Body and Blood of Christ - Homily 6

Homily 5 - 2022

If you have, or have had, the custom of regularly reciting the Angelus, you will be well acquainted with: “The Word became flesh …And dwelt among us”. When you stop to think about them, the implications can seem really incredible. That Word who took on our flesh was the same Word “through whom all things were made” from “the beginning”. Science has informed us of much of what was involved in that. The first thing that was made by the Word was apparently the energy source of what we have come to call “the big bang”. That was, so they tell us, over thirteen billion years ago — and over all those years it has materialised into the universe in which we live today. “Not one single thing existed [and exists now] other than through him”.

It was that creating Word, the Christ, the Son of God, the source of everything, who chose to become flesh and dwell among us as Jesus, the son of Mary of Nazareth, one of us, as St Paul insisted, “Like us in everything but sin”. And it happened just over a puny two thousand years ago. Incredibly, human persons like us, true to form, actually chose in their ignorance to kill him; and he, a human being like us, out of his love for us humans, and even for his killers, actually chose to allow them to do that to him.

That was really no surprise for God. It was because human persons regularly kill each other and seem drawn to all kinds of other violence that God is totally committed to intervene in a way that respectfully involves our freedom and cooperation. God … loves this world that many of us do not love at all but often see as “the enemy”. God’s hope is consistently that “the Word made flesh” might “save this world” from itself — might save us from the habitual negative behaviours we are consistently but sadly inclined to indulge in towards all but a few.

God’s incredible love for humanity, — all humanity, our humanity — seems to know no bounds. Jesus’ murder was not the end. God raised the lifeless human body of Jesus to deathless life, the kind of life that Jesus could share now with all humanity — a life that makes us free, that makes us want to love, that enables us to love.

Today we celebrate the Eucharist. It is such a rich sacrament of so much that was so special in the life of Jesus — the gift of his life —which he offered only once but directed his disciples to do regularly to keep alive his memory. And he beautifully connected it with the death he would endure on the following day —the Feast of Passover — the day when each year the Jewish People marked their liberation from Egyptian slavery with a ritual meal and remembered, too, the agreement, or Covenant, God had entered into with them, to love them with a focussed interest in order that they might bring to other nations the news of God’s care for the whole world.

Jesus modified the customary ritual. When he took the bread and prayerfully blessed God for it, he broke the loaf so that it could be eaten together by the disciples, identifying it as his body that would be given in sacrifice the following day. He sought to motivate and empower the change in the world’s heart needed to reverse its habitual ways of violence with self-sacrificing love on their part.

He did something similar with the ritual cup of wine, identifying it with his blood to be poured out on the cross on the following day for the same purpose of eliminating the world’s sin.

He then charged them to do the same in order to remember him, the source of all true liberation and of community, and to remember and to implement his insistence on love as the practical way to attain his vision of peace, justice and freedom, all firmly anchored in truth.

The creating Word who took human flesh climaxed his work by allowing us to be transformed into his risen body! God’s love indeed knows no limits!