A homily for the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi), June 2, 2024
Ex 24:3-8, Heb 9:11-15, Mk 14:12-16, 22-26
Shortly after our daughter, Erin, was baptized, Andrea and I were asked by our then-parish to join the baptismal prep team. We agreed, figuring we could relate to other young couples and perhaps meet new friends in (unfamiliar) Bergen County.
At one session, the dad scoffed at the whole baptismal process, saying he was in attendance to keep his family happy. “You take the kid to church and you dunk her,” I remember him saying. “Then you go home and everyone eats lasagna.”
He went to a different place of worship, he explained.
As a long-haul cross-country trucker, he often pulled his rig to the side of the road after the sun went down in big-sky places like Montana. He’d sit on the semi’s hood, especially on moonless nights, and meditate on the stars that seemed close enough that he could pick them like apples from a tree. It was as close to touching them as anybody could get, he told us. A religious experience.
“God and I are doin’ just fine,” he said. “We talk all the time.”
Let’s tuck our trucker in the back of our minds for a minute.
Many years after the lasagna party, at a Catholic high school for girls on the Philly outskirts, a teacher noticed how his students were approaching the sanctuary to receive the Eucharist one Friday morning. Their prayer hands were folded so tightly that their fingertips were an unnatural color. Their feet moved in sync, so precisely that a Marine battalion could learn close-order drill. Their eyes were cast down, and their faces verged on funereal.
After Mass, when they all were back in their classroom, the teacher suggested to the young women that it’s perfectly fine — in fact, it’s a wonderful idea — to go to Communion joyfully, happily, because they would be receiving the physical presence of Jesus in the consecrated bread as well as the spiritual presence of Our Risen Lord.
Body and blood, soul and divinity.
How great is that?
Uh, well…
The following Monday morning, the teacher had to explain, first, to the principal and, then, to a horde of parents why a couple dozen teenagers were smiling as they inched toward the altar that weekend. Why they were far from irreverent.
Why, indeed.
What the truck driver and these student drivers had in common, and what to this very day we have in common with all of them, is the innate desire to experience the divine in as tangible a manner as possible. To celebrate perfect love and perfect joy.
We’re hard-wired to want God in our lives. We’re hard-wired to look for someone bigger than us, better than us, more decisive than us. Somebody with all the answers, even answers to questions we don’t know enough to ask.
But because we’re tactile beings, because we absorb knowledge through sensory experiences, we want to see, smell, taste, hear and feel everything. Even those among us with a diminished sense or reduced senses seek to immerse themselves in experiences according to their abilities.
The catch is, the Ultimate Reality, the Supreme Being, Almighty God, the All-Pervading Holy of Holies cannot be fully grasped through our feeble five senses and our limited minds. No matter how hard we try as long as we live, we won’t get our arms all the way around God.
Fortunately, God Who Is Love and Who Loves wraps divine — though spiritual, not physical — arms around us always in all ways everywhere. God hugs us and invites us to hug as much of him back as we can.
Fortunately, God Who Is Love and Who Loves loved us so much that the second person of the Trinity became fully human as Jesus of Nazareth, Emmanuel, God-With-Us.
Jesus, the perfect gift of God, gave us the perfect gift of himself many times over:
- In his horrific death and glorious Resurrection, he conquered death and restored humankind’s path home to Heaven.
- In his radical teaching of love for God and neighbor and self, he gave dignity to every person in every age and shattered every phobia and -ism.
- In his establishment of the Church, he incorporated us into his Mystical Body on Earth and throughout the Universe(s).
- In breaking bread and passing around a cup filled with wine, he declared them to be his very own flesh and blood and commanded all who follow him to do the same in memory of him. He promised that whenever people gather in his name, he is there with them/us. He gave humankind the Eucharist. He gave humankind the Mass.
When we celebrate the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ, as we do this weekend, we celebrate that, through the Sacrament of the Eucharist, we can feel Jesus in our hands, on our tongues, in our torsos, in our hearts.
Our very human need for a tangible experience is fulfilled. We have a concrete connection.
And through this satisfied need, with its accompanying divine nourishment, our very human craving for spiritual, moral and social guidance also is fulfilled.
When we touch the Body and Blood of Christ, and when the Body and Blood of Christ touch us, we’re inspired and empowered to live the Gospel, to live the Law of Love Jesus taught.
Individually, to be sure.
All of us together as Christ’s eyes and hands and heart as his Mystical Body, absolutely.
