Reflection by Frances Flatman on the Readings for Corpus Christi
Most of us have been brought up with the understanding that we are ‘saved’ by Jesus. Understanding what this means is however rather a different matter, as the degree of involvement different Christians have with Jesus varies enormously. The Feast of Corpus Christi, a Catholic feast, tries to bring home the enormity of God’s involvement in our lives through the Son. My guess is that like the Jews who found this beyond the Pale, many of us today find it very difficult to get to grips with the implications of Jesus’ life and saving death and the vision of God it holds out to us.
Our Reading from Deuteronomy (8:2-3.14-16) was a similar reminder to Israel. They had been given the 10 Commandments and the writers, priests from the Jerusalem Temple, were at pains to spell out its meaning lest Israel left the straight road. Throughout our passage and other sections, Deuteronomy lays heavy insistence on ‘obedience’. Indeed, its earlier (and subsequent history) would remind them that they continually turned away from the God who rescued them from slavery in Egypt. Our story reminds them of God’s continual care and provision throughout the forty years in the wilderness as they got to know God, how he continually rescued them, fed them with manna and quail, gave them water, and was with them day and night in cloud and fire. The fact is stressed time and time again in this document – Israel is called to obedience, something they found almost impossible to fulfil, yet still God maintained his care for his chosen, God does not give up on Israel.
Yet we know that Jesus taught his followers something different. In Judaism, God was always distant, but in Jesus God has come amazingly close. Born a fully human being, he lived out his earthly life after the pattern of God the Father with overwhelming generosity and self-gift. His empathy with the Father was such that he could work miracles, and his outreach to humanity one in which he always put others before himself as he lived out the life of God made man. In John’s Gospel (6:51-58) we are given an insight into the depth of this relationship in this great ‘I Am’ statement, linking Jesus totally to the Father as he uses the divine name. What he then goes on to do in this lengthy teaching is to spell out the relationship we gain through his total gift of himself. As God has no attributes, no degree of cleverness – or not; no limited way of being as we do; we know that when the members of the Trinity give to us of themselves, they give without limit, in full. There can be no partiality, no degree to their gifting. So Jesus speaks to his disciples of his giving himself as their/our food, that which we eat, which we quite literally consume, take into our bodies so that he becomes part of us in the sense that other foods sustain life; indeed, become the very stuff of life.
Jews of course, remembered the manna from heaven, but Jesus’ teaching remains quite different. Just as his gift of himself is entire and complete, so is our reception of him. At the Last Supper Jesus made very clear what this meant ‘My body – for you’. Our relationship to him is therefore not something partial, something for a while or with small meaning. Christ has flung himself into our being just as the Father flung him into creation, whole and entire, and therefore we are now part of Christ. Later generations enacting this experience called it the Eucharist (thanksgiving); their fundamental way of knowing Jesus and being known by him. In John’s Gospel Jesus uses this extraordinary imagery of our eating Christ, indeed he emphasises it using the term ‘eat’, mostly with the Greek ‘fago’ but then later switching to another verb ‘trogo’ literally ‘to chew’, to consume – such is the depth of our being taken into the divine. ‘Whoever eats me will draw life from me’. Eating is so fundamental to our existence that Jesus deliberately picks a symbol which we can all understand.
His Last Supper, which was at the celebration of the Jewish Passover, when Jews relived their escape from slavery in Egypt was/is never what we mean by ‘memorial or remembering’ that hazy thing. Every Jew is there at that original moment of Jewish remaking, which is why the Greek uses the word ‘anamnesis’. Clearly Jesus understood his usurpation of Passover and his sacrifice on the cross as the making of every Christian. It is our solemn pact with God the Son, risen from the dead, who by God’s power takes us into divinity. Quite clearly then, as Jesus makes clear Jn 6:52-57, he is not talking about cannibalism, the literal eating of his flesh, but, as with the saving event of the original Passover, a symbolic act of defining significance; and by taking his disciples through their Jewish roots in Passover and that manna – so deeply reminiscent of their becoming the chosen of God - Jesus now, via bread in the Eucharist, makes us the New Israel. It is a truly staggering idea, and along with the whole meaning of the Incarnation opens out for us the enormity of God’s will for us, truly accomplished by Christ Jesus.
Paul, writing in the early 50’s to the unruly Corinthians, (1 Cor 10:16-17) gave the understanding of the oral tradition of the Eucharist which he had learned; (11:23-26) and here in our Reading he labours to help this class conscious and divided community explore its meaning through another usage of the bread metaphor, ‘The fact that there is only one loaf means that, though there are many of us, we form a single body because we all share in this one loaf.’ Jesus’ dying on the cross has made of us a unity; He has taken us into his life, the one he shares eternally with Father and Spirit and we, celebrators of his self-gift in the Incarnation, are here and now called to act with that same self-sacrificial care for our fellow men and women as we now are his body on earth. It’s an invitation we cannot resist, or if we do we can have no part in him. Corpus Christi is both a supreme act of worship as we glorify God the Son who became human for us, and as we are called to live out the unity he won for us as sons and daughters in the Son.
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