This
weekend is another great liturgical feast, the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body
and Blood of Christ, otherwise known as Corpus Christi.
Corpus
Christi is one of a handful of feasts that celebrates the very gift of the Eucharist
itself. It is one of my favorite feasts,
because the doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist was
instrumental in my becoming Catholic.
Back
in the Fall of 1999 I was reading through the Apostolic Fathers and came to
this passage in Ignatius of Antioch’s Letter to the Smyrneans (c. AD 106):
But consider those who are of a different
opinion with respect to the grace
of Christ which has come unto us, how opposed they are to the will of God. They have no regard
for love;
no care for the widow,
or the orphan, or the oppressed; of the bond, or of the free; of the hungry, or
of the thirsty. They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they
confess not the Eucharist
to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which
suffered for our sins,
and which the Father,
of His goodness, raised up again. Those, therefore, who speak against this
gift of God,
incur death in the midst of their disputes.
I
was shocked by the italicized line, because I realized that no one who held to
standard Protestant views of the Eucharist would have written something like
that. “Transubstantiation” as a term may
have come years later, but clearly Ignatius’ view of the Eucharist was that the
bread transformed into the flesh of Christ.
Since Ignatius was writing ten years after the death of the Apostle John,
there was not enough time for him to have gotten “confused” on this issue. It dawned on me that Ignatius was simply
reflecting the views of the early Christians on the Eucharist—views that they
must have gotten from the Apostles themselves.
In
any event, the Readings for this Feast have obvious and strong relevance to
Eucharistic doctrine.
The
First Reading, taken from Deuteronomy, reflects on the gift of the manna to the
Israelites during the forty years in the wilderness, an obvious type of the Eucharist:
Dt 8:2-3,
14b-16a
Moses said to the people:
"Remember how for forty years now the LORD, your God,
has directed all your journeying in the desert,
so as to test you by affliction
and find out whether or not it was your intention
to keep his commandments.
He therefore let you be afflicted with hunger,
and then fed you with manna,
a food unknown to you and your fathers,
in order to show you that not by bread alone does one live,
but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of the LORD.
Moses said to the people:
"Remember how for forty years now the LORD, your God,
has directed all your journeying in the desert,
so as to test you by affliction
and find out whether or not it was your intention
to keep his commandments.
He therefore let you be afflicted with hunger,
and then fed you with manna,
a food unknown to you and your fathers,
in order to show you that not by bread alone does one live,
but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of the LORD.
"Do not forget the LORD, your God,
who brought you out of the land of Egypt,
that place of slavery;
who guided you through the vast and terrible desert
with its saraph serpents and scorpions,
its parched and waterless ground;
who brought forth water for you from the flinty rock
and fed you in the desert with manna,
a food unknown to your fathers."
who brought you out of the land of Egypt,
that place of slavery;
who guided you through the vast and terrible desert
with its saraph serpents and scorpions,
its parched and waterless ground;
who brought forth water for you from the flinty rock
and fed you in the desert with manna,
a food unknown to your fathers."
Brant
Pitre has an excellent treatment of the manna as a Eucharistic type in Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the
Eucharist. The Apostles saw the
forty years in the wilderness as a type of the earthly sojourn of every
Christian, who journeys through many trials and temptations toward the Promised
Land of Heaven. On this journey, we are
sustained by the bread from heaven, the Eucharist. Tolkien does a riff on this them in LOTR with
the elven lembas bread, which
sustains Sam and Frodo on their journey through Mordor. He even describes it in terms that resemble
the Latin Rite host.
There
is evidence that even before the coming of Christ, there was a Jewish
expectation that the Messiah would once again provide manna for God’s people.
One
of the lines from this First Reading is particularly applicable to the
Eucharist: not by bread alone does one live, but by every word that comes forth
from the mouth of the LORD. In the
Eucharist we receive the bread that is the Word made flesh, the bread-Word that
has proceeded from the mouth of the Father.
Psalm
147 is the Responsorial. This Psalm
celebrates God’s protection and provision for Jerusalem, the David’s Holy
City. The early Christians, starting
with the Apostles themselves, consistently understood Jerusalem as a type of
the Church, and God’s promises to Jerusalem as fulfilled in the Church (see
Hebrews 12:22-24; Revelation 21:2-22:4).
This portion of the Psalm particularly resonates with Eucharistic
themes:
He has granted peace in your
borders;
with the best of wheat he fills you.
He sends forth his command to the earth;
swiftly runs his word!
R. Praise the Lord, Jerusalem.
with the best of wheat he fills you.
He sends forth his command to the earth;
swiftly runs his word!
R. Praise the Lord, Jerusalem.
Understood
spiritually, this Psalm praises God for his providential care for all creation,
but sees his provision for Jerusalem (his special people=the Church) as the
highest expression of his providential care.
The “fine wheat” that God gives to his people becomes the quintessential
sign of his loving provision for the entire cosmos.
The
Second Reading is one of St. Paul’s most explicit teachings on the Eucharist:
Brothers and sisters:
The cup of blessing that we bless,
is it not a participation in the blood of Christ?
The bread that we break,
is it not a participation in the body of Christ?
Because the loaf of bread is one,
we, though many, are one body,
for we all partake of the one loaf.
