June 4, 2010
Sunday Scripture
The Most Holy Body and Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ
BY FATHER DONALD DILGER
The primary celebration of the Body and Blood of Christ is Holy Thursday taken together with Good Friday. This agrees with a response of the people to the invitation, “Let us proclaim the mystery of faith.” The response: “When we eat this bread and drink this blood we proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes.” The resurrection of Jesus is as important an element of the celebration of the Eucharist as is his death. Again a response of the faithful, “Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.” Both responses include the Christian faith and hope for the return of Jesus. Every celebration of the Eucharist looks to the past, to the present, and to the future.
There is an element of sadness connected with the commemoration of the Last Supper on Holy Thursday and its overshadowing by the death of Jesus commemorated in the liturgy of Good Friday. The feast of Corpus Christi traditionally overlooks the sadness and celebrates the joy of Christians being fed with “the bread of angels.” This is one of the titles of the Eucharist used in the eucharistic hymn, Sacris Solemniis, authored by Thomas Aquinas. The title, “Bread of Angels,” is first used in the Second Book of Esdras (100 B.C.) of the manna which nourished the Israelites in the wilderness.
The feast of Corpus Christi came about in this way. In 1209, a religious sister of Liege, (today in Belgium), experienced an oft-repeated vision of a full moon with one dark spot marring its beauty. Somehow she concluded that the moon represented the Church. The dark spot was the absence of a feast to honor the Body and Blood of Jesus reserved in the tabernacle, the Blessed Sacrament. The bishop of Liege in 1246 instituted such a feast for his diocese. Its observance spread throughout much of Europe especially in response to various attacks, explicit and implicit on the Real Presence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. Have times changed that much? A pastor of our own time refused a request in an RCIA class to say anything about transubstantiation or the Real Presence. Was this an excuse for his ignorance or a refusal to speak of something in which he no longer believed? After the archdeacon of Liege became Pope Urban IV in 1261, the feast of Corpus Christi was extended to the universal Church.
The gospel reading chosen for today is the feeding of five thousand people with the bread and fish miraculously multiplied by Jesus, Jesus had withdrawn into the wilderness in a kind of retreat for the apostles who just returned from a mission of preaching and healing. The crowds found out where they were and followed. Jesus made time for them — “spoke to them of the kingdom of God and cured those who needed healing.” Towards evening, the Twelve advised Jesus to send the crowds away to find lodging and food. Jesus says, “You give them something to eat!” They complain that they have only five loaves of bread and two fish, “or should we go and buy food for all these people?”
What happens next makes it clear that Luke has the Eucharist in mind, what he will later in the gospel and in Acts of Apostles call “the breaking of the bread.” Jesus, on this occasion uses the very words that he used in Luke’s version of the “Words of lnstitution,” at the Last Supper, “He took, blessed, broke, gave,” words which are still the essence of our various Eucharistic Prayers of the Mass. Jesus’ command to the disciples, “You give them something to eat” was fulfilled in his use of the apostles to distribute the food to the people. At the Last Supper, the command to the apostles and through them to the Church to feed the people as he fed them with his body and blood is expressed in Jesus’ words. “Do this in remembrance of me.”
This story of Abram’s punitive expedition against tribal chiefs to recover goods and people of which they had robbed him ends with an encounter between Abram and Melchizedek, king of Salem (Jerusalem), and “priest of the Most High God (El Elyon).” It was his prerogative to make an offering to his god. The fact that Abram gave Melchizedek a tenth of what he had regained from the tribal chiefs, Melchizedek’s use of bread and wine as an offering to El Elyon, and Psalm 110:4, (part of the response after today’s first reading) enabled the New Testament author of Hebrews to evolve Melchizedek into the originator of a priesthood superior to the Levitical priesthood of the Old Testament. Jesus is the high priest of this superior priesthood. Therefore our priests are ordained “according to the order of Melchizedek,” rather than inherit priesthood from their father according to the order of Levi.
Paul claimed that his revelation concerning Jesus came directly from Jesus himself. Therefore he writes, “I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you.” What follows is the oldest, (about the year 52 A.D.), narrative of what Jesus did at the Last Supper and what we were ordered by Jesus himself to do, when he said, “Do this in remembrance of me.”