A Homily for Sunday in the Octave of Corpus Christi

He that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself,

not discerning the Lord’s body.

Today we celebrate the festival of Corpus Christi, the Body of Christ. The Epistle lesson, from Saint Paul’s first letter to the Church of Corinth, is very familiar. It contains the words of institution of the Eucharist, as they are recited in the consecration prayer at every Eucharist celebrated according to the Book of Common Prayer. It is the formula that Saint Paul says was taught to him, and which he taught to the churches that he founded.

Two sentences later, in the same letter, Paul writes: “He that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord’s body.” (Or, in a contemporary translation: “A person who eats and drinks without recognizing the Lord’s body is eating and drinking his own condemnation.”) This is a serious warning, seriously given; and we must take it seriously.

How shall we discern the Lord’s body?

We discern the Lord’s body first in the Mystery of the Incarnation. The Son of God, the eternal Word, who was God and who was with God from before time itself, who, being in the form of God thought it not robbery to be equal with God, became flesh and pitched his tent among us. At the message of an angel, by the power of the Holy Spirit, he was conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary, the girl who was so filled with grace that she was able to say: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord, be it unto me according to thy word.” And at that moment he assumed his human body.

In that same body, he walked the way of the Cross, the way of sorrow, depicted in the plaques around this room: whipped with cords, beaten with rods, his head crowned with thorns, falling and getting up again, he carried his cross to the hill of Calvary, where nails were driven through his wrists into the wood of the cross, and he was lifted up, until he died there of asphyxiation, and a soldier pierced his heart with a spear. And his body was taken down from the cross and laid in a stone-cold tomb.

On Sunday morning came Mary Magdalene, with myrrh and spices to anoint the body, and she found the tomb empty. The angel said: “You seek Jesus who was crucified: he is not here, he is risen.” For forty days this same Jesus was with his friends in his human body—transfigured, indeed, but his real body—so real that he let Thomas put his fingers in the nail wounds, so real that he ate broiled fish with them on the shore of Geneseret. And then, on the fortieth day, he was taken, in his human body, up out of his friends’ sight into heaven; where, in that same human body he sits at the right hand of God the Father.

And so we discern the Body of Christ, ascended into heaven.

On the same night in which he was betrayed, this same Jesus, took bread and wine, and, giving thanks to God the Father, he blessed them and shared them with his friends, saying: “This is my Body. This is my Blood.” And he gave them a commandment: “Do this in remembrance of me.”

And he meant what he said. In the Gospel lesson this morning, Saint John reports that Jesus told the people: “My flesh is meat indeed, and my blood is drink indeed. . . . He that eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood dwelleth in me, and I in him. . . . ”

The Church has never doubted that the elements of the Eucharist, celebrated in obedience to Jesus’s commandment, are anything other than what his own words declared them to be. “This is my body. This is my blood.” Saint Justin Martyr, describing the faith and practice of Christians in the early second century, wrote:

Not as common bread and common drink do we receive [this food called Eucharist], but as Jesus Christ our Saviour, made flesh by the Word of God, took flesh and blood for our salvation, so likewise have we been taught that the food which is consecrated by the prayer of his words . . . is the flesh and blood of that Jesus who became flesh and blood.

And Saint John Chrysostom, bishop of Constantinople in the fourth century said: “Not only do we see the Lord [in the Sacrament]; we take him in our hand, eat him, put our teeth into his flesh, and unite ourselves to him in the closest union.”

The time came when human beings thought it worthwhile to try to explain how these things could be. Eventually, in the sixteenth century, a great assembly of bishops, meeting in a small town in Italy, declared how the bread becomes flesh and the wine becomes blood, using the latest scientific terminology of their day. (Unfortunately, the most advanced science known to them was alchemy. So the explanation of how God works in the Sacrament became a stumbling block to many.)

It is enough for us to know that, in the Holy Eucharist, God’s gifts and creatures of bread and wine have become the body and blood of Jesus Christ. There is a verse attributed to Queen Elizabeth I, which is often cited:

He was the Word that spake it,

Then he took the bread and brake it,

And what his Word doth make it,

That I believe and take it.

And Jesus himself said: “I am the living bread that came down from heaven. . . . The bread that I will give is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world. . . . Except ye eat the flesh of the Son of Man, and drink his blood, ye have no life in you.”

And so we discern the Body of Christ in the Holy Eucharist. And we pray, in the words of the collect drafted by Saint Thomas Aquinas for this feast, that by God’s grace we may so venerate the sacred mystery of his body and blood that we may perceive in our own lives the fruits of his redemption.

But that is not enough, because we must also discern the Body of Christ in his Church.

The Church is the Body of which Jesus Christ is the head, and all baptized people are the limbs and organs. We, being many, are one body in Christ. The one body has many members (that is, many limbs and organs), and all of the members do not have the same function. The body is not one member, but many.

Saint Paul, only a few sentences after the passage read for today’s Epistle lesson, asks whimsically: “What if the foot were to say, ‘I’m not a hand, so I am not part of the body.’ Or what if the ear should say, ‘I’m not an eye, so I am not part of the body.’ Or what if the eye should say to the hands and feet, ‘Go away! I don’t need you.’” This is the folly of schism, of every attempt to cut off any part of the body of Christ.

The Lord Jesus is the head of his body, the Church; but we are its hands and feet and eyes and ears and mouth. When the body of Christ hears the cries of the poor, it hears through our ears; when the body of Christ sees the misery of oppressed, it sees through our eyes; when the body of Christ touches the sick to heal them, it touches with our hands; when the body Christ walks again the way of the Cross, it walks with our feet. And when the body of Christ speaks of the wonderful works of God, it speaks with our tongue.

Similarly, when any member of Christ is offended, the body of Christ is offended. When any member of Christ is wounded, the body of Christ is wounded. When any member of Christ is cut off, the body of Christ bleeds anew.

The Lord loves the church as his own body. He feeds and takes care of the Church; for we are the members of his body, and of his flesh, and of his bones. And he is the head of his body, the Church.

And so we discern the Body of Christ in the Church and in our fellow Christians.

On this Corpus Christi Sunday, as always: “Praised, blest, worshiped, and adored be Jesus Christ our Lord, on his throne of glory in heaven, in the most holy Sacrament of the altar, and in the hearts of his faithful people. Amen.”

Church of Saint Mary Magdalene

Orange, California

2 June 2002

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