Feast of Corpus Christi
The Body and Blood of Christ
Saint Mary's Cathedral, Sydney
Gen 14:18-20; 1 Cor 11:23-26; Lk 9:11-17
+ Cardinal George Pell, Archbishop of Sydney
6 Jun 2010
Today we have the feast of Corpus Christi, a Latin term for the Body of Christ. This feast celebrates a New Testament truth; that Jesus meant what he said when he prayed over the bread and wine "This is my Body, This is my Blood" at the Last Supper, the first celebration of the Eucharist.
This is the first aspect we must stress on this feast - the miraculous presence of Jesus Christ in the host. "Visus, tactus, gustus fallitur" as St. Thomas wrote. All our senses are deceived. The repetition of the miracle should not blind us to its importance.
But we celebrate this ancient truth in a thoroughly Catholic way through a medieval feast which came into Church life after the urgings of Blessed Juliana of Liege in Belgium about 1230. Later that century Pope Urban IV endorsed the feast and it was made universal in the church during the fourteenth century. On many occasions it is celebrated with a public procession like today's.
Often when speaking with primary school children from the middle or senior years (years 3 and 4 to year 6) I ask them why the priest does not use coke and a pizza or some Australian equivalent such as lemonade and a piece of cake rather than bread and wine. I explain to the children that the Church is occasionally criticised for being old fashioned and perhaps in a youth Mass the church could try to update its image, appear more "with it" by trying some such strategy. To my relief this suggestion is nearly always greeted with laughter, followed by silence as they venture reasons why this change would be unacceptable. They often begin by pointing out that the bread and wine become the Body of Christ and I further explain that the proposal is that some other materials, used as food today, would be substituted as the basic material for the miracle.
On every occasion some child has been able to explain fairly early in the dialogue that Jesus used bread and wine at the Last Supper and because the priest and people are celebrating this same Eucharist, we follow Christ's example. Even in those countries where rice is eaten more frequently than bread, we must follow the example of the Lord. This position is not open to change.
Actually Jesus himself chose an Old Testament practice, which we heard of in the first reading, used by Melchizedek the King of Salem and priest of the Most High God. Abraham is our father in faith, in many ways the founder of the monotheist tradition, and Melchizedek, also a monotheist who acknowledged God Most High as creator of heaven and earth, used bread and wine when he blessed Abraham. We belong to an ancient tradition, which Our Lord developed and expanded, going back more than 3,700 years.
We need food for our life's journey and activity in order to produce energy, just as the followers of Jesus who followed him into the countryside were hungry. A balanced diet, not too much, not too much of the wrong foods like fat and sugar, keeps us healthy, able to work, enjoy ourselves, and be happy.
So too we need regular prayer and worship if our faith is to be strong and if we want to be able to do the right thing regularly; if we want to be able to acknowledge we are sinners and ask forgiveness of God and if we want our faith to remain strong.
Faith is more like learning to play a musical instrument or learning a foreign language than buying a house or a car. While we have to maintain our houses, they do not disappear if they are neglected, but take a long time to deteriorate. On the other hand if we never use our musical ability or practice a foreign language, we can lose the ability almost completely.
So too in daily life we need to exercise, to work, to spend our energy. If we stupidly did nothing at all in order to consume our energy, our laziness would ensure we became weaker and weaker. Popular wisdom proclaims "Use it or lose it".
Following Christ is very similar to this. We need to be doing the correct thing regularly in order to remain genuinely Catholic and we need to keep up our energy through prayer.
In many ways Catholics have moved into the mainstream of Australian life and some of us do not want to be thought of as different from majority Australia. So we can become diffident, reluctant to stand-up for our Catholic principles even in everyday conversations. The enemies of Christian influence in public life are working in a similar direction to exclude Christian values from public discussion. We should not be helping them.
For all these reasons a public procession through the streets of Sydney is an important witness to our belief in the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist, but also an important symbol reminding us of the necessity of defending and charitably explaining Catholic principles in our daily life, in our families, while we are at work and among our friends.
Discipleship always comes at some cost. Following Christ is never cost free, even when there is no or little official hostility. For some personalities it is easier to rise to defend the Church against hostility, than it is to rebut the charge that we are old fashioned, a bit ridiculous or superstitious. We need new ways to explain all truths, but we still need age-old virtues like courage, prudence and courtesy to explain our basic claims and truths.
We know of beautiful truths. We believe that the eternal Word became man, took flesh of the Virgin Mary and lived among us. Stranger still the peculiarity in his life which Jesus highlighted for our memorial celebrations was his death on the cross, when he gave up his life for us. As St. Paul explained to the people of Corinth, on every occasion when we eat this bread and drink this cup we celebrate the death of the Lord, as a slave on the cross, until he comes again.
Neither does the strangeness end here, because the New Testament teaches that Jesus is not among us simply as a fond memory but under the forms of bread and wine, which we eat so that the elements become part of our own body. We worship and adore the Host in the monstrance and in our tabernacles, but the Eucharist was instituted to be eaten, as food for our journey. We stand before a series of great mysteries.
In the words of today's sequence, the Lauda Sion.
"This faith to Christian men is given -
Bread is made flesh by words from heaven:
Into his blood the wine is turned. . .
Concealed beneath the two-fold sign,
Meet symbols of the gift divine".
This is our faith. We thank God for it.
In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.
