Homily for the Solemnity of Corpus Christi

It’s been rather warm recently. One thing I’ve found moving from being a

child to an adult is that I can cope a lot more easily with extremes of

temperature. When you’re a child, whilst you can enjoy warm weather, if you

get too hot you can begin to get irritable and moody, and it can even be the case

when you’re an adult as well.

In the Gospel today, it doesn’t say what the temperature was. In the version in

St Mark’s Gospel though, it says that the people sat down on green grass,

which implies it was spring, as in the summer the grass would have turned to

dry straw in all the heat. But there’s another reason that Our Lord could have

been tempted to be miserable, or annoyed – just before the start of today’s

extract, the Apostles had just come back from going out in pairs, spreading the

Gospel, and now needed time to talk about it and to rest. They all want some

time together, alone, and then all these people turn up. Have you ever had the

situation at home where someone looks through the window and spots an

uninvited guest coming up the drive and says, oh no, it’s so-and-so! Did the

Apostles respond in this way? Even if they did, I don’t think Our Lord did. So

He speaks to them of the kingdom of God and cures those who need healing.

Then, at the end of the day, maybe one of the Twelve thinks, at last, we can get

rid of them! Master, send them away to get food and find somewhere to stay

the night. It’s one of those clever moments where they can look like they have

the crowd’s best interests at heart, but in fact they’re glad to get some peace

and quiet for themselves. But no! Jesus doesn’t dismiss them. And now it’s

time for a great miracle that will keep them there a good bit longer.

This miracle, though, isn’t just about Christ’s ability to multiply food, or even

to show that He can take the little we have and use it beyond our wildest

imaginings. There’s also Eucharistic language buried in there. He took the five

loaves, blessed them, broke them and gave them. Heard those words before?

Christ doesn’t want to send the people away, even when everything began from

an inconvenient moment. He didn’t say to the crowds at the start of the

passage, “We’re busy at the moment, so come back another day”, and neither

does He use the lateness and the lack of food now as an excuse to get rid of

them. He is so welcoming and inviting of the crowds, and that great love He

had to share the Gospel, heal those who were sick and to feed them is found to

an even greater extent in the Eucharist.

We’re in Year C, and we heard on Palm Sunday, as it recounted the scene at the

Last Supper, that Christ said to them “I have earnestly desired to eat this

Passover with you before I suffer” (Luke 22:15). Other translations have

similar expressions, along the lines of “how I have desired” or “how I have

longed” to eat this Passover. Christ desired to celebrate the first Eucharist more

than a couple might desire their wedding. So great was His desire to feed us on

His Body and Blood! And the Book of Revelation, also called The Apocalypse,

shows us that the Eucharist is a wedding feast between God and His Chosen

People, the Church. To receive Holy Communion is a form of consummation

of the marriage, with all the implications that we need to be faithful to this

marriage. The Eucharist is really Christ whom we receive, just as at a wedding,

the bride marries a real man, not an inflatable lookalike. When we celebrate

Mass and receive Holy Communion, it’s a deep celebration of love between

God and His Church, His People. He is completely open and genuine with us,

and we need to respond in the same way. He shows us how much He loves us,

and we show Him how much we love Him.

It follows that because the Host, after the Consecration, is Christ, that we treat

Him with the utmost care and reverence. At the end of today’s Gospel, they

picked up what was left over, twelve baskets of broken pieces. Thankfully it

hasn’t happened here, but I can remember in one of my previous parishes

someone finding a host on the floor, underneath one of the benches. For

whatever reason, someone had received communion, but then taken the host

out of his or her mouth and left it on the floor. It seems someone didn’t realise

or appreciate Who the Host is, or else they wouldn’t have done that. But we

also need to be careful, without going to extremes of bringing magnifying

glasses to church, we need to be careful of any crumbs when we receive Holy

Communion, that they don’t end up on the floor either. If you break a Host into

two, Christ is still equally present in each half. You can break it again and

again, and the same applies. The question is, how small do the fragments need

to get before it is no longer Christ? Bread is not a molecular substance, so we

can’t go down to the molecular level. But it is possible to give someone a

small piece of the Host, and for that person to have received Holy Communion.

The Lord is very patient with us, as He demonstrated by not sending the crowds

away. He desires us to receive Him in Holy Communion. It’s His great gift to

us of Himself, as part of the marriage feast between Him and His Church. And

that Gift, so that He may live in us and we in Him, like a marriage, needs to be

treated with utmost care and reverence. The Giver is the Gift.

Curious about exploring things further?  If you would like to ask further questions about the topics raised in these homilies (or maybe think it wasn’t explained too well!), please feel free to e-mail Fr Michael at stjoseph.thame@rcaob.org.uk