Homily for the Solemnity of Corpus Christi

This past week I attended the Golden Jubilee Mass for the Priests of our Diocese who are celebrating fifty years of priesthood. Four of them have already retired, and one remains active in parish life. Doing some quick math, I was able to discern that between these five men, they have celebrated Mass more than 100,000 times, in parishes large and small. Just think of the Grace that has been brought to our Diocese through the ministry of these Priests!

Attending a celebration such as this often brings some retrospection, considering the Masses I, too, have celebrated in so many locations. Reading the words of Moses in preparation for today, brought that retrospection into full bloom, as he said: “Remember how for forty years now [it’s actually been 42 years for me] the Lord, your God has directed all your journeying in the desert, so as to test you by affliction, and to find out whether or not it was your intention to keep His commandments.”

Where have I wandered through this time, celebrating Masses as well as the other Sacraments? It all began on this Feast of Corpus Christi back in 1981 when I celebrated my First Mass at a Parish named Blessed Sacrament, in Denver, Colorado.

Within the Archdiocese of Denver, I was further stationed at:
- St. Thomas More, in Centennial
- St. Mary’s, in Littleton
- The Basilica of the Immaculate Conception, in Denver
- St. Mary’s in Breckenridge, with its Missions in Keystone, Copper Mountain & Dillon Valley

Moving to Vermont in 1991, I have served at:
- St. Monica’s, in Barre
- Our Lady of Mount Carmel, in Charlotte
- St. Elizabeth’s, in Lyndonville
- Our Lady, Queen of Peace, in Danville
- Holy Family, in Essex Junction
- St. Augustine’s, in Montpelier
- North American Martyrs, in Marshfield
- Our Lady of the Snows, in Woodstock
- Our Lady of the Mountains, in Killington
- St. Francis of Assisi, in Windsor
- St. Anthony of Padua, in White River Junction
- and now here at Annunciation and Holy Name of Mary.

Twenty parishes in forty-two years: sounds like I can’t hold a job.

Looking back upon these assignments and the more than 16,000 Masses I have celebrated, Moses’s opening words in today’s passage from the Book of Deuteronomy have special meaning. He began by saying “Remember,” and then closes the passage with the words: “Do not forget the Lord your God.”

Our Feast of Corpus Christi today retains that essential element of remembering: both the Lord’s Teaching about giving Himself as the Bread of Life… and how this mystery will be central to the Institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper.

Remembering, however, makes a good beginning, but is insufficient for our purposes in celebrating Masses today. While the non-Eucharistic Services of our Protestant brethren are fulfilled in mere remembrance, our Catholic liturgy goes further, into an action of “making present” — that is — through the power of the Holy Spirit working through the Sacrament of Holy Orders, Christ is made Truly Present in the Eucharist at the moment of Consecration at each Mass, through the miracle of Transubstantiation.

This is a far better gift than the manna in the desert, for while the Hebrews experienced physical hunger, and are fed with bread-like manna, Our Lord now uses earth elements of bread and wine to meet our spiritual hunger. Indeed, Our Lord says that “Whoever eats this bread will live forever.”

Consuming the Body and Blood of Christ in the consecrated bread and wine brings to the communicant the gift of "Viaticum", a term usually used for the Holy Communion given to the Dying, but which we will use for our purposes here to describe our experience of the Presence of Christ leading us forward in the Sacramental Life. 

The word “viaticum” is Latin for “food for the journey,” and what a journey the living of our Faith has become! It will seem for some that we’ve been journeying for forty years, wandering in the irreligious desert that our culture has become, seeking the restorative Grace of the Eucharist as we receive Holy Communion.

The Bread of Life — the Holy Eucharist — is given along the way as food for our spiritual journey, to meet our needs in the present,  to deepen our hunger for God, and to set us on the right path. As such, let’s return for a moment to Moses’s call to “Remember.” The event he speaks of belongs to a distant past. However, we must remember these significant moments in Salvation History as we might remember a personal experience.

These significant events, while held in retrospect, are to be founded in the fact that God is always present to us, whether today, yesterday, or in our fading memory. For example, I hold dear in my own memory my First Communion Day, as do most Catholics.

While I can tell you that there are days when I can't remember what I had for breakfast, the details of my First Communion day are clear as a bell.
- the hope and the excitement leading up to the day
- the 130 children walking in procession
- the white suit, handed down from my cousin
- the grandparents, aunts & uncles in attendance
— and, the most memorable part —
- the cake

These memories form a basis that strengthens me were I ever to take Holy Communion for granted. Speaking of which, recall how we felt three years ago, when, for ten weeks, we wandered through a desert devoid of Mass, the Sacraments, and, most of all, the Holy Eucharist.

It diminished the faith of some, who have not returned since then, but in the midst of the pandemic, God was testing our endurance and the disposition of our hearts. He allowed us to experience a great hunger for Him and for Our Lord Jesus Christ, so that we might remember just how much we need Him, His Presence, and His Grace.

In our Second Reading, Saint Paul reaffirms our faith in the Real Presence by speaking in the interrogative form, asking: “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?”

Note that Saint Paul asks not, “is this a reception of the Body and Blood of Christ…” — but — he asks if our reception is not a participation in His Body and Blood. Here he develops the passive experience of “receiving” into an active form of “participating” in the “bloody sacrifice” of the Cross through our communing with Him in the “unbloody sacrifice” of the Mass.

Therefore, the consecrated Host we receive in Holy Communion is not simply an entity through which we commemorate a central mystery of our Faith, it is the “Living Bread” of which Our Lord speaks, thereby making our reception of Holy Communion a participation in that mystery given to the church for all time, which prepares us to commune with the Lord outside of time, hence the notion of viaticum, food for the journey into eternity.

And now we come to the very words of Jesus in today’s Gospel. The passage we hear today is taken from what is called the “Bread of Life Discourse,” a Teaching so long and thorough that it takes up an entire chapter in Saint John’s Gospel.

The time and place in which his speech is delivered give us the context in which the people in Our Lord’s time might understand it, as difficult as the theology would be to comprehend, given as it was, before the Last Supper and the Lord’s Passion.

Jesus had just fed the 5,000 through the miraculous multiplication of loaves and fishes. Some people had followed Him without making provision for their next meal. So, witnessing this miracle, they followed Him further: some in faith… some in mere curiosity. Recognizing this, the Lord cautions His would-be followers to look beyond food that perishes and, instead, to seek the food that endures for eternal life: once again, that viaticum.

He begins this Teaching with words that are more important, and more telling than Moses’s opening word “Remember.” Jesus begins by saying, “I am the Bread of Life.” We’ve heard before that when Jesus begins a statement with the words, “I am…” invoking the Hebrew name for God, (Yahweh) He stakes a claim for His own divinity, and His connection with God the Father, because, as we learned last week on the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity, the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit
never act apart from one another.

Faith in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist goes hand-in-hand with our faith in the Incarnation of Christ. The reality of Our Lord’s humanity, intrinsically linked with His divinity, provides the foundation for the Lord’s Real Presence in the Eucharist. Therefore, the Lord’s words here, and at the Last Supper, are not mere metaphor or allegory… the words here and the action at the Last Supper embody the miracle revealed then, and which continues at each Mass.

Jesus goes on to say that in this Bread that comes down from heaven, we share in “the Father who has sent Me…” that is to say, our bond with Christ in the Eucharist is comparable to the bond that unites the Persons of the Holy Trinity.  

So, it remains important to constantly recall the word of Moses: “Remember.”