Today the Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi). This Solemnity is celebrated on the Thursday following Trinity Sunday, or as in the United States, on the Sunday following Trinity Sunday. While this Solemnity was not celebrated by the Church until the 13th Century, the reason for the celebration is certainly much earlier. This Solemnity really started on Holy Thursday, when at the Last Supper, Jesus gave His body and blood to the disciples. His sacred body and blood were freely given up for all of us again on Good Friday. Sometimes the sorrow of that time may overshadow the beautiful gift that was given, a lasting gift that we are privileged to have available to us every day.
The idea of our Father providing life-giving nutrients to us is mentioned many places in the Bible. In the Gospel for the Solemnity (John 6:51-58) Jesus tells a crowd of Jews, and us, that, “unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life. I will raise them up on the last day, for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them.”
The Jews were appalled. To this present day, Jews do not drink blood, nor eat foods that incorporate blood into them. All blood must be removed from slaughtered animals before the meat can be consumed. To even touch blood made a person “unclean”. Remember the story of the Good Samaritan? The priest and the Levite, on their way to worship in the Temple, did not dare touch the injured man lying on the road for fear of being contaminated and made unclean with his blood. Jesus telling his followers to eat his own flesh and drink his own blood was, to the Jews, nothing less than promoting cannibalism.
What could Jesus possibly mean, telling us to eat His body and drink His blood? To get a better understanding, we need to understand what happens to us whenever we consume nourishing food or have a thirst-quenching drink. The flesh we eat and the beverage we drink assimilates totally into our being, giving us the strength we need to live. Consuming the body and blood of Jesus does the same thing: we assimilate totally into our very being all that He teaches, His vision, His values, His understanding of the meaning and purpose of life. We become able to say, along with Paul, “I live, not I, but Christ lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). Or elsewhere, “Let this mind be in you which was in Christ Jesus” (Philippians 2:5). His thinking is our thinking, His dreams are our dreams. This is the basic and fundamental meaning of eating the body and blood of Christ: total union with Him in our way of thinking and living.
That is what the Eucharistic sacrament is all about. In a very real way, when we consume the real body and blood of Christ, not only do they become part of us, but we become a part of the body of Jesus. Jesus is the head of the body, and we, each with our unique and diverse gifts and talents, become its “members”. But we can only be part of the body when we consciously and actively participate in the function of the body. We need to give witness to the vision that Jesus gives us and share that vision with everyone we meet.
We Catholics are blessed to have the Body and Blood of Christ as a sacrament. If a person knows absolutely nothing about Jesus or refuses or neglects to accept the vision of Christ, they have not “eaten the flesh and drank the blood” of Christ, and so coming to Mass would be a meaningless exercise for them. If a person claims to be a follower of Christ but comes to the Eucharistic meal in a purely passive frame of mind or without any sense of actually receiving the very being of Jesus, coming to Mass would be a meaningless exercise for them. If, after receiving the Eucharist, they do not feel part of a community of fellow members of one Body, then they, too, are going to benefit very little from receiving the Eucharist.
So what do we do at Mass? First, we must remember the sacrifice that Jesus made for us and give thanks. The word ‘Eucharist’ comes from the Greek word meaning thanksgiving. We remember, above all, everything that God has done for us in Jesus Christ through His life, His teaching, His suffering, His death, and His resurrection. But we also remember and give thanks for all our own personal experiences of being touched by God’s love in our lives. The Mass is a time to count our blessings.
Second, we come together to celebrate being a community in fellowship in Christ. The Mass, by itself, does not make a community. The Mass presupposes that a community already exists. It is a celebration of, and a strengthening of, that community. We don’t just “go to” Mass, or “hear” Mass, or “attend” Mass as individuals. We are not here simply to observe the Third Commandment, “Keep holy the Sabbath day.” We don’t come to the Eucharist the way we go to see a play or a movie. We don’t come to be entertained. We don’t come just to get something, but to give something – ourselves – to each other. The Mass is a sign pointing to something bigger than itself. That is why the Mass is a measure of the quality of our fellowship and community. A living, vibrant community cannot have a bad Eucharist. Where there is no real community there can be no real Eucharist, even though the church building is beautiful, the vestments are gorgeous, and the choir sings the most heavenly music.
Some people ask why they must come to Mass and why they cannot pray at home, or on a mountain top, or at the beach. Of course, we can and should pray at all these places and sometimes they are better places to pray than in a church building. But Mass is not just a time for praying; it is a time for celebrating community. That cannot be done alone at home, alone on a mountain top, or alone at the beach; we can only do that together.
Some people treat Mass like a meal at McDonald’s, eating alone in a corner; when it should really be like dining at a Chinese banquet, everybody sitting in a circle and dipping into the same dishes. We don’t just receive Jesus in Communion; we share together the broken Body and Blood of Christ. St. Paul says in the Second Reading (1 Corinthians 10:16-17): “The cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake in (share in) one bread.” Today we commonly use small disks of bread for Communion rather than pieces broken off one loaf. There are good reasons for this. But we may lose sight of the bread being “one bread” broken for all. It makes receiving Communion look like an individual, a private experience rather than a shared meal. We may get the sense that Jesus is coming just to me.
Yet, everything we do at Mass and during Communion emphasizes that it is a shared experience. We begin the Communion liturgy by saying together the Lord’s Prayer, where we speak to God as our (not my) Father, where we ask Him for our (not my) daily bread, where we ask for mutual forgiveness and reconciliation. This is followed by the greeting of peace: a gesture of friendship, reconciliation, and forgiveness for all those around us. All of this happens before we approach the altar and consume the Eucharist.
If we are not already a community before we enter the church, we are not suddenly going to become one after we come in. If a parish consists only of providing Mass with nothing whatever happening outside of Mass, then that is basically a dead parish, and its Eucharist will be dead. A parish gets the Eucharist that it deserves. A parish gets the Eucharist that its parishioners make. It is not only the architecture or design of the church, not only the quality of the preaching, not only the brilliance of the music. It is all these things with a deeply united community as its foundation. The Eucharist is truly a sign. A good Eucharist is the sign of a living community. A boring Eucharist is the sign of a dead one. The more we become aware of Christ living and acting in and through us as his Body, the more meaningful will be our gathering around His table.
May God Bless You and Grant You His Peace!