Homily for Sunday, 21 November 2021– Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe

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…

Homily for Sunday, 18 June 2017‒ Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi)

Readings of the day: Deuteronomy 8:2-3, 14b-16a; Psalm 147:12-13, 14-15, 19-20; 1 Corinthians 10:16-17; John 6:51-58

What is the Body and Blood of Christ? What do we mean when we speak of the Real Presence of Christ, Eucharist, the Feast of the Lord’s Table or the Lord’s Supper, of Mass, or of communion? These are just a few of the names we give to today’s celebration, officially the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ, and to a reality that we Catholics celebrate every Sunday and may celebrate nearly every day of the year.

Also today Bishop Salvatore Matano has declared the beginning of a Year of the Eucharist in the Diocese of Rochester, and so we have not only today to celebrate this reality of many names, but a whole year to celebrate it, through to June 3, 2018, next year’s date of the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ. And so, as we begin this year-long celebration; our Year of the Eucharist, might it be worthwhile to ask ourselves this question once again: What is it?

“What is it” is the very question that has been asked since the people of Israel, returning home to their land from slavery in Egypt, first asked it. When the people of Israel were hungry in the desert, God sent them a strange, dewy substance to satisfy their hunger. As the people of Israel figured out that they could eat this substance, that it filled them, and that it tasted perhaps better than they would have thought, they looked at it cross-eyed, maybe (parents, you know better than I do) as a picky child eyes something like broccoli, and asked, “Manna”?

Yes, “manna” is actually a question, before it became the name given to this strange, dewy substance God gave the people of Israel in the desert. In the Hebrew of the Book of Deuteronomy from which we hear today, as well as in many other ancient languages of what are now Northeast Africa and the Middle East, “manna” means, “What is it”?

We still ask this question today. We still celebrate, as the people of ancient Israel did, “a food unknown to [our] fathers”; to our ancestors. We call it the Body and Blood of Christ, the Real Presence of Christ, the Eucharist, the Feast of the Lord’s Table, the Lord’s Supper, the Mass, or communion. But might we as well ask, “Manna” ‒ “What is it”?

In his pastoral letter announcing this Year of the Eucharist, which is in the Catholic Courier (I will have a brief further announcement about this letter in a few moments before we leave here today), Bishop Matano laments the “high percentage of Catholics who,” according to polls, “do not understand or who have not been taught” about, or “simply do not believe in” the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist. In many ways our bishop is right to be concerned about faltering practice and understanding of our faith among so many of our brothers and sisters under his pastoral care in this diocese.

At the same time, though, we are here at this celebration. I am confident that I am speaking in front of people who are here now because we at least recognize that something extraordinary, in fact a miracle, is taking place before our eyes. It is taking place in a way we are able to sense: To see here and soon to taste, touch, and smell in the form of bread and wine from the altar; to hear in the form of one another joining together in worship, from the prayers of our Mass, to the singing of hymns, to the cooing of small children, to perhaps more unexpected sounds that echo through this place. The miracle we witness here is so extraordinary, even though it remains always sensible, that we, like the people of Israel in the time of Moses and people since then, are right to ask an eternal question: “Manna” ‒ “What is it”?

Yet is the answer to this question not given to us in a beautiful way especially in the Word of God we hear this evening [morning] from St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians? St. Paul asks, “Brothers and sisters, the cup of blessing that we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ”?

