Readings of the day: Exodus 24:3-8; Psalm 116:12-13, 15-16, 17-18; Hebrews 9:11-15; Mark 14:12-16, 22-26
Near the beginning of Pope Benedict XVI’s first Encyclical letter, Deus Caritas Est (God is Love) are words that stand out to me both for their truth and their beauty. In Deus Caritas Est, not speaking of the Eucharist directly (considering we celebrate today the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ) but of the very essence of what it is to be a Christian, Pope Benedict says: “To be Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.”
My sisters and brothers of the Church, Christ’s Body now on Earth: The very essence of our Christian faith, and the Eucharist within it, as Vatican II’s Lumen Gentium says, as “the fount and apex of the whole Christian life,” is first and foremost about “the encounter with an event, a person.” Our Christian faith; our celebration of Eucharist is about our personal encounter with Jesus Christ perpetuated in our history and life and faith experiences.
I will grant that this Solemnity we celebrate of the Body and Blood of Christ is multi-dimensional; so much so that it defies being reduced to a collection of ideas, concepts, or titles. We call this celebration the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ, Corpus Christi. We speak of the Eucharist as “the fount and apex of the whole Christian life.” We speak of it as the Real Presence; the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of our Lord Jesus Christ. We speak of the Eucharistic celebration as a sacrament; a sign that is what it is, something we perceive with our human senses, but that points to a reality beyond itself, the real, true, bodily presence of Jesus Christ. In this way, French philosopher Paul Ricœur would speak of Eucharist and other sacraments as having a “surplus of meaning”; a meaning-beyond-meaning or meaning beyond our physical senses.
We speak of Eucharist as “the holy sacrifice of the Mass.” And our readings today certainly focus heavily on the dimension of sacrifice. Mark’s Gospel speaks of Jesus’ re-focusing of the Jewish commemoration of the Passover, when God spared the people of Israel from death and allowed their escape from slavery in Egypt, as long as they marked their doorposts with lambs’ blood as God commanded them. In the Book of Exodus today, we hear how Israel’s first Passover became a ritual memorial: An altar dedicated with lambs’ blood, animals sacrificed as burnt offerings to God. These sacrifices take on meaning-beyond-meaning or meaning beyond our physical senses: They point to a covenant; a promise by God that Israel would always be God’s people, and a response by the people of Israel to be “obedient” and faithful to God.
The Last Supper of Jesus and his disciples re-focuses; re-configures the Passover sacrifice in memory of the Exodus. Instead of repeating animal sacrifices each year in memory of the Passover, Jesus becomes the once-and-forever sacrifice for us. Jesus becomes the focus of our Passover; our only way to “pass over” to eternal life. No other sacrifice—not of animals, not of ourselves in heroic acts of faith—is capable of making eternal life possible for us. And although this sacrifice, like that of the Passover during Israel’s Exodus from Egypt, is repeated ritually through our celebration of Eucharist—the Mass—it is one and the same sacrifice, that of Jesus through his Passion and death, that is projected through our history as Church. The Letter to the Hebrews emphasizes this once-and-forever nature of Jesus’ sacrifice of self. No longer is “the blood of goats and calves,” offered to God an infinite number of times, necessary; Jesus offers his own Body and Blood to us, for our salvation, once, forever.
This all becomes very complicated; mysterious, even: How the sacrifice of Jesus for us from the Last Supper through his death on the cross is both once-and-forever, and ritually celebrated by our Church as our Eucharist; how Jesus offers us his Body and Blood and, at the same time, how we, the Church, are rightly called the “Body of Christ.” I invite us to pause for a moment on this dimension of sacrifice in our Eucharist. Clearly, sacrifice is central to our Eucharist: We commemorate Jesus’ sacrifice for us, his Passion and death, and at the same time Jesus makes his sacrifice not simply a past event, but one with real meaning for our present time.
But without present “encounter with… a person,” sacrifice remains only a finished past event. If our Eucharist is anything less or other than the high point of a continuous encounter with Jesus Christ that spans our whole lives, then it is only sacrifice, a one-and-done past event, with no present meaning. So how is our Eucharist the high point, “fount and apex” of our lifelong encounter with God in the person of Jesus Christ? Our Eucharist is not only the (usually) small wafer of bread and maybe sip of wine we may receive in communion at Mass, which we believe have become by that point in the Mass the Body and Blood of Christ. Our Eucharist is not only the “essential” words, spoken by the priest during the Eucharistic Prayer and which Jesus spoke at the Last Supper (and we hear today in Mark’s Gospel), when somehow ordinary bread and wine becomes Christ’s Body and Blood.
The effects of our Eucharist extend beyond this celebration; beyond the church buildings in which we celebrate it; beyond (for now) our computer screens onto which our Eucharistic celebration is live-streamed. The Cardinal Archbishop of Toronto, Thomas Collins, when he was Archbishop of Edmonton, would make a strong case that we live our identity as a Eucharistic people not only when we are together at Mass, but, for the most part, during the rest of the week when we are not at Mass. It is no accident, Cardinal Collins would say, that the last line of the Mass is a command to us to “go”: “Go in peace”; “Go… glorify God by your lives”! Cardinal Collins would humorously paraphrase the Latin of this line, “Ite, Missa est,” as “Get out of here; now you have work to do”!
My sisters and brothers, fellow Eucharistic people in Christ, our work, announced by “Ite, missa est” is, at its heart, to be the means by which everybody we encounter in our lives in some way encounters Christ, real and present. But how are we to be the means by which the world encounters Christ, real and present, by our every action; our every word? Surely we are weak sinners, and cannot be expected to configure ourselves perfectly to Christ at all times; to be the means at every moment by which everybody we meet encounters Christ through us, right?
We might think of plenty of instances in our history; in our Church when the encounter with Christians has been one with human sin, even to the point where sin has become embedded in social structures and attitudes. The imperialism and racism against this country’s Aboriginal peoples that drove its residential school system, with Church and state complicity, is an especially horrific example of this. So it is true; we are weak sinners. This is all the more reason for us to turn to our Lord Jesus in the Eucharist, that first and foremost point of encounter between God and us. Our graced encounter with Jesus Christ in this celebration can then strengthen us for our encounters with one another: For encounters that express sorrow and resolve to repent for when we have wronged other people as individuals, as a society, as a Church; encounters that increase our awareness, without defensiveness, of ways in which we benefit from socially-embedded patterns of sin; encounters that bring healing and reconciliation.
Most of the time, we will be (and have been) the means of encounter between Christ and everybody around us in the simplest of ways. We frequently do not and will not realize that we are bearing Christ’s real presence to our world through each simple smile or act of kindness. We know well that sometimes to be the means by which the world encounters Christ will be more difficult: Listen attentively, especially to people who differ from us, even if we may determine their views to be wrong; or to people who challenge biases we may not be aware we have; or to people who are suffering in any way. Prayerfully think of somebody we need to forgive (even if that person has never asked our forgiveness), and then begin the process, again prayerfully, of forgiving that person. Live purposefully with joy and thanksgiving toward God and anybody who has been good to us. After all, “Eucharist” (from sas eucharistō, “thank you” in Greek) is originally another word for “thanksgiving.”
St. Augustine of Hippo famously said of us as Eucharistic people, “You are what you receive.” So may we be, to the world, what we receive and celebrate: The Real Presence of Christ we now bear to our world for eternal life; the point of personal encounter between Christ and everybody we meet. Now, may I say, we have work to do…
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