It was not too long ago that this last Thursday was everywhere the feast day of the body of Christ (in Latin, Corpus Christi) and the first day of July was the feast day of the blood of Christ. But these days, the two have been lumped together into one feast day on the Thursday, and often enough local conferences of bishops delay the observance of the feast day until the following Sunday. It can be rather annoying in our media age to watch Rome and Jerusalem celebrating the feast day on Thursday, but here we are now on the Sunday.
Today’s celebration is of the greatest gift given us by our Lord. Remember how many times during the Last Supper discourses He promised to not leave His children as orphans after His Passion, Resurrection and Ascension.
“I will not leave you friendless; I am coming to you. It is only a little while now, before the world is to see Me no more; but you can see Me, because I live on, and you too will have life. When that day comes, you will learn for yourselves that I am in My Father, and you are in Me, and I am in you. The man who loves Me is the man who keeps the commandments he has from Me; and he who loves Me will win My Father’s love, and I too will love him, and will reveal Myself to him.”
Gospel of S. John, 14: 18-21 [link]
And then just before His Ascension, He promised to be with us always, yes (He said), to the end of time. How did He propose to do that? Well, we’re looking at it, or rather at Him, every Mass that we attend. That is the first thing I wanted to say about Corpus Christi: it is about the actual, physical presence before us of the Lord, daily, in so far as we are able to either attend daily Mass or visit the parish church and remain for however long before the tabernacle. The Church therefore recommends to us that we spend some time every week in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament – a sort of visitor to a beloved Friend.
The second thing I wanted to mention about Corpus Christi is its celebration of eternal life. Memorably, while our Lord was preaching in the Galilee, He once said to a crowd of His Jewish followers that they would have to eat Him, in order to live eternally. The life of the Father flows through Me, He said, and it will flow through you too, if you eat My flesh and drink My blood.
“‘I Myself am the living Bread that has come down from heaven. If anyone eats of this Bread, he shall live for ever. And now, what is this bread which I am to give? It is My flesh, given for the life of the world.’ Then the Jews fell to disputing with one another, ‘How can this man give us His flesh to eat?’ Whereupon Jesus said to them, ‘Believe Me when I tell you this; you can have no life in yourselves, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink His blood. The man who eats My flesh and drinks My blood enjoys eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day. My flesh is real food, My blood is real drink. He who eats My flesh, and drinks My blood, lives continually in Me, and I in him. As I live because of the Father, the living Father who has sent Me, so he who eats Me will live, in his turn, because of Me.'”
Gospel of S. John, 6: 51-58 [link]
Do you see how this reception of Holy Communion becomes the condition of eternal rest and heaven, and union with the Holy One at the end of our lives. This condition itself has a condition, and we hear of this in our first reading, from Exodus. The condition of the condition is obedience to the commandments of God. If we show our love for Christ by doing our best to follow the commandments He gave us, then He will come to us in Holy Communion and we shall have that eternal life He promised us. This He said to the Apostles at the Last Supper (see the first quote, above).
“After this Moses took half of the blood, and set it aside in bowls; the other half he poured out on the altar. Then he took up the book in which the covenant was inscribed, and read it aloud to the people. ‘We will do all the Lord has bidden us,’ said they; ‘we promise obedience;’ and Moses took the blood and sprinkled it over the people, crying out, Here is the blood of the covenant which the Lord makes with you, in accordance with all these words of his.”
Book of Exodus, 24: 6-8 [link]
This union with God and eternal life is our end, the highest blessing we can hope for. As the second reading says this weekend, Christ as High-priest is the mediator of all blessings to come, flooding them upon us through the medium of His humanity, His Body and Blood. This was the whole point of the Incarnation of Christ – His taking on our humanity and becoming one of us. As the Fathers of the Church used to say, God became man in order than man may become divine. This humanity of His is the means by which we are divinised and so returned to the state of our first parents, Adam and Eve, before their great sin. If only the serpent who accomplished their ruin back then were not still around, surrounding us with temptations.
But despite that, we should be as the Saints we know and love: we should be in a constant state of repentance and seeking the grace of God through the Sacraments of the Church, and especially Holy Communion – following every occasional fall into sin with a greater soaring towards the heavenly places. This is the Christian life: a sequence of falling over and getting up again, but always (if it please God) making progress in virtue, always edging closer to eternal life. And all this became possible when the Lord at His Last Supper, with His priests around Him, took the bread and the wine up and said, This is My Body, this is My Blood, the Blood of the covenant, by which heaven is now open to the children of Adam, by which the eternal life that Adam and Even once forfeited is now available once more to their children, My children, Whom I love, and for Whom I now give My life.
“Meanwhile, Christ has taken His place as our high priest, to win us blessings that still lie in the future. He makes use of a greater, a more complete tabernacle, which human hands never fashioned; it does not belong to this order of creation at all. It is His own blood, not the blood of goats and calves, that has enabled him to enter, once for all, into the sanctuary; the ransom He has won lasts for ever. The blood of bulls and goats, the ashes of a heifer sprinkled over men defiled, have power to hallow them for every purpose of outward purification; and shall not the Blood of Christ, Who offered Himself, through the Holy Spirit, as a victim unblemished in God’s sight, purify our consciences, and set them free from lifeless observances, to serve the living God? Thus, through His intervention, a new covenant has been bequeathed to us; a death must follow, to atone for all our transgressions under the old covenant, and then the destined heirs were to obtain, for ever, their promised inheritance.”
Letter of S. Paul to the Hebrews, 9: 11-15 [link]
Catholic Louth and Mablethorpe 