From the Catholic Liturgy for
Corpus Christi Sunday, June 3, 2018. Gospel: Mk 14L12-26. Theme: Looking Beyond…
When I was about 17 years old I received my very first
Bible and began to seriously investigate Christianity. I had come to believe
three things beyond any shadow of any doubt: that God exists; that Jesus is
divine, and that Christianity is the religion revealed by God himself when He
came to earth. That’s all I had to go on as far as religious knowledge went because
I was a public-school kid who went to catechism classes for only a handful of
times in my life and my immediate family never went to Mass.
The joy and goodness I saw in some Evangelical Christian
classmates attracted me and I began to ask them questions about Jesus and the
Bible. I was impressed by their devotion to the Word of God and their
commitment to Jesus Christ. But I
discovered something that confused me as a total rookie to Christianity. They
would say that everything Jesus spoke was true, but when I asked about the
Eucharist being transformed into the actual Body and Blood of Jesus, they would
all reply, “Oh He didn’t mean it literally.” I found that to be so very odd…and
inconsistent with the rest of the way they accepted without question Jesus’
other words in the Gospels. And as I pressed them further for reasons, I came
to discover that really, deep down, their rejected Jesus’ literal words about
the Eucharist because they trusted more in their senses than in the One who
said those words, “This is my body; this is my Blood.”
I could not accept their conclusion about the Eucharist
because, you see, to me it did not seem all that impossible. After all, Jesus
of Nazareth was God come in the flesh and His divinity could not be experienced
by human senses. As a matter of fact,
trusting only in their senses is what led many people to reject Jesus as the
Son of God and Messiah. When people looked at Jesus of Nazareth what they saw
and smelled and touched and heard was a Jewish man in his 30’s, fit and strong
from his work as a laborer, covered with the dust of the road and having the
smell of many days on that road without a bath. What they did not see was the
Eternal Son of God the Father, the Word through whom all creation was made, the
glory and power of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. But the reality of
the divinity was always there. Just hidden from the senses by flesh and bone.
And yet this carpenter-turned-rabbi, whom to all
appearances looked and smelled and acted like the guy next door, went about the
towns and villages saying such incredible things about his divinity such as: “The
Father and I are one.” “Before Abraham existed, I AM.” “Your sins are
forgiven.”
It took great trust in Jesus and confident faith in His
words to look beyond what the eyes saw and call Him Lord; to look beyond what
the hands touched and worship Him as God. My Evangelical Christian friends had
no problem accepting these words from Jesus about his divinity and believing
what they meant. How strange that they could not do likewise with his words
about the Eucharist. And you know, it takes that same kind of confident faith
for us today to look beyond what our senses experience in the Eucharist; to
look beyond the appearance of the bread we eat and to look beyond the taste of
the wine we drink, and to trust deeply in these words of Jesus: “This is my
body which is given for you…“This is my blood, the blood of the new and eternal
covenant…”“I am the Bread come down from Heaven...”“My flesh is real food, my
blood real drink...”
Yet this is what Christians have been believing ever since
the beginning of our Church in Jerusalem 2,000 years ago. Allow me to close
this homily by sharing with you one of the earliest descriptions we have of the
Eucharist, dating from about the year 150 in Rome, which is just 50 years after
St. John the Apostle, Jesus’ best friend, died:
There is brought to the presider bread and a cup of wine
mixed with water; and he … gives praise and glory to the Father of the universe…and
offers thanks…And when he has concluded the prayers and thanksgivings, all the
people present express their assent by saying Amen. And then those who are called deacons give to
each of those present …the (Eucharistic) bread and wine...not as common bread
and common drink do we receive this bread and wine; but …just as Jesus took on
both flesh and blood for our salvation, so likewise have we been taught that
this food which is blessed by the prayer of His word, and from which we are
nourished, is the flesh and blood of that same Jesus who was made flesh." (St. Justin Martyr)
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