A major difficulty of what we celebrate here is that it is possible for us to place our focus on many different aspects of the celebration. Is the Eucharist, the Body and Blood of Christ, the bread and wine on the altar in which Christ miraculously becomes really, truly, and fully present without changing what that bread and wine looks, tastes, smells, and feels like? Is the Eucharist centered on the prayer to the Holy Spirit to “make holy these gifts” of bread and wine, “that they may become the body and blood of [God’s] Son, our Lord Jesus Christ”? Is the Eucharist centered on the whole of the Eucharistic Prayer, which extends from my invitation, “The Lord be with you,” to, “Through him, with him, and in him”… and that I will pray with you in a few moments? Is the Eucharist centered on a second prayer to the Holy Spirit within this Eucharistic Prayer, in which we pray not only that the bread and wine be made holy and transformed to take in the real, true, and full presence of Christ, but that we, too, may be so transformed: “Grant that we, who are nourished by the Body and Blood of your Son, and filled with his Holy Spirit, may become one body, one spirit in Christ”? Is our Eucharist centered on what is on the altar; the whole of this celebration we often call the Mass; the priest who leads the celebration; all of us gathered in community, in communion, with one another?

Let me offer a too-easy answer to the long list of questions I have asked just now: “Yes.” Indeed, the Eucharist, the Body and Blood of Christ we celebrate, is all of this and more. It is no wonder, then, that even the most faithful Catholic Christian might become easily confused by this celebration of many names and many faces. It is no wonder that the question we may be most drawn to ask is, well, then, “What is it”?

What is the Body and Blood of Christ; the Real Presence of Christ; Eucharist; the Feast of the Lord’s Table; the Lord’s Supper; Mass; communion? As I say to children I have taught when they look at me sheepishly, thinking they have asked what they are not sure is the right or on-topic question, “That’s an excellent question”! Our next step with this question about the Eucharist, “Manna ‒ What is it,” though, must be to turn this into no longer a “What” question but a “Who” question: “Who is it”?

And so “Who is it”? In some ways more fully than others, my experience is that most Christians know that Jesus Christ is present in the Eucharist and that our salvation, our living “forever” with God, depends on this fact. We know that, as we hear Jesus himself proclaim in our Gospel reading, from John, “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life… For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink.”

“Jesus Christ” is our best answer to our question that has become, “Who is it”? Depending upon how fully some people actually believe Jesus Christ is present in the Eucharist or how literally (or not) to interpret his words in our Gospel, some may be confused our outright scandalized in thinking about how Jesus could offer us his body and blood to eat and drink. I go no further, because my understanding here is at its limit.

And yet, I think, what could be even more challenging for us than to believe that Jesus Christ offers himself really, truly, and fully in flesh and blood; all that he is in this celebration in his memory, is to believe that Jesus Christ has chosen to offer himself to our world through us; that we are the first place from which Jesus Christ shows himself to our world really, truly, and fully through our flesh and blood; that we are part of the answer to the question, “Who is it”?

And from the moment we go forth from this celebration; our witness here to a miracle of Christ really, truly, and fully in flesh and blood, we are entrusted with working out together, in communion, in our world by how we act as Christ in our world the answer to our eternal question about our Eucharist: “Who is it”?

Homily for Sunday, 22 June 2014‒ Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi)

Readings of the day: Deuteronomy 8:2-3, 14b-16a; Psalm 147:12-13, 14-15, 19-20; 1 Corinthians 10:16-17; John 6:51-58

Who among us is adventurous with food? Who among us enjoys trying new kinds of food; food we have not encountered before?

Our first reading today from Deuteronomy features the people of Israel being led by Moses through the desert. They face a crisis: They are hungry, and there is no food. God responds to the plea of the people of Israel for food by sending them manna.

This manna is great, except that none of the people of Israel journeying through the desert had ever seen this strange, supposedly edible, frostlike substance before. Deuteronomy describes this manna as “a food unknown to” the people of Israel “and [their] fathers.” The word manna derives from a question in Hebrew that means, “What is it?”

What is it? Is this manna more like chicken; or does it taste like tofu, or more like broccoli or Brussels sprouts? (By the way, children and anyone here with children, grandchildren, or great-grandchildren, I encourage you to eat your vegetables, and sometimes to try food you haven’t seen before.) Is this manna like gruel? What is it? The people of Israel had no idea what this food was, so they asked, “Manna”? All they knew was that this was the food God had sent them to satisfy their hunger.

