Homily: Eucharist

Year B / Ordinary Time / Week 9/ Solemnity of Corpus Christi 

Readings: Exodus 24.3-8 / Psalm 115.12-13, 15, 16bc, 17-18 (R/v 13) / Hebrews 9.11-15 / Mark 14.12-16, 22-16

Food. It has a special place in our lives. We cannot live without it. May be this is why we make a fuss about food. 

“You must eat to grow taller”, my sister tells her growing children. “Don’t play with your food”, my grandmother used to say to me. “Never waste your food”, my father often reminded us.“If it’s good food, we’ll eat there”, my brother, the foodie, announces whenever we are looking for a place to eat. 

I am sure you have heard the same pronouncements in your family and among friends.

We make a greater fuss over important food. Much fanfare surrounds the sugee cake at a Eurasian baby’s Christening. Peranakans spend hours preparing for the Tok Panjang dinners. We light the candles and dim the lights as we parade the birthday cake in a hearty “Happy Birthday” song. In fact, every culture has peculiar customs relating to food, because food is important and worth making a fuss over. 

As Catholics, we believe the Eucharist is the most important food we have. So, what sort of fuss do we make about it?

The Eucharist is the summit of our worship. The Eucharist is at the center of our lives. We especially celebrate the Eucharist with today’s solemnity of Corpus Christi or the Holy Body and Blood of Christ. We parade the Eucharist in procession. We expose it for adoration. We celebrate all the major feasts in the Church with the Eucharist. We commemorate our lives with the Eucharist: First Communion and Confirmation, weddings and funerals. Yes, all this is how we make a fuss about the Eucharist.

But the Eucharist is also unusual food. It is the living presence of Jesus. With eyes of faith, we believe that bread and wine are completely changed into the body and blood of Christ when a priest consecrates them at Mass. Thus, Jesus is with us wherever we parade or expose the Blessed Sacrament at. And Jesus is still in the Eucharist if we drop the host by accident. And yes, no sacrilege to the host harms Jesus, though the one who damages the host harms his soul. Here in the Eucharist, all initiative and power is indeed Jesus Christ’s. 

“This is my body”. “This is my blood”. With these words, Jesus offers himself as food for our journey, daily bread that we pray for and God’s gift for our lives. We hear these words at every Eucharist we celebrate. We will hear them in a bit. We heard them in today’s gospel. But what do those words mean to you and me?  What do you think Jesus is saying to us in these words?

I believe we would be so wrong to think that there is only one action when we eat the Eucharist: that we alone consume and incorporate into our bodies Jesus Christ. The miracle of Eucharist is that we become the Body of Christ. We do because Jesus himself ‘consumes’ us and makes us part of his body. In fact, this should be the greater fuss we make today about the Eucharist.

Jesus consuming us. It is hard to understand how this can happen. Today’s gospel helps us understand how Jesus does this: by making us one with him.

The disciples ask Jesus, “Where will you have us go and prepare for you to eat the Passover?” It appears they are will take charge of the preparations. But it is Jesus who is in complete control. He instructs them on what to do and where to find the room.  He tells them to ask the owner, “Where is my guest room, where I am to eat the Passover with my disciples?” 

“My guest room”, Jesus says. Not the owner’s room. The disciples find it 'furnished and ready'. No one but Jesus could prepared this room. 

Here in this guest room Jesus will be with his disciples for the Passover. Here in this space they will have their last supper. Here in this place Jesus will make this promise: “If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself, that where I am, there you may also be” (John 14. 2-3).

Jesus’ promise comes alive each time we eat the Eucharist. Yes, we receive Jesus sacramentally in the Eucharist. And as we do, Jesus receives us into himself “that where I am, there may you also be”. 

We come to communion to receive Jesus. We come with our joys and hopes, our griefs and the anxieties. And in communion Jesus comes to us. Comes to lift us up from the earthly to the heavenly, to that upper space where we will be with Jesus and the Father. “Where I am, there may you also be”.

Our first reading echoes this good news. We may find Moses dashing blood onto the altar and people repulsive. But for the Israelites, it symbolises new life given by God and to be lived toward God. Here is God calling humankind to be one with God. Here the Israelites are being invited to commit themselves to God by living in God’s ways. 

No blood is splashed or dashed upon us at Mass. Instead, the Eucharist is always offered to us at Mass.  Do we recognise in the Eucharist God’s same invitation for us to have fullness of life and the same call to us to live as God’s people?

We can celebrate God’s gift and God’s call if we profess that the Eucharist is truly Jesus’ self-sacrifice for us to live and love fully, like he did for God and for neighbour. If we do, we make the message of our second reading real and alive for many and us. That Jesus’ death and resurrection brings about cleansing from and forgiveness of our sins so that we can live in a new way: worshipping the living God and living fully new life the risen  Jesus gives.

To live fully, we must accept that the new life we receive in Holy Communion transforms us to do with our lives what Jesus did with his for everyone: that we become bread broken for others, that we pour out our lives for all, as Jesus did on the cross. When we do, we live as the Body of Christ.

Today we are being asked to make a great big fuss about the Eucharist. But really it is God who makes a great big fuss about us. 

God’s great big fuss is that we are gifted to receive the Eucharist, to become the Body of Christ through the Eucharist, and as the Body of Christ to heal and uplift the world.  

God’s great big fuss is that it is right and good that we eat Jesus’ body and drink his blood so that we become his body and his blood for the many who are hungry, thirsty, in prison, needing forgiveness, wanting hope, seeking a better life. 

God’s great big fuss is that the Eucharist will always be God’s divine food for us. It is, it must be because Eucharist is Jesus who loves us and desires to give himself lavishly upon us, so that where he is, we might also be.

"Believe what you see, see what you believe and become what you are: the Body of Christ”, St Augustine wrote about the Eucharist. And he added: “when we say ‘Amen’, we are saying ‘Yes! I believe this is the Body and Blood of Christ and that I will be the Body of Christ to others’”.

Yes, the Eucharist is indeed God’s divine food for you and me. It must always have a special place in our lives. You and I, we cannot live without the Eucharist. 

Inspired in parts by the writings of Fr Leon Pereira, OP

Preached at Church of the Transfiguration

photo: www.connectacec.com (from the internet)