Body and Blood of Christ 2023
Deuteronomy 8: 2-3, 14-16; 1Cor 10: 16-17; John 6: 51-58
Many moons ago, probably in the early 70s, if I remember correctly, there was a television documentary about the Catholic Church entitled “Rome, Leeds, the Desert,” an intriguing title, you may think. It focused on the Little Brothers and little Sisters of Jesus, congregations founded by Rene Voillaume, who was inspired by the example of St. Charles de Foucauld, who lived as a hermit in the Algerian desert, and who was killed by Berber tribesmen during the First World War, as they suspected him of being an agent of the French government.
The particular group on whom the documentary concentrated lived in Leeds, where they worked in the factories of those days, but they also spent time in the desert, both the metaphorical desert of intense prayer, and the literal desert in North Africa, where they made an annual retreat. Rome featured as what one might call the HQ of the Church.
What struck me most forcibly about the programme was the presenter’s conclusion. “The most common expression used by Catholics, “he said, “is the Body of Christ: the Body of Christ in the Eucharist, and the Body of Christ which is the Church”. And I found myself thinking “By George, he’s got it!”
This presenter had hit the bullseye of what the Catholic Church is, and is about. We receive the Body of Christ, and so we become the Body of Christ. We owe this insight firstly to St. Paul, who devotes much of chapters 10-12 of his First Letter to the Corinthians to an analysis of the Church as the Body of Christ, and to the Eucharist.
Those two sentences which we have heard this morning summarise Paul’s teaching on the subject. He first reminds us of the nature of the Eucharist, as a communion with the Body and Blood of Christ, before stating that our sharing in the one bread which is the Body of Christ makes us the Body of Christ.
It is the Eucharist which makes us what we are: without it, we atrophy and die, our membership of the Body failing and withering. Hence, I was astounded by a letter which appeared in the Tablet, shortly after the restrictions imposed during the pandemic had been lifted.
One gentleman wrote that he had followed Mass on line during that pandemic, and that he intended to continue doing so, as the standard of preaching and liturgy was higher than he encountered in his own parish. WHAT? WHAT? WHAT? WAS HE SERIOUS?
He clearly had no conception of what the Mass or the Church are about. The Mass is not, first and foremost, an aesthetic experience, designed to satisfy us, or even instruct us, from a distance. It is the gathering of God’s people in the flesh to become what we are, the Body of Christ, by participating in the self-offering of Christ and receiving Christ in the Body and the Blood.
“If you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you shall not have life in you,” says Jesus the Christ in the Eucharistic Discourse of John chapter 6, part of which you have heard today. Did this gentleman think that he could receive communion through a television screen or what? He might experience excellent liturgy, at second hand; he might be edified and instructed by homilies of quality; but he would, and will, wither spiritually by absenting himself from the gathering of God’s people, and by failing to receive the Body and Blood of Christ.
Of course homilies are often poor: of course the current translation of the Mass is turgid, but that is not the point. We are called to be part of the Body of Christ, along with all the other messy, sinful, imperfect, unappealing people who form that Body: if we absent ourselves, and decline to receive the Body, we shall cease to be the Body.
One final story by way of illustration. It is the true account of an Englishman who lived for some time in India. One Sunday, he attended the local Anglican cathedral, where the liturgy was magnificent, the altar staff splendidly arrayed, and the great and the good of the expatriate community present in force. The following Sunday, he attended the Catholic church, where things were far less aesthetically pleasing, and, as he said, “the place was full of Indians”. “This” said the man, “is the Body of Christ” and he subsequently became a Catholic and, eventually, a priest.
Of course we want better liturgy and better preaching, but in the last analysis they are not what matters. The Body of Christ in the Eucharist, the Body of Christ which is the Church—that is what we are all about.
