BECOME WHAT YOU EAT: BODY AND BLOOD OF CHRIST.
June 14, 2020
Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ - A.
An Indian proverb says, “The water from the river becomes
salty when it reaches the ocean.” And a Spanish proverb adds, “What one does,
one becomes.”
How do you define a sacrament? By definition, a sacrament is
a visible sign of invisible realities. The Holy Eucharist, in that sense, is
the most wonderful sacrament. For, it is the visible sign of the invisible
realities of the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.
There is a beautiful and close connection that we can
perceive between the Cross and the sacrament of the Eucharist. They both talk
about the Body of Christ. They both talk about sacrifice. They both talk about
love. The Cross and the Holy Eucharist are a love story written in blood. This
is the story of the Body of Christ.
We are celebrating today the solemnity of the Most Holy Body
and Blood of Christ, the Corpus Christi. This solemnity, though outside Easter,
takes us back to the Easter season, and mostly in the Paschal Triduum, to
reflect on the Paschal Sacrifice of Christ. It is a sacrifice he started on the
evening before his Passion, after the washing of the feet of his Apostles,
through the institution of the Holy Eucharist (Cena Domini) and which was
brought to completion when his Divine Body was raised on the Sacrificial Altar
of the Cross on Good Friday. The sacrifice of the Cross in this sense is a
continuity of the Eucharistic sacrifice and vice versa.
The Word of God today leads our meditation on this reality
of the Eucharist. In the first reading, we have its prefiguration in the Manna,
the food that God, through the intercession of Moses, gave to his starving
people during their journey in the desert. The Manna was, for the children of
Israel, an unexpected gift from Heaven. And Moses could say that the Lord led
his people hunger and then he fed them with a food they did not know. The
lesson from that gift of the Manna was for the people to know “that not by
bread alone does one live, but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of
the LORD.”
That which was prefigured for the people in the desert is
made factual in Jesus, Word of God, in the Gospel. He is the true bread of
life. To the hungry crowd gathered to listen to him in the deserted place,
Jesus made the miracle of the multiplication of bread. And then, this miracle
gave away to a great catechesis on the “bread of life”. If for the Israelite in
a journey in the desert the Manna was the bread that sustained their life the
whole of their journey toward Canaan, Jesus, today speaks of a bread immensely
superior. It is not about a bread that will give life for a moment, the time of
a journey, but the bread that sustains and leads to eternal life. And that
bread, the Lord says, is his own flesh. We read in today’s Gospel, “my flesh is
true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my
blood remains in me and I in him.”
We are speaking here of the Holy Eucharist, the true Body,
and Blood of Christ. As Christians, that is what makes our identity. We are a
people fed at the Body and Blood of their Lord and God. This would seem a
little awkward and even cannibalistic, or somehow a theophagy (sacramental
eating of a god). This can explain the chock and the reaction of those who
heard Jesus, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” But the Lord will
make it clearer and insistent that eating his Body and drinking his Blood is
the only way for us to identify ourselves in him. For, in Christ, we become
what we eat. The Lord gives us his Body and Blood to feed our needs so that we
too might be able to feel and feed the needs of others.
The Eucharist is a sacrament of communion. St. Paul, in the
second reading, will insist on that dimension. He says to the Christian
community in Corinth, “Because the loaf of bread is one, we, though many, are
one body, for we all partake of the one loaf.” We learn from these Paulinian
words that the Holy Eucharist to which we partake at Mass, is not a mere bread
to be eaten alone, nor is it a wine for one to drink alone and be drunk of it.
It is a communion, as we call it, that means, a broken Body and a poured Blood
to be shared “for many and for all” as a means and sign of unity.
In the Holy Eucharist, we celebrate Christ’s love, that is,
God’s love for mankind. Love in its perfect expression is not egoistic. It is
before all a communion, a communication of self that leads to unity. The bloody
sacrifice of Christ on the Cross was not only for a few selected people but the
truly, “for many and for all”. The Eucharist is the sign of that special and
predilection love of God for us all. God himself comes to nourish us, to feed our
needs so that, we, in return, might feed others in their needs. At the end of
this Eucharistic celebration, we will be entrusted with a mission, that is to
become for others, what we have received at the sacrificial table of the Altar.
Anytime that one partakes to the Eucharist, he is challenged to become
Eucharist. What is therefore asked of him is to be truly Christ-bearer, Body
and Blood of Christ.
As a Christian community, as Church, we are the Body of Christ, communion, and unity. It would sound sad that Christians, after partaking to the Holy Eucharist, the sacrament of unity and communion, fail to become an external and visible sign of unity in the community where they live. When Christians live in the division they betray and deny Christ who is supposed to be living in them. Therefore, St. Paul can say, “We eat our own condemnation” if the communion to which we partake cannot unite us (1 Cor 11:27-29). If we firmly accept and believe that in the Holy Eucharist, we have the Body and Blood of Christ, we should always strive to receive it worthily and give it to be at work in us.
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