need of healing”. They could not have been too physically disadvantaged if they had followed him into the wilderness. Perhaps their wounds, like the wounds of most of us, were wounds of the heart, wounds of the human spirit. Certainly, Jesus’ response was to “welcome” them. How precious was that – real, genuine welcome? And, perhaps as he moved around among them, listening to their needs, listening to their pain, he led them to share, and to reflect on something much deeper, something much more human – issues that Luke summed up with his comment: "[Jesus] talked to them about the kingdom of God”.

Jesus was not rapt by the Twelve’s reaction to the need of the hungry crowd, and their proposal “to send the crowd away”. Nor was he over-impressed by their knee-jerk objection, ”[Do] we go ourselves and buy food for all these people?” when he suggested that they “Give them something to eat yourselves”.

In the light of last week’s passage through the Victorian Parliament of the voluntary euthanasia legislation, and our own possible uneasiness, might Jesus be saying to us, “Give them something to eat yourselves”? Like the Twelve, do we simply complain that it is too late now for us to do anything? And again like the Twelve with their fall-back recourse to an economic-rationalist solution, are we satisfied that the government is already looking after that by putting more money into palliative care?

Last week’s legislation speaks to me of a need for a reflective, more truly human, response on our part. I see traces of loneliness there. Like Jesus, do we need to welcome, be open to people, listen to what they are saying? Can we deepen the conversation by sharing our sense of the further light our personal experience of the kingdom of God may throw on the issue?

I suspect that the loneliness highlights a crisis of loving. Our culture is lonely because we have not explored the riches of what loving involves and what it enables. People speak of compassion, but I think that loving takes us significantly beyond compassion. And truly loving schools people in trust and allows them to let go of their compulsions to control. It enables them to accept the vulnerability and limitations in which love paradoxically flourishes. That does not make sense to many and, in fact, is learnt only through experience. Death can terrify because it often involves losing control – yet losing control and learning to trust can make people more human, not less.

Pain levels are not a factor solely of a person’s medical condition. Pain can be affected by people’s fears, by the presence or absence of a sense of meaning to life, by whether they feel surrounded and saturated by love or whether they feel lonely. Experienced palliative care specialists insist that pain can be managed, controlled and personalised, even if at times the steps taken may also contribute to or accelerate the process of dying.

As believers we have the opportunity to develop our own learning to love, to reflect on our experience, gently to support friends struggling to deal with death and, when appropriate, respectfully to articulate where we are at. And what is that if not to live eucharistically, and with St Paul to “proclaim the death of the Lord”?

Homily 5 - 2022

If you have, or have had, the custom of regularly reciting the Angelus, you will be well acquainted with: “The Word became flesh …And dwelt among us”. When you stop to think about them, the implications can seem really incredible. That Word who took on our flesh was the same Word “through whom all things were made” from “the beginning”. Science has informed us of much of what was involved in that. The first thing that was made by the Word was apparently the energy source of what we have come to call “the big bang”. That was, so they tell us, over thirteen billion years ago — and over all those years it has materialised into the universe in which we live today. “Not one single thing existed [and exists now] other than through him”.

It was that creating Word, the Christ, the Son of God, the source of everything, who chose to become flesh and dwell among us as Jesus, the son of Mary of Nazareth, one of us, as St Paul insisted, “Like us in everything but sin”. And it happened just over a puny two thousand years ago. Incredibly, human persons like us, true to form, actually chose in their ignorance to kill him; and he, a human being like us, out of his love for us humans, and even for his killers, actually chose to allow them to do that to him.

That was really no surprise for God. It was because human persons regularly kill each other and seem drawn to all kinds of other violence that God is totally committed to intervene in a way that respectfully involves our freedom and cooperation. God … loves this world that many of us do not love at all but often see as “the enemy”. God’s hope is consistently that “the Word made flesh” might “save this world” from itself — might save us from the habitual negative behaviours we are consistently but sadly inclined to indulge in towards all but a few.

God’s incredible love for humanity, — all humanity, our humanity — seems to know no bounds. Jesus’ murder was not the end. God raised the lifeless human body of Jesus to deathless life, the kind of life that Jesus could share now with all humanity — a life that makes us free, that makes us want to love, that enables us to love.

Today we celebrate the Eucharist. It is such a rich sacrament of so much that was so special in the life of Jesus — the gift of his life —which he offered only once but directed his disciples to do regularly to keep alive his memory. And he beautifully connected it with the death he would endure on the following day —the Feast of Passover — the day when each year the Jewish People marked their liberation from Egyptian slavery with a ritual meal and remembered, too, the agreement, or Covenant, God had entered into with them, to love them with a focussed interest in order that they might bring to other nations the news of God’s care for the whole world.

Jesus modified the customary ritual. When he took the bread and prayerfully blessed God for it, he broke the loaf so that it could be eaten together by the disciples, identifying it as his body that would be given in sacrifice the following day. He sought to motivate and empower the change in the world’s heart needed to reverse its habitual ways of violence with self-sacrificing love on their part.

He did something similar with the ritual cup of wine, identifying it with his blood to be poured out on the cross on the following day for the same purpose of eliminating the world’s sin.

He then charged them to do the same in order to remember him, the source of all true liberation and of community, and to remember and to implement his insistence on love as the practical way to attain his vision of peace, justice and freedom, all firmly anchored in truth.

The creating Word who took human flesh climaxed his work by allowing us to be transformed into his risen body! God’s love indeed knows no limits!