Corpus Christi

Sunday, June 14th, 2020

Something very rare and unusual happens in the liturgy today. We hear the Second Reading. We hear “The Word of the Lord”. We respond “Thanks be to God.” And there is no Alleluia! Instead somebody gets up and chants this strange song we have never heard of!

Except we have. This chant, this sequence, has been part of the liturgy for centuries. There are at the moment 4 sequences in the post-conciliar liturgy: at Easter, Pentecost, Our Lady of Sorrows - and today: the feast of the Body and Blood of our Lord. Of Corpus Christi. Written by St Thomas Aquinas in 1264, it was incorporated into the Roman liturgy, I think by Pope Urban IV. The point, like any sequence, is to give us particular space to contemplate and appreciate this mystery: that the flesh and blood of Jesus Christ is before me and that it will become part of me when I consume it. As Thomas delicately writes: 

This faith to Christian men is given –

Bread is made flesh by words from heaven:

Into his blood the wine is turned:

What though it baffles nature’s powers

Of sense and sight? This faith of ours

Proves more than nature e’er discerned.

Of all things about Christianity, the gift of the Real Presence of the Eucharist is one of the most unsurprising. Of course God nourishes us with his Body to eat! He said he would do it again and again and again throughout Sacred Scripture. As Thomas writes:

Behold the bread of angels, sent

For pilgrims in their banishment,

The bread for God’s true children meant,

That may not unto dogs be given:

Oft in the olden types foreshowed;

In Isaac on the altar bowed,

And in the ancient paschal food,

And in the manna sent from heaven.

This is the point of the First Reading today: “Do not forget the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery: who guided you through this vast and dreadful wilderness, a land of fiery serpents, scorpions, thirst; who in this waterless place brought you water from the hardest rock; who in this wilderness fed you with manna that your fathers had not known.’” God knows we are human. He knows we are not just spiritual, but also flesh and blood: that we are sacramental. So of course, in this world of serpents and thirst, he gives himself to be with us not just spiritually, but in flesh and blood and I can touch and taste.