Homily for the Vigil Mass of Corpus Christi

Readings for Year A:  Deuteronomy 8:2-16;  I Corinthians 10:16-17; John 6:51-58

Last night I walked down Whitehall, beautiful and surreal, under dark clouds. The cityscape of central London has for weeks now seemed like the set of an apocalyptic movie, at times deserted by all but police vans and helicopter ambulances. But as night fell, there was a new foreboding as the city prepared for a second weekend of protests by Black Lives Matter and the far right. The statues of great men were being boarded up – Charles I and Churchill, Gandhi and Mandela. A host of homeless people walking around, journalists with their cameras, people sleeping on the streets so they could participate in the protests today. What a backdrop for a Corpus Christi procession, I thought. I craved a vision of the Body of Christ present here in this place, at this moment…  

This great solemnity is our chance to celebrate the Body of Christ given us sacramentally in the Mass. It is hard to imagine a feast that appeals more to the Catholic imagination. We are people of the Eucharist. That is why the restrictions put in place to combat the coronavirus have so distorted our lives, cutting us from full sacramental communion with Christ. It’s why so many will be relieved to come back to churches on Monday morning, so at least they can pray once more before the Lord present in the tabernacle. 

But to speak of the body of Christ, is to evoke an even richer mystery than His real presence in the Eucharistic species. There is a deeper symbolism at work which points to the Church as the mystical body of Christ. Indeed, the Eucharist makes the Church by unifying us in the one bread as one body. Our sacramental practice of having hundreds of separate hosts can obscure the imagery which St Paul puts into such plain words, that by sharing in the one loaf, each of us is assimilated to that single loaf. To put it as its most provocative, at communion we don’t consume the Eucharist – it consumes us. 

Seeing the Church as one great body has inspired Christians over the ages to ask how they fit in as individuals. St Paul was the first to do this. For him, being part of the body of Christ meant first of all taking your direction from the Head of the body, Jesus Christ. And then accepting that you were just part of that body and giving your all to fulfilling your role, trusting that the one spirit held together all the different parts, the limbs, the organs and all the rest. Catholics who say there is only one way to be a Christian need to meditate on St Paul.  

Another theologian of the body of Christ who inspires and challenges us is St Teresa of Avila, who famously taught: 

Christ has no body now but yours. No hands, no feet on earth but yours. Yours are the eyes through which he looks compassion on this world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands through which he blesses all the world.  

We are His body, we the faithful people of God. The implications of that are profound and far-reaching. 

The body of Christ is black and white – and everything in between. When I receive communion, I am gathered in one flesh with people of all nations and cultures and ethnicities. To receive the Eucharist is a far stronger anti-racist gesture than taking the knee. It’s to say not only that Black Lives Matter but that I am throwing my lot in with them in the most consequential way possible. 

The body of Christ is male and female. When we receive communion, we express fundamental solidarity with women and men. One of the distortions inflicted on us by the coronavirus is that our live-streamed Masses have presented an exclusively male face of the Church, even more than usual, some might say. We shouldn’t underestimate how damaging that will have been to many people’s sense of belonging to the Church.  

The body of Christ includes saints and sinners. It is neither a community of the pure, nor a gathering of like-minded folk who do not need to be challenged to holiness. When I receive communion, I bind myself to the saints, but also, in a strange solidarity, to the great sinners of the Church’s past and present. That’s why instinctively we baulk at those who, very understandably, want to cleanse their identity by distancing themselves from those whose misdemeanours offend them.  

This is because the body of Christ is first and foremost mercy. Mercy to sinners. Mercy to people like you and me. We are none of us worthy to come up to communion. Union with the Son of God is not our entitlement. It’s pure, gracious gift. All of us are strangers in the house of the Lord.  

The body of Christ defies all our petty ideologies. It’s a divine interruption of our human way of proceeding. That’s what makes it bread for the hungry. That’s why, by becoming one body in Christ, we become bread for the world. By offering a vision of the life human beings are called to share. By nourishing hope at a time when hope is in short supply. And by quite literally feeding the poor, as this parish has been doing over the last few weeks in Trafalgar Square, alongside other Catholic communities and with the Sikhs, who also believe that God calls them to feed the world. 

A controversy broke out a few months ago about how many Catholics in America believed in the real presence. That is regrettable. Catholics need to be grounded in a solid understanding of their faith. 

But isn’t it a greater scandal to understand the real presence and to deny it by your conduct? By being racist or misogynistic, by having no regard for the destitute, by omitting to be bread for others?  

God didn’t lead Israel into the desert so He could give them miraculous bread, but to create a holy nation. The manna was nutrition for a long journey of purification. The goal, the endpoint of the pilgrimage, was the Promised Land. And so it goes for us. The body of Christ, given us in the Eucharist, is food to sustain us on our progress towards to Mount Zion, to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, to the assembly of the first-born enrolled in heaven, and to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood that speaks more graciously than the blood of Abel. 

Fr Damian Howard SJ