Body and Blood of Christ

See Commentary on John 6:51-58

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. 

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.

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.

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.

 Homily 5 - 2020

For the few of us here in our small group, it’s good to be back, celebrating in flesh and blood. And those of you taking part in this Mass online have a precious opportunity to experience it differently — to reflect quietly on the prayers, to notice the ritual, and to ponder what a three-dimensional, flesh-and-blood, Mass has that an online Mass inevitably lacks.

It is not that the real Mass gives those of us here a more real Jesus than the one we all engage with whenever we pray. There are not different grades, different degrees, of Jesus. There is only one real Jesus. The special thing with Mass is not just Jesus who is here but what he is doing. The Mass is a sacrament through which Jesus, by means of symbols, seeks to draw us into what he is doing.

In John’s Gospel that we read today, Jesus insisted that we eat his flesh and drink his blood. He wants us to allow his humanness, his flesh-and-blood-ness, to nourish and strengthen us to become like him; to become in fact his body. The bread and the wine — the dinner menu — tell us that in symbol, confronting us with the sheer reality, the stark challenge, of it all.

Indeed, the Mass tells us more. In today’s Second Reading, St Paul stressed that the Mass is a shared meal. The Mass is something that we do together, a meal where we all eat a piece of the one loaf and drink from the one cup. It is not just union with Christ — Jesus and me; it is communion— Jesus and us.

The “com” bit is very much what it is about, because a shared meal is something we celebrate; and celebrating serves to deepen our friendship, our harmony. Eucharistic unity is a unique unity based on our common faith in Jesus, and the conviction that Jesus’ way is the way, the only way.

That is what redemption is in miniature: people living together in love — the radical opposite, the reversal, of sin which is essentially disharmony and violence of one kind or another.

“When we eat this bread and drink this cup, we proclaim your death, O Lord, until you come again”. Our mutual love proclaims the saving death that unites us … and we begin to taste redemption.

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.