Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi)
Faith in God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit (Trinity), is not a distant and unattainable experience. Instead, it is as near since it is perennially “broken” for us: This is my Body… This is my blood.”
In 1207, a Belgian Augustinian nun, Giuliana di Cornillon, who had just turned fifteen, had a vision of a full moon with a dark spot sullying it. Contemporary experts interpreted it thus: the full moon symbolized the Church, the dark spot was the absence of a specific feast in honour of the Body of the Eucharistic Jesus. The following year, the same religious had an even clearer vision, but had to fight hard to get the feast instituted. She succeeded only at the diocesan level, when Robert de Thourette became bishop of Liège in 1247. In 1261, the former archdeacon of Liège, Jacques Panteléon, became Pope Urban IV. In 1264, impressed by a Eucharistic miracle that had taken place in Bolsena, near Orvieto in Italy where he was residing, he promulgated the bull Transiturus through which he instituted a new solemnity to be celebrated the Thursday after the Octave of Pentecost in honour of the Blessed Sacrament. Thomas Aquinas was given the task of composing the liturgical office. The last strophe of the hymns very famous hymn he wrote, Sacris Solemniis, which begins with the words Panis angelicus (Bread of angels), has often been set to different musical scores, apart from the rest of the hymn. Since Pope Urban IV died two months after having instituted the feast, the bull was never implemented, but Pope Clement V, the first Avignon Pope (1312), confirmed it later.
The now traditional procession of Corpus Christi was introduced by Pope John XXII in 1316. During his pastoral visit to Orvieto, Saint John Paul II said: “Even though the construction of this cathedral was not directly connected with the Solemnity of ‘Corpus Christi’, instituted by Pope Urban IV with the bull Transiturus, in 1264, nor with the miracle that took place in Bolsena the previous year, there is no doubt that the Eucharistic miracle is powerfully evidenced here due to the corporal of Bolsena for which the chapel was specifically built and which it now jealously guards. Since then, the city of Orvieto became known throughout the world due to that miraculous sign that reminds all of us of the merciful love of God who becomes the food and drink of salvation for humanity on its early pilgrimage. Because of the cult rendered to such a great mystery, your city preserves and nourishes the inextinguishable flame” (17 June 1990).
Jesus said to the Jewish crowds: “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.”
The Jews quarrelled among themselves, saying, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day. For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink. Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him. Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me. This is the bread that came down from heaven. Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats this bread will live forever.” (Jn. 6:51-58)
There’s bread and there is bread
The people did not forget and could not forget the Exodus experience and what God had done for them. The First Reading from the Book of Deuteronomy focuses on this. It can be said that life is guided by memory. “Remember how for forty years now the Lord, your God, directed all your journeying…” (Dt. 8:2). Along that journey, the people received “manna” in which they received the strength to endure the difficult journey through the “vast and terrible wilderness with its saraph serpents and scorpions, its parched and waterless ground; who brought forth water for you from the flinty rock and fed you in the desert with manna, a food unknown to your fathers” (Dt. 8:15).
This is a salvific act on God’s part, a “providential” act, through which he could arrive where man could not. But the desert experience, described in such detail by the author, makes us think of the deserts of our own life, of the weariness, the difficulties, the barrenness and lack of meaning gripping our lives that make it impossible to move forward. Prisoners of our own complaining and nostalgia for the comforts of bondage when at least there was food!
And so, God is the One who gives the food capable of giving strength and vigour. There is “another food” that can revive the hope that is in you, that will help you on your way. As once in the desert, so too today, God gives the “Bread of angels”, such that no one has ever seen.
Bread from Heaven
Jesus gives himself to me, to everyone, in this Bread and makes us able to pursue our journey toward Heaven, toward eternity. “Whoever eats this bread will live forever”. In this Bread, Jesus makes me partake of his love, he clothes me with it, he nourishes me with it. He himself is both the banquet and the food. Jesus himself is Eucharist: “This is my body…. This is my blood…”. In other words: This is my life, it is I. The Eucharist is an anticipation of what we will live in eternity together.
We have been made for great things
In giving us this Bread, Jesus makes us realize we have been made for great things, higher things. By looking toward the things above, which is consistent with the call to be “born from above” (see Jn. 3:3), Jesus reveals the perspective through which we are called to look on life – not stopping at earthly things, looking only horizontally (see Col. 3:1-4), but looking up, aiming high. The Eucharist is the Sacrament which catapults us toward the things of Heaven. It invites us to think higher, in a vertical dimension, according to God and not according to others (see Mk. 8:33). Toward that end, the Eucharist is offered to us as nourishment, strength, the bread from heaven so that “whoever eats my flesh will live because of me, will live forever” (see Jn. 6:51, 54). This, and only this, can deliver us from a flat and trivial life.
Not a ticket, but a logic
Viewing the Eucharist as a “ritual”, a kind of “weekly ticket” we need to pay, an obligation, leads us to fall back into the logic of the old covenant – “obeying” an external law that does not change life, and even less, does not save it. Instead, Jesus invites us to assume the logic that the Eucharist become a style of life, a new way of being, knowing how to receive him in our hands in order to offer the Eucharist in Him and to others.
Understanding the Eucharist, living the Eucharist, will lead us to the point of making this experience of love become a style of live, a “higher measure”, a way to love and to serve. Jesus said, “Do this in memory of me”. “Doing this memory” means “doing it like him, moving from “I” to “we”, as someone connected to others, who takes care of others after the example of Jesus who washes the feet of his disciples (see Jn. 13:1-11), or of the Good Samaritan (see Lk. 10:29-37).
The Eucharist gives us the experience of rediscovering the “Community”, and of “Encountering the community”. It is the laboratory of fraternity. This is why a Christian can never be content with personal prayer because there are times when the Community, Jesus’s friends, gather together to pray. This is the Eucharist. In this gathering, we listen to the Word and nourish ourselves on the Eucharist.
Prayer
Lord Jesus,
with your instructions to follow the man with the pitcher of water,
you make me understand that I am to follow in the footsteps of those who seriously live their baptism:
help me imitate those who aim high in life.
Lord Jesus,
by inviting me to the upper room,
you ask me to abandon a flat way of life:
help me be carried away with the desires you place in my heart.
Lord Jesus,
by giving me bread and wine, Your Body and Your Blood,
you teach me that life is either a gift, or it is not life:
nourished by You, help me to make my life an offering pleasing to the Father.
Lord Jesus,
in gathering your disciples around the table,
you teach me that there is no Eucharist without the community,
and there is no community without service.
Help me to make my life a Eucharistic life.
(Prayer by Father Andrea Vena)
