June 11, 2023 (The Body and Blood of Christ)

by Fr. Xavier Lavagetto, O.P.

[This is the text composed by the homilist prior to delivering the homily.]

They quarreled: “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” Some quarrel still; it has divided the Christian world since the Reformation: Is the Eucharist real or a symbol? Do you adore or pray a holy moment?

John’s Greek is graphically realist; it literally reads: “How can this man give us his flesh to gnaw?” … Gnawing, now that is an intense image! … Grislier yet for Jewish minds, is being told to drink his blood. Jesus is hardcore; he insists even to the point of people walking away!

With that kind of language floating around, is it any wonder the Romans called Christians cannibals? …

Imagine the pagans’ disappointment when they discovered it was seemingly ordinary bread and wine.

Pliny the Younger wrote to the Emperor Trajan about 112 AD:

The sum and substance of their fault … had been that they were accustomed to meet on a fixed day before dawn and sing responsively a hymn to Christ as to a god, and to bind themselves by oath, not to some crime, but not to commit fraud, theft, or adultery, not falsify their trust, nor to refuse to return a trust when called upon to do so. When this was over, it was their custom …to assemble again to partake of food, but ordinary and innocent food.

Yet the early Christians vehemently insisted that it was the self-same flesh and blood of Christ.

Ignatius of Antioch, a few years earlier, wrote against those who thought Jesus was only divine but not physically human. He was a phantasm. Ignatius wrote:

“They have no concern for love, none for the widow, none for the orphan, none for the oppressed, none for the prisoner or the one released, none for the hungry or thirsty. They abstain from the Eucharist and prayer because they refuse to acknowledge that the Eucharist is the self-same flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ, that suffered for our sins and the Father, by his goodness, raised up. Therefore, those who deny the good gift of God perish in their contentiousness. It would be more to their advantage to love so that they might also rise up.”

Justin the Martyr is no less intense. He had the chutzpah to admonish the Emperor for persecuting Christians. He wrote:

“We do not receive these as common bread and common drink; but just as Jesus Christ our Savior, having been made flesh by the word of God, had both flesh and blood for our salvation, so likewise have we learned that the food over which thanks (eucharistia) has been given by the prayer of the word which comes from him, and by which our blood and flesh are nourished through a change is the Flesh and the Blood of the same incarnate Jesus.

The Eucharistic bread and wine is clearly a symbol of bread and wine, but it is a unique symbol in that it has been changed and transmuted into Jesus’ flesh and blood. It is miracle.

The Word became flesh and was sacrificed to redeem our very flesh and blood and the entire creation.

But it is not sacrifice as most people imagine it. In most dictionaries, a sacrifice means “to give up, renounce, injure, or destroy.” (Mariam Webster) That definition enshrines a Protestant notion of penal substitution; Jesus’s death propitiates; it calms a wrathful God. … Thank you, John Calvin.

There is a slight problem! … It makes Jesus a good cop taking our punishment, while the Father is the bad cop demanding that someone pay. … Just what I don’t need, a schizophrenic god! … Jesus’s death is not the penalty paid to the Father, but the Father’s very mercy pouring his divine life into our death.

If your image of the Father has a different face than Jesus, you’ve got the wrong God. …. Jesus is the self-expression of the Father in our humanity.

Let’s escape America's Mel Gibson-type fascination with enduring pain and suffering. Let’s hear a Jewish insight from my favorite Rabbi, Lord Jonathan Sacks:

We love what we are willing to make sacrifices for. That is why, when they were a nation of farmers and shepherds, the Israelites demonstrated their love of God by bringing Him a symbolic gift of their flocks and herds, their grain and fruit; that is, their livelihood. To love is to thank. To love is to want to bring an offering to the Beloved. To love is to give. Sacrifice is the choreography of love.

To love is to give! … Sacrifice is first and foremost “a giving” to a beloved. … Sacrifice means in Latin, to make holy; God wants to make this world holy with his very presence, with his own holiness.

We’ve been told, but too often fail to absorb that “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son.” (John 3:16)

Christian sacrifice originates in the eternal total self-giving and total receiving that is the Triune God. Their love spills over into an exuberance that created a universe and created and called you. He calls you to participate in the Trinty’s love.

The first sacrifice is the Father’s “gifting” his Son to you in his humanity. The second part is the Son’s response, his giving himself, his offering himself to the Father for the sake of all. The third moment of that sacrifice is our yes, our giving ourselves. The Spirit unites us with the Son, and we become the Body of Christ. The Son prays in us, and we in him in one self-offering to the Father for the sake of all. Spirit of Jesus prays in us, and we come alive. United to his humanity, we begin to share in his divinity. Mass is not a passive moment but demands our intentional offering ourselves with Jesus to the Father for the sake of all.

When will we say yes to being God’s beloved? … That’s a beautiful question! … Say yes to the love that begins in the Father. ... A love unanswered does not become mutual love! … A love unanswered is not love!

The Son didn’t come just to forgive our sins. How far does that get us? … God does not want merely to return us to some status quo ante sin; God wants to redeem the whole of creation by becoming, in St. Paul’s words, “all in all.” He wishes to transform you, as Paul explains

“… all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.” (2 Cor 3:17-18)

When I was a child, I was so focused on one aspect of the Mass that I missed the main point. … I saw only an unbloody sacrifice; I saw my guilt loud and clear. I missed seeing the love and the life given. I suspect others had the same fixation since so few went to communion. I saw the Mass in the light of the Crucifixion, but I missed seeing the Crucifixion in the light of Jesus’ Passover supper, a feast of freedom and new life.

People often pray to inform or persuade God. … As if he doesn’t know or doesn’t care? … Give God the prayer of quiet to inform and persuade you! … But more. …Embrace the encounter of the sacrament to be touched and fed with Jesus. Don’t Jesus receive it; savor it.

Sin, in this view, is not “a something” but a distancing oneself from God. … It is the emptiness of alienation from God and others. … That’s not removed by a forgiving but by a filling! Alienation ends with a union with Jesus.

In Hebrew, the word sacrifice means “to draw near.” Cleary it was the drawing near to God to offer a sacrifice.” But Jesus flipped that: God in Jesus is drawing near to you. Thus he says: “Take, eat ..” and “Take, drink …” He doesn’t want your soul only, he wants to fill your whole being. He doesn’t only die for us; he pours his life into us.

In the early Church, communion was always received in the hand. Pause a moment as you hold him. St. Augustine said: No one eats that flesh without first adoring. He then brings it home to you: “Behold who you are; become what you receive!” ….

Before communion pause to adore, behold, and then become what you receive …The Body of Christ.