THE MOST HOLY BODY AND BLOOD OF CHRIST [C] (Gn 14:18-20, 1Cor 11:23-26, Lk 9: 11b-17)

The Solemnity of Easter was the revelation of Jesus as the Son of God and his oneness with God the Father. At the end of the Easter season we celebrated the Pentecost, the revelation of the Holy Spirit as the third person of the Trinity and His oneness with the Father and Son. Last Sunday we had the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, the worship of the One God in three different persons. And, today we have the Feast of the Most holy Body and Blood of Christ, honoring the sacrifice of Christ.

At the heart of the system of worship in the Old Testament is sacrifice: the offering to God of the best that humanity has to give Him. Much of the book of Leviticus is given over to setting out how the people of Israel are to worship God with sacrifice. Indeed, from the beginning of Genesis, the importance of right worship is a theme we find in the narrative: there is the story of Cain and Abel and the offerings they make, and we encounter too the slightly mysterious figure of Melchizedek, priest of the Most High God, and his offering of bread and wine about which we read in today’s first reading. He is the first priest mentioned in the Bible, and he comes long before the Jewish priesthoods of Aaron and Levi are established. Melchizedek is therefore an example of religion before Scripture. Human beings existed long before recorded history; the stories in the Bible are actually very recent in the grand sweep of human existence. Melchizedek is a sign of God’s care for human beings before he chose his Chosen People. In Psalm 101, Jesus Christ is predicted — a king from before the dawn of time who will outlast time, and a priest from before priesthood whose sacrifice will end all sacrifice.

Alongside those texts which speak of the need to worship with sacrifice, we also find passages of the Old Testament which treat sacrifice as a much more ambivalent phenomenon. ‘I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice,’ (Hosea 6:6), ‘the knowledge and love of God is greater than burnt offerings.’ In Psalm 49(50), animal sacrifice seems almost to be mocked: ‘Do you think I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?’ Sacrifice – the attempt to give anything, even what we hold most valuable, to God – is always going to fall short, because at the most fundamental level we don’t have anything to give Him which is not already His. Thus, one of the dangers of offering sacrifice is that we can think that, by giving God something valuable, we have in some sense ‘bought Him off’ and done our bit in relation to God, so that we can then act as we choose without further reference to Him. This is the attitude Isaiah criticizes when he says, ‘bring your worthless offerings no more’ (1:13), and ‘stop doing evil! Learn to do right; seek justice and correct the oppressor, defend the fatherless and plead the case of the widow’ (1:16-17).

But if the offering of sacrifice is so problematic, or liable to misunderstanding as it seems to be from the history of the Old Testament, why is it nonetheless such an important element of the worship? In the context of today’s feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, we can find part of the answer in the sacrifice of Christ, the perfection of humans’ worship of God. The Old Testament teaches us that sacrifice – despite the dangers of misunderstanding and abuse – is important because that helps us to understand what Christ does for us on the Cross. His offering, unlike human beings’ earlier attempts, really is perfect and sufficient, because the life he freely offers to the Father is the life he shares with the Father from all eternity, an offering more precious than the whole of the universe or anything in it and an offering which is as much the Son’s to give, as it is the Father’s to receive.

Because Christ’s offering is perfect, a worthy sacrifice to give to God, human beings, in Christ, can now offer truly acceptable worship to God. Not only has Christ offered himself, once for all, as a perfect and living sacrifice, but he has given us the means to participate in that sacrifice in a manner appropriate to our earthly life, allowing us – the Church, his Body – to offer his Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity to the Father under the appearance of bread and wine. The sacrifice of the Mass is the source and summit of our Christian life because it simply is the praise and worship of God in which the life of heaven consists. As the book of Revelation presents, there is a constant praise and worship of God by the denizens of Heaven.

The Eucharist follows this pattern. There is constant praise and worship of God for giving us a second birth through Christ who sacrificed himself for us and shares himself with us. How Jesus shares himself is well represented in the miracle of the Gospel today. Jesus took the loaves and fishes that the Apostles gave him, and he multiplied them.

We give to God simple bread and wine. Then, through the ministry of the priest, Jesus takes these gifts, blesses them, and transforms them into his very self, his real presence. Our offerings represent our lives and work. Our offerings are both the fruits of our labor, and the means by which we stay alive. He wants us to give him our lives, our work, our resources, our talents, our time, thereby our whole week’s life, every efforts our week becomes a sacrifice. He will transform what we give to him with his grace, and make them blossom in ways far beyond we could ever imagine. We should never live it as an empty ritual or dry obligation.

When we bring our everything to him for his blessing: Our sicknesses, spiritual and physical, he can bless us with healing, spiritual or physical, as he sees best for our souls. St. Cyril of Alexandria said. “The Savior will multiply the little you have beyond expectation.”

To give due honor to the Body and Blood of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament involves those ritual actions by which we express our faith in the real presence, like worthy celebrating the Mass, offering everything without restraint, taking time communicating with Jesus after the reception of the Holy communion, spending time before the blessed sacrament etc., but more than that, it involves living a life which expresses that mystery of God’s love for humanity through the Eucharist, we share. So, on this feast of the Eucharist, let’s ask for the grace to help us grow in appreciation of the most real presence of God among us.