Body and Blood of Christ - Homily 3

Homily 3 - 2014

Jesus let them crucify his body and bleed him to death because, from his point of view, it was the price he was prepared to pay for loving us. He was convinced that the only way he could save us from ourselves and from each other was by loving us. Not that that was enough. The world would be saved from its own bestiality, its wars, its exploitation of the weaker, its toxic competitiveness and self-interest, only by its choosing to change and taking to heart Jesus’ risky lesson of love.

Jesus wanted to put us in the picture, to know at least the way to peace and true happiness, to show what was possible and to interest us in the possibility. And he did it because, like his Father, he loved us. He loved this hopelessly messed-up world. Paradoxically, he hoped that our killing him, our crucifying his body and shedding his blood, would have the effect of waking us up to what we do to each other each day, in one way or another, though usually less spectacularly. He hoped it would inspire us to change, and to try instead his way of love.

So he devised a means to keep us focussed. Through the sacrament of the Eucharist, he gets us sacramentally to eat his crucified body and to drink his shed blood. There is nothing magic about it. We need to believe him, to trust him and to do our best to imitate him. To the extent that we do our best to love as he did, we begin to live now what he calls eternal life. Jesus says, in fact, that we draw life from him, the life that he in turn draws from the Father. That life is eternal life, god-life, or simply love. Our human loving gets an enormous boost. Through, with and in Jesus, we begin to love like God and with God.

Jesus wants it. We want it. It is a work done in tandem. But it is persistently difficult. It does not seem to come naturally – and we need to persevere as we lurch along. Yet, each step forward is its own reward. Loving is a great source of inner peace and joy. We become more fully human, more fully alive.

In today’s Second Reading, St Paul referred to the first ripple effect of our choosing the way of love, the way of the crucified Christ. When we come to celebrate Eucharist, we are all of us expressing together our choice for the way of Jesus. The symbol of the one loaf, broken in order to be shared, and then eaten together in a ritualized meal among friends, serves to show graphically that we are now one in the body of the risen Christ.

At least, that is what we are meant to show. And Catholics like us, all round the diocese, all round Australia, all round the world, are doing the same thing on this first day of the Week. We are all celebrating our commitment to Jesus’ project of saving the world by loving the world. We begin by loving each other – as best we can, but consciously and deliberately. 

The tragedy is that the whole thing can become habit. We get here; but we can forget why we are here. Consistently, words I hear or things I read trigger my deeply habituated hostility to other Catholics around the country or on the wider scene. Fortunately, Jesus seems to be gently prodding me of late, and leading me to realise what I am doing to my brothers and sisters, who share the same Eucharist. I still do not weep.

May today’s Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ focus our awareness even more. May our drinking of the one cup be our solemn toast to the crucified Jesus and to our shared commitment to the project of the world’s healing that is so dear to his heart.