Body and Blood of Christ - Homily 4

Homily 4 - 2017

Let’s face it! Mass is not a Pop Concert, nor an Orchestral Performance. Much less is it an exciting sporting event or a fascinating film. It is not entertainment, and cannot compete with professional entertainers. We cannot just sit and watch it, or simply listen. It is inevitably boring, unless… unless we actively involve ourselves in it. Mass is not for couch-potatoes.

In today's First Reading, Moses urged his fellow Israelites to: Remember … Do not forget … Jesus was onto something similar at his Last Supper. After the consecration of the bread and then of the wine, he urged his disciples, Do this in order to remember me. Do what? Essentially, have a meal where anybody is welcome. At his last meal, after all, he had a former disciple who was in the act of betraying him, another who, under questioning by a servant girl, would deny even knowing him, and the rest who would clear out, with hardly a whimper, scared for their lives.

Why have a meal? Because, somehow, it symbolized what he was on about. Since sin arises essentially from mutual hostility, competitiveness, rivalry and the destructive interactions that flow from them, then salvation is the living out of welcome, of acceptance, of love and the readiness for unconditional forgiveness. It is well imaged by hospitality, and sharing a meal where no one is excluded. And to the extent that people choose to live with welcoming hearts, they come alive. There is more to death than physical extinction. There is the worse death of utter loneliness, self-centredness, hostility and hatred.

But there is more than that to remember. The menu for this meal was bread and wine, the staple foods in that culture, that kept people alive. To be shared together, the bread needed to be broken; the wine to be consumed. And here is the rub. To move us from hostility to welcome, from death to life, Jesus needed to let his body be broken, his blood be shed. People killed him because he upset the familiar status quo. Fascinating! More fascinatingly, once resurrected, his first and essential response was not revenge but the repeated offer of forgiveness. In a world twisted by sin, it is dangerous to love. But if we do not remember that, we won't think of that; the world will never change.

There is still more to remember. He instructed us to eat the bread and drink the wine, and assured us that, through the incomprehensible power of God, in doing so we would be eating his broken body and drinking his blood shed for us and for everyone and anyone else; and thereby saying "Amen", "Yes", to all that means for our lives.

Doing this week after week is not entertaining; it is, rather, confronting. And yet to those of us who believe, it makes sense. Remembering gives meaning and direction to our lives. And the deeper we go with our remembering, the more our lives make sense; and the more we draw life from him.

Recently, I saw for again a film that was made a few years ago, which explored the real-life story from the 1990s: “Of Gods and Men”. It dealt with the beheading by Algerian terrorists of six or seven Trappist monks living in a monastery high in the Atlas mountains in Southern Algeria. Two years before their murder, their abbot, Christian de Chergé, had briefly returned to France and had left with his mother a note that was not to be read until after his death. I shall quote you a few lines from that letter:

I should like, when the time comes, to have a moment of spiritual clarity which would allow me to … forgive with all my heart the one who would strike me down … He went on to say: I certainly include you, …my last-minute friend, who will not have known what you were doing. Yes, I want this “Thank You”, and this “Goodbye” to be a "God Bless" for you, too, because in God's face I see yours. May we meet again as happy thieves in Paradise, if it please God, the Father of us both.

Through the many Eucharists, boring or otherwise, that he had celebrated across his life, Abbot Christian had learnt well to remember.