How many of you have seen the Body of Christ in Texas? Not many? Perhaps, I should have prepared you for today’s question by saying I had in mind a geographical question. So, I’ll rephrase it. How many of you have visited Corpus Christi, Texas? Of course, “Corpus Christi” is the Latin for “Body of Christ.” I also have a follow-up question. Why is Corpus Christi called “Corpus Christi?” What does this Texas city have to do with “the Body of Christ?”
Well, here’s a little history for you. In 1519, the explorer Alonso de Pineda sailed into a large bay along the Texas coast. He arrived on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, which was celebrated in the Church year as the Feast of Corpus Christi. And so, he named the bay: Corpus Christi. Although I haven’t been able to verify it, I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Alonso had sailed into Trinity Bay and the mouth of the Trinity River the previous Sunday.
Back then, they didn’t have Super Bowl Sunday to mark the beginning of the year. Or Memorial Day and Labor Day to begin and end the time for summer vacation. Instead, they used major religious holy days like Christmas and Easter to divide up the calendar. Pentecost, fifty days after Easter was also an important holy day. And one week later there was Trinity Sunday, which we celebrated in the church last week.
At the same time, back then, they didn’t have Monday holidays in order to get a long weekend. They celebrated their holy days, their holidays, whenever they happened to fall. Just as Pentecost is fifty days after Easter, they had a special holy day sixty days after Easter. It was today’s Feast of Corpus Christi.
The celebration of Corpus Christi started in the mid-1200’s and by the 1300’s had become a major feast day. There were huge processions of statues and flowers. In many Latin American countries this feast day still is a festival of flowers. But just as few people now-a-days like to go to Mass during the middle of the week, say on Ascension Thursday, the church calendar was shifted so that the Feast of Corpus Christi was changed from the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, that is, sixty days after Easter, to the Sunday after Trinity Sunday.1
And so it is that, today, we celebrate what was a major feast of the Catholic church, a day to rival Christmas and Easter. A day to celebrate the Body and Blood of Christ. A feast day for which Thomas Aquinas wrote a special hymn that begins: “Pange linqua gloriosi, corporis mysterium sanguinisque pretiosi …” Or, if you prefer: “Sing praise o tongue … of the mystery of the most glorious flesh and most precious blood…”
Flesh and blood. Body and blood. This is the feast day, the day of celebration of the body and blood of Christ found in the Eucharist we consume. A celebration of what is called “the real presence of Christ” in the bread we eat and the wine we drink. What can I really say about so great a mystery which is at the center of our Catholic faith?
A moment ago, I said the Feast of Corpus Christi in the church of the Middle Ages rivaled that of Christmas and Easter. Perhaps, it was so important because it unites several major celebrations of Christianity. There is Christmas in which we celebrate the enfleshment of God, when God took on human flesh in order that we might be united with God. There is Easter in which we celebrate the giving up of God’s human flesh in suffering and death and the return of his glorified flesh of the Resurrection. There is the Ascension when we celebrate the leave-taking of the glorified flesh of the Resurrection in its return to heaven. There is Pentecost when we celebrate the return of the Spirit into our own bodies and souls to empower us to be Christlike in all that we do.
In this Feast of Corpus Christi, of the body and blood of Christ, we celebrate, with the Eucharistic presence of Christ, the enfleshment of Christmas as well as the Pascal mystery of Easter. Somehow those peoples of a thousand years ago, who began the celebration of Corpus Christi, realized all of this in their hearts and minds in ways we so-called enlightened people approaching the twenty-first century cannot fully appreciate. They were able to hear the words of today’s Gospel reading and accept them completely: “Let me solemnly assure you, if you do not eat the flesh of the son of man and drink his blood, you have no life in you. Those who feed on my flesh and drink my blood have life eternal and I will raise them up on the last day. For my flesh is real food and my blood is real drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood remain in me, and I in them.”
We are told many who heard these words directly from Jesus did not believe them. Many left him. Yet, when Jesus asked his twelve disciples whether they, too, would leave him, Peter replied: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe; we are convinced that you are God’s Holy One.” And so it was that, when Jesus left this world and sent the Holy Spirit to abide with them, his disciples continued to meet and to share in his body and blood.
Corpus Christi celebrates the last supper Jesus ate with his friends. He knew it was a time of leave taking. And as with every leave taking, it was a time when he wanted desperately to stay, and yet he knew he must leave, for it was only in this way the Holy Spirit could come to be with each one of us. How many of us, in our own human way, have wished we could remain with our friends? We wished we would not have to move to a new city, a new country, and would never see these loved ones again? Yet, in his love, Jesus the Christ was able to leave and to remain. He gave us himself by giving us his body and blood.
How did he do this? There is no complete answer to this question. How can we analyze and measure his love, a love our human eyes see in the form of bread and wine? The only instrument we have to measure love is the instrument of our heart.
All sorts of human words could be used in an attempt to explain what is meant by the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Thomas Aquinas wrote many words in his attempt to intellectualize God, to make God into a theology. But in the end, Thomas is said to have experienced a miraculous vision and then, ordered his assistant to destroy all of the books he had written, muttering that all of his words were straw. Thomas Aquinas believed, in his attempt to understand the divine love of God, all he had written had no more merit than dead grass.
It boils down to this. Did Jesus lie to his friends and to us? Or did he tell the truth? If he lied, then he is not present in the bread and wine we consume here this morning. If he spoke the truth, then he is present even though our human senses can neither measure nor prove it.
In our first reading from Deuteronomy we heard how God tested the faith of the Israelites there in the desert, to see if they really had the intention, the guts, if you will, to follow him. During this time of trial, God fed them on manna, the bread of heaven. And why did he do this? The passage says he did this “in order to show you that not by bread alone does man live, but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of the lord.”
These same words were used by Jesus when the devil tempted him to turn stones into bread. We, on the other hand, are tempted to turn living bread into stones. We are tempted to ask how the bread we see and taste can really be the flesh and blood of Christ. We fail to recognize that “the word was God … and the word became flesh and made his dwelling among us …”
If we fail in the process of seeing God enfleshed in Jesus, then we, also, fail to see the Eucharist enfleshing Jesus the Christ. We can fail to see how the body and blood of Christ enfleshes each one of us. For this is the sequence of Christmas, Easter and Corpus Christi: God takes on flesh, Christ transforms his own flesh and blood within the bread and wine, and we eat his flesh and drink his blood and, in the process, become the Body of Christ.
In the words we heard from St Paul in his letter to the Corinthians: “Because the loaf of bread is one, we, many though we are, are one body for we all partake of the one loaf.” I began a few minutes ago by asking how many of you have seen the Body of Christ in Texas? Well, there is no reason to make the long drive down to the city of Corpus Christi. All you really need to do is look around you, right now, and behold the Body of Christ.
Body and Blood of Christ; June 9, 1996
Deut 8:2-3,14b-16a; 1 Cor 10:16-17; Jn 6:51-58
- It wasn’t too long afterwards that the celebration of Ascension Thursday was also shifted to a Sunday feast day!