A homily for The Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, June 19, 2022
Gn 14:18-20, 1 Cor 11:23-26, Lk 9:11b-17
Our news flashes and history books are filled with accounts of women and men — heroes, we call them — risking their lives or even making the ultimate sacrifice for the good of others.
Often, these heroes act for the benefit of absolute strangers. Sometimes those strangers are right there where the act of heroism takes place. Many times, the strangers are thousands of miles away, across oceans on another continent.
That’s the case, of course, in world wars.
And sometimes the strangers who will benefit the most have not yet been born, because the act of heroism has a history-making or civilization-changing impact.
Risking their lives. Making the ultimate sacrifice. Smothering a grenade with their body. Spilling their blood.
Two millennia ago, Jesus made the ultimate-ultimate sacrifice on behalf of millions of people who had gone before him and billions of people yet to walk the earth.
What an unsurpassable gift.
We believe that the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus of Nazareth, Son of God and Son of Mary, brought salvation to a world stained by the Original Sin of Adam and Eve.
We believe that we are perpetually linked to that salvific series of events through Scripture, liturgy and community.
And through Scripture, liturgy and community, we share in another of Christ’s extraordinary gifts, his very body and blood, brought to us in the Eucharist as we fulfill Jesus’ command to do this in memory of him.
Jesus could have given us the recipe for a different meal — Filet O’Fish from the loaves and fishes that fed thousands, maybe — or he could have given us a song to sing or a game to play in his memory.
But by giving us the Eucharist, by telling the Apostles — by telling us — that we were bringing his body and blood into our own selves, Jesus made clear that we were to remember everything he did during his days on earth.
The preaching and teaching. The healing and reviving. The uplifting of the lowly and the brightening of the lives of the downcast.
And his unjust torture and death on the cross.
We believe that after a lance pierced him while he hung, abused, on Calvary, Jesus gave every drop of blood he had, and then he gave more; water flowed from his side.
We believe his agonizing death atoned for the countless ways humans abused their free will by turning away from God.
We believe that Jesus gave his all for us.
Every bit of his humanity. All of it.
Every bit of his divinity. All of it.
And we believe that he gave us the Body and Blood we celebrate today … and every time two or more gather in his name.
