Body and Blood of Christ - Homily 1

Homily 1 - 2005

Easter has passed.  We have remembered Jesus’ liberating death.  We have celebrated God’s vindicating that death by raising him to life.  Now is an appropriate occasion, in the context of that death and resurrection, to think about Eucharist, which holds them both and draws us into living contact with them.  That we do so is especially proper in this year that has been named the Year of the Eucharist.

There were tendencies in the early Church to spiritualise Jesus: one heresy said that he wasn’t really human like us; another claimed that he did not really die by crucifixion.  Apparently flesh and blood were too earthy for God to get involved in.  Those reactions may seem strange to us, yet they reflect a pretty human instinct: to set Jesus apart, to make him too holy, and, in the process, to sanitise him (as it were).  Stressing the difference between him and us is less demanding for us than the alternative where, motivated and energised by him, we immerse ourselves in the continuing gospel project of setting captives free, and bringing the good news to the world’s poor – up to our elbows with Christ in the messiness of life.  We need to beware of any move that would separate the eucharistic Jesus – the sacramentally present Jesus – from the Jesus who was flogged and crucified precisely because he was threat to established interests.

That is where Eucharistic devotion can help to keep the record straight.  We know that we are dealing firstly with the real flesh of the real Christ, broken on the cross because of  his profound respect for all and his stance for inclusive justice; and secondly, the real blood of the real Christ that he  poured out to break the stranglehold of the entrenched power of sin in our world.  His obvious innocence exploded once and for all the myth of the so-called “peace-keeping” army of Rome and the “prudent accommodation” of the powerful religious figures of the day who instigated his trial.  It exposed to the uncompromising light of truth the double-speak, the spin and the dishonesty of every principality and power.

Jesus went on to insist: My flesh is real food, my blood is real drink.  Effectively he was saying: “Don’t get carried away! Keep anchored in reality!”  So we eat the broken flesh of Christ and drink the painfully spilt blood of Christ in order to be filled with the life of Christ, and to be changed according to his mind, and heart and spirit.

This is what devotion to the Eucharist is about.  We don’t withdraw from life, but, rather, we draw life from the flesh and blood of the still living Christ.  Filled with this life, we allow our hearts to be stretched by love; and, hand in hand with him, we work to break the power of sin wherever it takes shape in our world, whether it be in our families, our work places, our local communities, our leisure pursuits or even our Church.  In today’s very much changed world, the global village, we become his voice and his hands on behalf of the world’s underdeveloped and over exploited peoples, the unwilling citizens of nations destroying each other through war or terrorism, our anguished world awash with refugees.  Closer to home, we work with him to fashion a nation that respects life from the moment of conception to the moment of death, that is able and willing to say sorry to aboriginal people for our past exploitation, that acts with warmth and compassion to asylum seekers and that prefers caring for each other to the free pursuit of self-interest.  With Christ we seek to move against the increasing trend that would rather assist those well able to help themselves and to penalise those brothers and sisters who, for one reason or another, cannot.

Depthing our eucharistic devotion can be a difficult and arduous journey –  like the journey of Jesus.  By the end of this Year of the Eucharist, will we have become more like the flesh and the blood we have ingested? Will we have become more Christ-like? And through us, will our world have become a warmer, more just and more compassionate world? ... It will have moved in that direction to the extent that we have let Eucharist take hold of our imaginations and set fire to our wills.