I like to try new kinds of food; foods I have not encountered before. One of my favorite summer festivals when I lived in my home city, Edmonton, Canada, was Edmonton’s Heritage Festival, held during the first weekend in August. The Heritage Festival features well over one hundred tents, or pavilions, with food from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe and most countries of the world in between. The pavilions also include cultural performances; the demonstration and sale of art and goods from many countries, but my favorite part of the Heritage Festival is the food.

One year at the Heritage Festival, I entered the Canadian pavilion out of curiosity. What foods are typically Canadian? Bannock is typically Canadian apparently, although it may have originally been Scottish. What is it? Bannock, as prepared by indigenous North Americans, is a kind of flatbread made with wheat flour, water, sugar, and lard, with spices or dried fruits often added for extra flavor. Bannock is very tasty and filling, as I found out at the Heritage Festival.

What is it? If the journey by the people of Israel of which we hear in our first reading had taken place in Canada, the people’s manna might have been bannock. God would have given them this bannock to satisfy their hunger after forty years of travel through a landscape of snow and ice!

Today, on this feast day of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, Jesus invites us to try a new kind of food; a food that, even more than the manna of which Deuteronomy speaks, is a food “unknown to” us and to our ancestors.

Some of us may be wondering: What am I talking about when I speak of the Eucharist as a food “unknown to” us and to our parents; our grandparents; our great-grandparents; to those who have gone before us in faith? The Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ‒ or how, because Christ instituted this sacrament with the simple words, “This is my body… This is my blood,” ordinary bread and wine become Christ’s own Body and Blood‒ is a mystery.

Like any mystery, we can understand only so much before the mystery defies our language and our imagination. We are reduced in awe to the same question the people of Israel under Moses once asked: “Manna”? What is it?

The Eucharist is a sacrament; the real presence of Jesus Christ in this sacrament; “the source and summit of the whole Christian life.” Jesus says in our Gospel reading: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.”

Jesus’ words mystified the Jewish crowds who first heard him. How can this be? How can this man be more than the manna that God gave us under Moses in the desert? How can Jesus be for us “the living bread… from heaven”; God himself, given to us as food and drink “for the life of the world”; “I am”? Jesus invites us to try a new kind of food; a strange kind of food; the mystery of God himself, given to us as food and drink “for the life of the world.”

The food of which Jesus Christ invites us to partake is a strange, new kind of food indeed. I wonder: Is it strange because this food is the real presence of Christ our Lord and God in sacrament? Or is it strange primarily because, unlike every other food that becomes part of our bodies when we eat it, we become what we receive and eat in the case of the Eucharist, the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ?

In a sermon on the Eucharist, St. Augustine once prayed over the people to whom he was speaking: “Be what you see; receive what you are.” In our second reading St. Paul asks us two questions about the Eucharist that are very similar to St. Augustine’s exhortation: “The cup of blessing that we bless: Is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread that we break: Is it not a participation in the body of Christ?”

What is it? Perhaps an even better question to ask ourselves about the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ is, “Who is it?” And then we might ask ourselves, as we gather to celebrate the Eucharist, in light of who the Eucharist is, the real presence of Christ, our Lord and God, “Who are we?”

How is it that we participate in this food we are invited to consume; this food “for the life of the world”? Do we keep it to ourselves or do we, as I have seen many examples in this parish, go out, filled with the real presence of Christ, to our world? Do we go out to those who hunger for enough ordinary food let alone for the Eucharist? Do we go out gently and joyfully to those who long for the real presence of God; of Christ; those who long for forgiveness; to those who long for peace and justice; those who ask of us, “What is it; who are you”? In what ways are we what we see and receive in this celebration, the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ?

To our world, we are called to be a new kind of food; “the living bread”; perhaps strange or never before encountered by some; perhaps not accepted by all. And yet we are what we see and receive in this celebration: Christ to the world; Christ to those most in need of the real presence of our Lord and God in our world. Having partaken of Christ, we are this new kind of food “for the life of the world.”