I was asked the other day why we make such a fuss about the presence of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament when Jesus is actually present in everything, not least as he said whenever two or three are gathered in his name. You can hear and see me give this Homily on https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZY-7pCUDBM
The answer must be that although he is present in a general way in and through everything that exists, and we should certainly acknowledge that; he is present in a special and specific way in the Bread and Wine over which his words have been said. And the specific is that he said these words at a particularly crucial time for him and for his first disciples, linking them for ever to the moment when he offered himself as a sacrifice to bring salvation to the whole world. So St Paul doesn’t just say, as in our 2nd Reading (1 Cor 11:23-26) that this is a memorial – a bringing into the present – of Jesus; but more, that “Every time you eat this bread and drink this cup you are proclaiming his death.”
In a way of course, the death of Jesus that offers life to all who are open to him, is an eternal moment, a moment that is present for everyone in every age; but nevertheless he chose to give his followers a special way of proclaiming that death in and through the bread and wine taken and blessed and shared in imitation of him. This is why the greatest celebration of his gift is on Holy Thursday night; but inevitably on that night the Watch in Gethsemane and following him to the Cross on Good Friday tend to overshadow what he did at the Last Supper; and so eventually in the 13th Century, at the suggestion of St Thomas Aquinas, a Feast to celebrate the joy of this gift to us was created - most properly called in English the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ. – usually called Corpus Christi.
So this is why we make a fuss about the Blessed Sacrament, not only when it is present before us on the altar at a Mass, but also afterwards wherever it is kept in the Church. Rather than use the ordinary word “kept”, we use the word “reserved” – the Reserved Sacrament - which somehow conveys the reverence we should feel for this precious gift that he has given us. And we reserve the Sacrament both for distribution to those who cannot be at Mass because they are ill and need his special Presence; and perpetually somewhere in the Church where a light shines so that we can kneel or bow and acknowledge that Presence.
Mind you, there’s little point in acknowledging his Presence in this way, if we don’t acknowledge him in our hearts and minds; and for that might I suggest that the crucial response is one of profound thanksgiving. It is quite significant that the way Jesus blessed that bread and wine at the Last Supper is basically by giving thanks over them; and indeed although the phrase “Give thanks” doesn’t appear in our Gospel, (Luke 9:11-17) scholars will tell us that the way Jesus would have “Said the blessing” over “The five loaves and two fish” would also have been by giving thanks. It is therefore not an accident that when the Bread and Wine has been placed on the Altar, the Priest, after greeting the people, immediately says “Let us give thanks to the Lord our God” to which all reply “It is right and just.” Then at every Mass the Priest says “It is truly right and just, our duty and our salvation, always and everywhere to give you thanks.” Our problem is that hearing these words at every Mass, we fail to notice how significant they are, especially the words “Always and everywhere.” Equally, we fail to notice why we give thanks this way “Always and everywhere”, for to do this in memory of him is both “Our duty” AND (I stress the AND) “And our salvation.”
This is why the other title of the Mass is the Eucharist, the word which means Thankyou in Greek. In modern Greek it is “Efharisto,” but it’s the same word, used to make clear that of all the ways of giving thanks to God for everything we have been given, the best way is to take part in the Great Thanksgiving given to us by Jesus – that we normally call Holy Mass. But it is also important to realise that our thanksgiving to God should not be confined to Mass, but should spill out from the Mass into every part of our lives. Read St Paul’s Letters, and you will see him often urging his fellow Christians always to give thanks. But why is it only once that he actually mentions the Eucharist as the supreme way of giving thanks – in the passage for our 2nd Reading today? The answer is that those early Christians took it for granted that that is what they had to do. As we hear in the Acts of the Apostles (2:46) “Day by day, attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes, they partook of food with glad and generous hearts,” and so St Paul only mentions it when some of the Christians in Corinth are misunderstanding what this daily breaking of bread was meant to be like. Read the whole of 1 Corinthians 11:17-34 to get the full picture.
You see in their society, rich people often entertained others by providing food for them; but when they did so their rich friends sat in one place and got the best food, the middle ranking people sat lower down and got less, and the poor and the slaves got the worst, not least because their work meant that they arrived late, way after the rich people had started eating. The Christians in Corinth had to be told firmly that this was NOT the way the Christian Breaking of Bread should take place, for this meal was a holy meal, a special ceremony, in which those who arrive early had to wait for everyone else to arrive, so that all could take part together as one family under God. This was a dramatic and radical challenge to the normal way rich people, who often provided their house as a place for the Christians to meet, ate their meals; and St Paul made clear that this spilled over into the ordinary life of every Christian as he writes to the Galatians (3:28) “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female ; for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” It is still the same today as we go up to receive Communion, for when we do so there is no difference shown to the rich as opposed to the poor etc. All receive from the one bread, for we are all one Body and we all give thanks in this special way together.
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