The Solemnity of Corpus Christi: Beyond the Carousel

A few weeks ago I came upon a beautiful carousel. Instant reflections of early childhood hit me as I remember the merry- go-rounds I would go on at Seaside Heights back in the day when the term “Jersey Shore” had no connotations of immorality.

Jun 19, 2014

Most Holy Body and Blood (Year A)
Readings: Deuteronomy 8:2-3, 14B-16A;
1 Corinthians 10:16-17
Gospel: John 6:51-58

A few weeks ago I came upon a beautiful carousel. Instant reflections of early childhood hit me as I remember the merry- go-rounds I would go on at Seaside Heights back in the day when the term “Jersey Shore” had no connotations of immorality. I don’t know if modern carousels still do this, they probably don’t because of safety issues, but back when I was little, everyone would try to be on a horse or animal on the outside of the circle. That was so they could reach for the ring. Children would spend the entire ride hoping to get the ring. It wasn’t easy. For one thing you had to be brave, at least for a five or six year old, and stretch your arm as far as you could while holding onto your horse. But if you were successful and reached beyond yourself, there was a reward in store, usually a free ride or something.

The people that Jesus speaks to in the Gospel reading for this week, from John 6, were satisfied with receiving free bread. The day before Jesus had multiplied loaves and fishes. Now they wanted more free food. Jesus told them that He would give them bread beyond their imagination. He would give them His body and blood. They had to be willing to reach out for it, though, and accept His gift. They had to stretch beyond their physical senses and let Him feed them with the Living Bread that we call the Eucharist.

Many of them were not interested. They were satisfied with going around in circles on the merry-go-rounds of their lives. They did not believe that there was a far greater gift beyond the physical which was being offered to them. They had reminded the Lord about the Manna that God provided for their ancestors in the time of Moses. Jesus pointed out that those ancestors still died. The bread He would give would be for everlasting life. Were they willing to stretch their lives and reach for the spiritual gift?

Are we? We are called by the Lord to eat His Body and Drink His Blood. On the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, we have to ask ourselves whether we do reach out for Him, or whether we just perform a ritual action in Church with as much enthusiasm as our standing, kneeling and sitting at various moments during the Mass. Today’s celebration is given to us to remind us what we are doing and Who we are receiving when we go to communion. We have got to fight against the spiritual laziness that relegates the Eucharist to a sacramental, as though taking communion is on the same level as making the sign of the cross with Holy Water. We have to prepare to receive the Lord, not just in the prayers we say moments before Mass but in the life we lead the week before Mass. We have to celebrate the Presence within us, not just in the pews after communion but in the way we treat others, with the Kindness of the Lord.

The fundamental action of Jesus’s life, the reason why He became one of us, was the gift of Himself in His passion, death and resurrection: the Paschal Event. The gift of His sacrificial love re-established our union with God and our capacity to share in His immortality. Or to put it simply: because He died for us we can live forever with Him.

When Jesus gave us his Body and Blood the night before He died and when He gives us his Body and Blood everytime we receive comamunion, the Lord gives us the total sacrifice of Himself to his Father. “This is my Body which shall be given up for you. This is the cup of my Blood, the new and everlasting covenant that shall be shed for you and for all until the end of time.” When we receive the Eucharist, Jesus is present as the Servant of God who in his sacrificial death is saving us all. Right here, right now. Today’s Gospel states: ‘The one who feeds on my flesh and drinks my blood has life eternal.” In the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist we receive Jesus saving His people.

We receive Christ strengthening us and transforming our joys and sorrows into prayers to his Father. Sometimes we are full of the joy of the Resurrection, sometimes the sorrow of the Passion, but always we are strengthened by the One who gives us His body and blood.

In the Eucharist Jesus is within us, nourishing us. He comes closer to us than our skin. He experiences our joy and our sorrow. He knows our needs before we can express them. He builds up our faith life, our spiritual life, our eternal life.

He is there for us, but we have to reach out, stretch ourselves beyond our physical limitations and take the gift He holds out to us. We cannot be satisfied with just receiving communion. We have to let His Presence transform us. When we allow Christ to be our lives, we can go beyond the carousel of life and accept the prize of eternal life. -- By Fr Joseph A Pellegrino

Thoughts of the Early Church

My flesh is real food and my blood is real drink.
You see on God’s altar bread and a cup. That is what the evidence of your eyes tells you, but your faith requires you to believe that the bread is the body of Christ, the cup the blood of Christ. In these few words we can say perhaps all that faith demands.

Faith, however, seeks understanding; so you may now say to me: “You have told us what we have to believe, but explain it so that we can understand it, because it is quite possible for someone to think along these lines: We know from whom our Lord Jesus Christ took his flesh — it was from the Virgin Mary.

As a baby, he was suckled, he was fed, he developed, he came to a young man’s estate. He was slain on the cross, he was taken down from it, he was buried, he rose again on the third day. On the day of his own choosing, he ascended to heaven, taking his body with him; and it is from heaven that he will come to judge the living and the dead.

But now that he is there, seated at the right hand of the Father, how can bread be his body? And the cup, or rather what is in the cup, how can that be his blood?”

These things, my friends, are called sacraments, because our eyes see in them one thing, our understanding another. Our eyes see the material form; our understanding, its spiritual effect.

If, then, you want to know what the body of Christ is, you must listen to what the Apostle tells the faithful: “Now you are the body of Christ, and individually you are members of it.”

If that is so, it is the sacrament of yourselves that is placed on the Lord’s altar, and it is the sacrament of yourselves that you receive.

You reply “Amen” to what you are, and thereby agree that such you are. You hear the words “The body of Christ” and you reply “Amen.” Be, then, a member of Christ’s body, so that your “Amen” may accord with the truth.

Yes, but why all this in bread? Here let us not advance any ideas of our own, but listen to what the Apostle says over and over again when speaking of this sacrament: “Because there is one loaf, we, though we are many, form one body.”

Let your mind assimilate that and be glad, for there you will find unity, truth, piety, and love. He says, one loaf. And who is this one loaf? “We, though we are many, form one body.”

Now bear in mind that bread is not made of a single grain, but of many. Be, then, what you see, and receive what you are.

So much for what the Apostle says about the bread. As for the cup, what we have to believe is quite clear, although the Apostle does not mention it expressly.

Just as the unity of the faithful, which holy Scripture describes in the words: “They were of one mind and heart” in God, should be like the kneading together of many grains into one visible loaf, so with the wine.

Think how wine is made. Many grapes hang in a cluster, but their juice flows together into an indivisible liquid.

It was thus that Christ our Lord signified us, and his will that we should belong to him, when he hallowed the sacrament of our peace and unity on his altar.

Anyone, however, who receives this sacrament of unity and does not keep the bond of peace, does not receive it to his profit, but as a testimony against himself. -- Augustine (354-430)

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