[Deacon Mick had a great homily on the three aspects of the Eucharist on Corpus Christi this weekend. You can catch the homily here on our YouTube channel. The whole Mass is on our Facebook Page here.]
The origin of the Feast of Corpus Christi
goes back to the high Middle Ages.
It’s a moment to reflect
on the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist,
The real presence –
the absolute reality of the bread and wine
becoming through Transubstantiation
not a symbol, not a representation but
the actual body and blood of our savior Jesus Christ.
The source and summit of and a beloved truth of
our Catholic Faith.
About 45 years ago or so, the Feast of Corpus Christi
was combined with the Feast of the Precious Blood.
So today at this Mass —— we celebrate the Feast of
the Body and Blood of Christ.
Our readings today
look at three different Eucharistic dimensions of the Mass:
power, —— presence —— and promise.
The Letter to the Hebrews today
takes us back to the great Temple sacrifices in Jerusalem
to show us the power of the Mass.
Our Gospel reading takes us to the Last Supper
to show the real
and continuing presence of Christ among us in the Eucharist.
Today’s reading from the Book of Exodus
takes us to the mountain of the covenant
to show that the Eucharist
is the place where the promise of God
and the promise of His people still come together.
Power, presence, and promise.
First, the power of the Mass
and a brief time trip to the Jerusalem temple.
The letter to the Hebrews gives us a snapshot
of the Temple liturgy on the Day of Atonement,
Yom Kippur, and the ritual slaying of bulls and goats.
In fact,
the temple back then had a whole array of sacrifices.
They all involved death
and the substantial sheding of blood.
There was a whole array of sacrifices:
there were sacrifices to atone, to thank,
to adore, to make peace,
and to make requests/petitions,
all of them striving, straining,
trying and yearning to achieve what Jesus did on Calvary, —— the perfect, complete sacrifice.
The Mass today is the true sacrifice
and all the bloody rituals in the Old Testament
were early symbols
foreshadowing what Christ would do.
The Mass – this Mass makes present Christ’s powerful,
unique Calvary sacrifice.
Today’s Mass however — makes present the single,
all-powerful sacrifice of Christ with two differences.
First – the pain, the crowds,
the blood, the agony are gone.
It’s an unbloody sacrifice.
Secondly, we can add our prayers to Christ’s.
It’s as though the Mass is
a powerful rocket
on which we can piggyback our prayers.
We can fuse our petitions, big and small,
to the great powerful calvary sacrifice of Christ.
That’s the power of the Mass.
In today’s Gospel reading,
we go from the Jerusalem Temple to the Last Supper.
Jesus says, “This is my Body, this is my Blood.”
Christ is present among us in many ways but
here in the Eucharist,
the Lord Jesus is present fully, substantially
and in an unobstructed way.
Sometimes you hear people say,
we can see Christ in our neighbor.
But that’s often difficult to do because
people’s personalities present a lot of interference
and Christ may be manifested in different ways.
But in the Eucharist,
the Lord is present without obstructions
in a complete and total way.
That’s the symbolism
of the red lamp
that we have displayed on the wall near the tabernacle,
it signifies the real presence of our Lord.
When we come to church,
we don’t have the hope that Christ will be here.
He Is here!
His presence does not depend on our mood,
our degree of faith
or whether we are in the state of grace.
Christ is truly here.
The Eucharist is the place of presence.
And Christ will stay with us until the end of time.
Who knows what changes will occur in the Church
over the next thousand years?
But a thousand years from now,
in every Catholic Church
there will always be a tabernacle.
Maybe in the middle, maybe the side,
but there will always be a tabernacle.
It’s the living presence of Christ
in all our joys and sorrows,
with us on our life’s journey
like the ark of the covenant that
traveled with the Israelites wherever they went.
The Eucharist is the sacrament of Christ’s presence.
Finally, the reading from the Book of Exodus
takes us to the holy mountain
and the Lord’s promise to be with His people
and their promise to be faithful to his law.
“We will do everything the Lord has told us.”
The Mass is the place of promise.
When we receive Holy Communion worthily,
we are promised that
we will be one with the Lord someday, face to face.
The Eucharist is also the place
of our promise to be faithful,
to be loyal to Christ and to his Church,
to be in communion with the Church.
If we receive Communion on the tongue,
we are promising that
our tongue will not lie, deceive, slander,
gossip or speak in an un-Christian way.
If we receive communion in our hand,
we are promising that
we will not turn our hands to violence or destruction
or hatred or anger but
will use them to build up the kingdom.
Whether we receive Holy Communion,
on the tongue or in the hand,
both eloquent and ancient gestures of commitment,
We need to understand and remember that
we are touching and consuming
the body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ
not a piece of bread or a sip of wine.
It’s a time of reverence where
we are making a recommitment of our lives to Christ.
And when we say “Amen,”
We should say it boldly
not amen but AMEN because we are not only making an affirmation of faith — of “I believe” but
are also making a promise to follow Christ faithfully.
The Mass is the place of promise,
God’s promise to us of future glory,
our promise of fidelity.
Power, presence, and promise.
It’s important that we keep the Mass holy.
It’s our Temple of a powerful sacrifice,
our table of unity around the real presence of Christ,
and our mountain of promise of fidelity
to Christ and his Church.
The Eucharist is
the greatest gift we have on this earth.
It comes from the very hand of God.
If we keep close to the Mass,
to the Eucharist,
wherever we are,
we will always be close to Christ.