Shrine of the Most Blessed Sacrament

This feast was established in the thirteenth century, and the beautiful hymns of the Divine Office and the Mass were written by St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the few proofs that a very exacting theologian can also be a great poet. It quickly became a very popular feast, celebrated on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, with a public procession marking the day. I remember as a boy seeing a German woman crying as she came out of church on this feastday in  my home parish in Nanuet, NY. I asked her what was wrong and she replied that she had just been remembering how Corpus Christi was celebrated in her home town in Bavaria, where it was a national holiday and celebrated with great beauty and devotion. The procession today will be an effort to revive that practice.

            Medieval theologians and poets liked to reflect on what they called the corpus Christi triforme, the threefold Body of Christ, the three meanings of the phrase "Body of Christ" that can be gathered from the New Testament. There is, first, the physical Body of Christ that born of the Virgin, walked this earth, knew our experiences of hunger and thirst and weariness, was nailed to a cross, was raised from the dead, and now sits in glory at God's right hand. Second, there is the same Body of Christ that becomes present in mystery in the eucharist. Originally, this was called the "mystical" Body of Christ because brought upon the altar in the sacramental mystery. Finally, there is the Body of Christ that is the Church, that we are, that we become because, as St. Paul says in today's second reading, "because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all share in the one bread."

            The three meanings were related dynamically. The body of Christ that endured the passion and won our redemption becomes present as we commemorate his death and resurrection, and as we receive this Body under the form of bread, as St. Augustine famously put it, "we become what we eat": we become the very Body of Christ that we receive. The eucharist pointed beyond itself, moved beyond itself, to the unity of the Church, the final purpose, goal, of this eucharistic dynamism.

            We have perhaps lost this sense of the unity of Church and eucharist. We have sometimes focused on the eucharist in itself, or as a gift to us as individuals, to the neglect of its power to integrate all our differences in a social body that is not just any social unit but is the very Body of Christ, so that we are members of Christ, members of one another, so that when one member suffers all suffer, when one member rejoices all rejoice. In turn, we have sometimes focused on institutional dimensions of the Church, seeing it as simply an organization with structures of authority and lots of rules and regulations, to the neglect of the vital, that is, living unity brought about by our common share in the bread and in the cup. But the two go together: as the adage has it: "The Church makes the eucharist, and the eucharist makes the Church."

            This is not just a theory for theologians to ponder. It should be the reality of our common worship. Any one of us can be in immediate relationship with God in prayer; we do not have to come together for that. But Christians have always come together on the Lord's day to celebrate the Lord's Supper, to break bread together, since the very first days of their history. In fact, the Greek word we translate as "Church" means "assembly," "gathering," an actual gathering, actual assembly, like this one, here and now. Christians have always sensed that they have to gather if they are to be a Church; they have to be Christians together, brought beyond their individuality into a common life as the Body of Christ. We are engaged in something together: we are not just 200 individuals here, each doing his or her own thing, only accidentally related to the person next to us. We come together to hear the same Word of God; we profess our faith together; we remember our common origin in the death and resurrection of Christ; and we, many as we are, receive the same bread and drink from the same cup and so become what we receive: Christ's own Body.

            This feast, then, can be an occasion not only to celebrate the mystery after which this parish is named, but also to gain a fuller awareness and a deeper appreciation of the mystery we celebrate every time we come together.

Please click here for a hard copy of this homily.

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