Body and Blood of Christ - Homily 6

Homily 6 - 2023

Jesus was a man on a mission, sent by his Father — an unfinished mission, still in process. The mission was to save the world from its own death-wish. He was sent to teach us instead to seek life, to love life. Not many of us listened to him. Yet he had continued to hope. We killed him. Fired by hope, he accepted death.

That is half the story. There is more to it. The truth is that we were not all complicit in his death. Some of us accepted his message — a group of disciples, quite small at first, agreed to carry on with his mission. Over time that small group has increased in size. Yet, perhaps inevitably, with growth, there has come an uncertainty of focus.

Some of us have come on board purely out of self-interest; some of us accepted our faith as children, largely from within our families, and never really made an informed decision to join in the mission of Christ. We simply wanted to save our own souls. But is salvation self-interest? or is salvation a wholly different life-orientation, the result indeed of a deliberate radical conversion?

The reason why Jesus was killed, brutally murdered, was because his call to conversion upset the universally accepted cultural, familiar, comfortable attitudes unconsciously fuelled by self-interest and competitiveness, and particularly threatening to powerful elites. Jesus’ vision instead called people into relationship. He longed for a world where people lived more as a family, concerned above all, and practically caring for, each other. He called people to love, to love even our enemies. He did so because he knew that our creating God created us from love, and never stops loving us, even when we sin. Love, in some shape or other, is the cosmic energy that energises our world — as Dante wrote, “the force that moves the sun and other stars”.

We save our own souls through our genuine interest in and love for others. Is there any other way? Jesus saved himself, as he was challenged while writhing in agony on his cross, not by coming down from the cross but precisely by staying there and dying for the sake of humanity.

Jesus went through with crucifixion because he hoped that people would see and appreciate the love for them, and for all humanity, that motivated him.

Indeed, he wanted the world to remember. Especially he wanted his disciples to let that conviction of the utter non-negotiability of the choice to love burn deeply into their hearts — because they would have to continue his mission to the world. That was why, during the last meal he was ever to have with them, he took a loaf of bread, broke it into pieces right before their eyes and said it was in fact his body soon to be broken for them, for the world, on the cross. He repeated the same message when, to conclude their meal, he took the cup of blessing, and identified the wine in it as his blood, the blood sealing a new covenant between God and humanity.

Then he directed the disciples, “To remember me, you do this”. He wanted them never to forget, him, his message, his whole-hearted conviction about the way of love, and his personal determination to live that way in utter integrity, whatever the cost. They would come alive — with him, with his love — to the extent they took him seriously, surrendered self-interest and burned with his same desire to call others on board to share in the mission with them.

Let us listen again to some of the words we heard in today’s Gospel:

Whoever eat my flesh and drink my blood live in me and I live in them.
Whoever eat me will draw life from me.

I find it is so hard not to let familiarity deaden me to what I do here whenever we assemble and celebrate Mass.

Thank God for this annual Festive celebration.