Body and Blood of Christ - Homily 2

Homily 2 – 2008 

Veronica’s Funeral Mass last Tuesday in Horsham was a sad occasion for us all present – but it was more than that.  There was a tangible sense of our being community – a community in mourning, certainly, but a community supporting each other, sharing a common loss, and sharing also a common faith and a common hope in eternal life.  A number of parishioners, and especially visitors, remarked on that strong sense of community and of shared faith.  For my part, I think there was a strong sense that God was there, too.

The sense of community that we parishioners were able to celebrate in our Eucharist was evident also in all that led up to the Eucharist and that then followed it.  Before it, there had been a wonderful cooperative effort by so many determined to make the liturgy the best they could make of it.  And then, after it, there was the gathering in the Parish Hall – a similarly magnificent cooperative effort of so many parishioners cooking and preparing the food, making sure there was enough, graciously serving it and then cleaning up afterwards.  The liturgical celebration and the community gathering and working together fed into each other, relied on each other and celebrated each other.

The Funeral Mass on Tuesday served to highlight what is an on-going reality: We are a community, all the time, serving each other in numerous ways, with a wonderful range of charisms and talents; serving, too, the broader community of Horsham (of which we are a vital part), through the work we do, the professions, vocations and jobs we are busy at, through our volunteering in a variety of capacities, and our presence in service clubs of various kinds.

Every parish Eucharist is a community reality, serving to give us the opportunity to step back and to take notice of who we are and how we are going.  Indeed, who are we? Through our baptism, we have been christened – Christed.  Together, we are Christ present and acting in the world today.  We are the Body and Blood of Christ; we are the hands, the feet, the heart, the wisdom and love, the compassion and forgiveness, the joy and suffering of Christ in our world of the here and now.

As Paul insisted in today’s Second Reading: The fact that there is only one loaf means that, though there are many of us, we form a single body because we all have a share in this one loaf.  It is that reality (brought about first through our baptism) of us, together, being the real flesh and blood Christ made present in the world, that we celebrate in our regular Eucharists.  We are what we celebrate, and by celebrating, we become even more what we celebrate.  Together we are already the Body of Christ.  In each Eucharist we are fed with the Body and Blood of Christ – that we share together as community – so that, as individuals and as community, we might become ever more effectively the Body and Blood of Christ in today’s world that so needs his presence, his wisdom and his love.