Sacred Heart Parish

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CORPUS CHRISTI (C)

  1. The Catholic Christian hardly needs a Ph.D. in the classics when it comes to today’s feast of Corpus Christi. An unbeliever might say – Corpus Christi is a large city in Texas; a Navy buff might remind us, unhappily in my view, that it’s the name of one of the Navy’s nuclear submarines. For us, of course, it means quite literally – the Body of Christ, the Blood of Christ – God’s great gift of the Eucharist.

  2. When we say “the Body of Christ”, we mean the risen Christ, our present living Lord, his Body and Blood, his human soul and his divinity. The Liturgy from Christmas to Pentecost underscores the central importance of the Body of Christ for our salvation. At Christmas, the Incarnation event, God’s eternal Son took on a body just like ours. On Good Friday, he offered his body on the cross for the forgiveness of our sins. On Easter Sunday, God the Father raised Christ’s body from the dead. On the day of his glorious Ascension, the risen Christ took his risen body to the very heights of heaven, which is our bodily destination as well. The main feast of Corpus Christi is Holy Thursday even though every Eucharist is the feast of Corpus Christi. We should ask, then, what did the Lord Jesus do at the Last Supper? Our Savior instituted the Eucharist as the sacramental sacrifice of his Body and Blood for two particular reasons. First, to perpetuate the sacrifice of the cross in a sacramental manner down through the centuries, so that you and I can be sacramental participants therein; and second, to give us in the Church not only a memorial of his death and resurrection but also a sacrament of love, a sign of unity, a bond of charity, nourishment for our earthly pilgrimage and a pledge of eternal life.

  3. My understanding of the Eucharist goes back many decades to that famous little book called the Baltimore Catechism – so far back that some senior citizens never heard of it. What is the Eucharist? – this little book asked. “The Eucharist is both a sacrifice and a sacrament: in the Eucharist the risen Christ is contained, offered and received.” When we say “contained”, we mean the consoling and marvelous teaching of our Catholic faith in what we call the “Real Presence”, that is, under the outward, visible, tangible signs of bread and wine, the inner reality is no longer that of bread and wine but the very reality of the body and blood of the risen Christ under the outward signs of bread and wine. When we say that the risen Christ is “offered”, we mean the Eucharist as sacrifice, the mystery of Christ’s death and resurrection, his self-offering on the cross made present for us in a sacramental manner; and when we say the risen Christ is “received”, we mean the Eucharist as sacrament, that is, holy Communion which means Christ’s body and blood sacramentally given as our spiritual food and drink, the nourishment we must have for a successful journey to God.

  4. With strangling brevity, I would like to touch upon three texts for today. First, our second reading, St. Paul to the Corinthians. Paul evangelized Corinth in the years 51-53 of the first Christian century, some twenty years after the Lord’s glorious ascension. A few years later Paul wrote to the Church at Corinth from Ephesus to remind them what Jesus had said and done at the Last Supper, which is exactly what St. Paul taught the Corinthians to do at the Eucharist which is exactly what you and I do at the Eucharist this Sunday morning.

    1. Just as Jesus at the Last Supper spoke with his disciples, so we all gather in church and the priest/celebrant calls us to join our minds and hearts with Christ. Then, Christ speaks to us in the Liturgy of the Word.

    2. Just as Jesus at the Last Supper gave thanks to God his Father, so the priest prays the great Eucharistic Prayer over the gifts of bread and wine and the Holy Spirit transforms them into Christ’s Body and Blood.

    3. And, just as Jesus broke the bread, so our Liturgy will come to completion with the breaking of the Bread and the distribution of Holy Communion to all who believe.

  5. A second text to note is our Opening Prayer directed as you will note directly to the Lord Jesus. We say – “You give us the Eucharist as the memorial of your suffering and death.” Liturgical remembering is radically different from the way we usually remember. In our warring world today, how many mothers and fathers, wives and husbands, brothers and sisters, fear that some military officer will come to the house and say – Your son/husband/brother/sister was killed in action. Even though we do all that we can to cherish our memories of those dear ones of ours, for example, we place their pictures prominently in our homes even though their real and true presence is elsewhere. They are no longer with us. Liturgical memory is different. The Eucharist is the living memorial of the Lord’s self-sacrifice for our salvation. This means that the Lord died once and for all at a particular time and in particular place, but now the Holy Spirit makes present on the altars of the Catholic world the very reality of the paschal mystery made sacramentally present in our midst.

  6. A third text I would cite at this time is what we will pray in the Eucharistic Canon – “Father, calling to mind the death your Son endured for our salvation, his glorious resurrection and ascension into heaven and ready to greet him when he comes again, we offer you in thanksgiving this holy and living sacrifice. Look with favor on your Church’s offering and see the Victim whose death has reconciled us to yourself. Grant that we, who are nourished by his body and blood, may be filled with his Holy Spirit and become one body, one spirit in Christ.” We give to God and God gives to us. Each one of us brings our prayers, works, sufferings, our difficulties, our problems, our griefs, our loss of loved ones, our sickness and illnesses and all of life’s disappointments and difficulties and join our self-offerings to the one great sacrifice of Christ our Redeemer.

  7. As we receive Holy Communion today, perhaps St. Thomas Aquinas’ words can be helpful to us – “Know that in this bread is the body of Christ which hung on the cross, and in the cup, the blood of Christ which flowed from his side. Take, therefore, and eat his body; take and drink his blood; and you will become members of his body.” Indeed, it is true, the Lord feeds us with the finest wheat.