The cup of blessing that we bless,
is it not a participation in the blood of Christ?
The bread that we break,
is it not a participation in the body of Christ?
Because the loaf of bread is one,
we, though many, are one body,
for we all partake of the one loaf.
It
is interesting that St. Paul refers to the Eucharistic cup as the “Cup of
Blessing,” since this seems to be a reference to the third cup of the four cups
of the Passover liturgy. St. Paul calls
this cup a “participation,” “sharing,” “partaking,” or “communion” in the blood
of Christ. The Greek word is koinonia, a word which has become
popular in Evangelical and even in some Catholic piety of late. One should note that if St. Paul had held a
symbolic view of the Eucharist, there would not be much force to his argument
that the Eucharistic species were a “participation” or “partaking” in the body
and blood of Christ. Though I never
realized it for thirty years, St. Paul, like St. Ignatius of Antioch, is
reflecting a Real Presence theology.
It
is a tragedy that the doctrine of the Eucharist has become an issue of division
between Christians, because, as St. Paul emphasizes in this passage, the
Eucharist is a source of unity:
Because the loaf of bread is
one,
we, though many, are one body,
for we all partake of the one loaf.
we, though many, are one body,
for we all partake of the one loaf.
Division
over Eucharistic teaching is, quite seriously, diabolical. Not in the sense that those who err in their
Eucharistic doctrine are worse than the rest of us who follow Christ, but in
the sense that the Evil One in particular wishes to sow discord on this issue,
since it is central to our faith.
In
the Calvinist tradition I was raised in, for all its good points, there was a
strange reversal of emphasis on what was central and what was peripheral in
terms of doctrine. Doctrines of election
and reprobation took central stage, while sacramental theology was considered
peripheral. While reading the Church
Fathers during my doctoral program (thankfully we were required to do some
patristics for Notre Dame’s Scripture doctorate), I was struck by how the Fathers
typically had the reverse set of emphases.
Corpus
Christi is an excellent Feast on which to pray for the unity of all Christians
around a common Eucharistic table.
The
Gospel reading is, as one would suspect, taken from John’s Bread of Life
discourse (John 6:51-58):
Jesus said to the Jewish crowds:
"I am the living bread that came down from heaven;
whoever eats this bread will live forever;
and the bread that I will give
is my flesh for the life of the world."
"I am the living bread that came down from heaven;
whoever eats this bread will live forever;
and the bread that I will give
is my flesh for the life of the world."
The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying,
"How can this man give us his flesh to eat?"
Jesus said to them,
"Amen, amen, I say to you,
unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood,
you do not have life within you.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood
has eternal life,
and I will raise him on the last day.
For my flesh is true food,
and my blood is true drink.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood
remains in me and I in him.
Just as the living Father sent me
and I have life because of the Father,
so also the one who feeds on me
will have life because of me.
This is the bread that came down from heaven.
Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died,
whoever eats this bread will live forever."
"How can this man give us his flesh to eat?"
Jesus said to them,
"Amen, amen, I say to you,
unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood,
you do not have life within you.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood
has eternal life,
and I will raise him on the last day.
For my flesh is true food,
and my blood is true drink.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood
remains in me and I in him.
Just as the living Father sent me
and I have life because of the Father,
so also the one who feeds on me
will have life because of me.
This is the bread that came down from heaven.
Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died,
whoever eats this bread will live forever."
As is
well known, Jesus gets increasingly graphic as this discourse progresses,
changing from the regular Greek word “esthio”, “eat,” to the more striking term
“trogo”, “munch, chew.” He also
introduces the concept of “drinking his blood,” which has nothing to do with
the multiplication of loaves—which is the precipitating event for this
discourse—and only makes sense if Jesus is moving toward a Eucharistic
application in his discourse.
Eating
animal blood was forbidden in the OT, because the “life is in the blood.” God does not want us to share in the life of
animals, but the blood of Christ is the blood of God, and he does want us to
share in divine life.
In this
pericope, Jesus is making obvious reference to the manna (“I am the living
bread that came down from heaven”), but it is less noticed that he is referring
to the Fruit of the Tree of Life, the only other thing in Scripture that one
could eat in order to gain immortality (“Whoever eats this bread will live
forever”). As St. Thomas would say, it
is fitting that we who lost eternal life by an act of eating, should regain it
through an act of eating. The Cross
becomes for us the new Tree of Life.
Our
reflection on these Scriptures for Corpus Christi should cause us great joy,
first of all, for God’s tremendous provision for our needs, but physical and
spiritual, the greatest sign of which is his daily gift of the Eucharist, the
Flesh of his own Son, for us. At the
same time, we should feel sorrow, because the Eucharist is a call for the unity
of all Christians (Second Reading) as well as call for our own unity with the
Son and the Father (the Gospel). The
Eucharist represents and causes our unity with the Holy Trinity (celebrated
last week) which it signifies. Yet so
often we do not live, behave, or act in a way that would inspire our family
members or co-workers to think “He lives in Christ, and Christ lives in
him.” May we use the opportunity
provided by the Masses this weekend to pray that our union with Christ through
this sacrament may be made more visible in our thought, word, and behavior in
this coming week and the rest of our lives.
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