Hi everyone, here’s my homily for CORPUS CHRISTI – THE FEAST OF THE BODY AND BLOOD OF JESUS CHRIST. The readings can be found at https://www.usccb.org/nab/062611.shtml . Thanks for reading and all of your feedback
HOMILY:
This was one of the weirdest, not to mention tragic stories I’ve read in a long time. In Friday’s Daily News it was reported that a Russian woman died from a heart attack that was brought on by the shock of waking up at her own funeral. The 49 year old woman, Fagilyu Mukhametzyanov, was mistakenly declared deceased by doctors. But she later woke up – in a coffin surrounded by sobbing relatives. She started screaming after realizing she was about to be buried alive. She was rushed back to the hospital where she was declared dead — this time for real. Her husband, Fagili Mukhametzyanov, said in his distraught: “Her eyes fluttered and we immediately rushed her back to the hospital but she only lived for another 12 minutes.”
Dealing with the death of a loved one, is always a painful and difficult thing to endure, but in this situation, you can imagine how much more painful and difficult this is. Questions like – How did this happen? How could someone have made such a mistake? As well as justifiable anger and disbelief has got to be tormenting them. The thought that this woman didn’t have to die and that it was her being surrounded by her family and friends that believed she was dead that shocked her so much, that caused this to happen, has got to be tormenting them.
That’s just, yet another dramatic example that confirms that what we believe, what we do, can have incredible effects on one another.
I was thinking about this story in praying with this Gospel as we celebrate a feast that is so central to something that we as Catholics believe. Today we celebrate the feast of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, or in Latin Corpus Christi. This feast, we focus on the belief that at Mass, in the consecration, the Holy Spirit changes a simple piece of bread, a simple cup of wine, to make Jesus as real, as present in His Body and Blood as he was 2,000 years ago as He walked and talked and lived with his apostles.
Recent surveys of Catholics say that close to 50% don’t know or mistake that teaching to believe that it’s just symbolic. It was surprising to see that number, but perhaps it shouldn’t have been. We see that in the numbers of people we’re missing at a regular Sunday Mass. We see that even in the behaviors sometimes of people who do come to Mass. There was the time this one guy actually got a cell-phone call on line for communion and had it to his ear as he stood in front of me almost looking for me to give him communion while he was talking. Even worse, a couple of years ago on Ash Wednesday this guy came up in the communion line and I said “The Body of Christ” to which he responded “Oh I don’t want that Father, I just want ashes.”
It saddened me that this man wanted ashes – which is a symbol, to remind us that our sins separate us from God and that without Him, we would be reduced to a pile of ashes, rather than the living body of Christ, which is His generous answer to that, His promise that if we eat his flesh and drink his blood we will have this unity with our God – Father, Son and Holy Spirit that not only will we have eternal life, we start to experience that here and now.
Why this disbelief? Maybe the problem is we seem to be overwhelmed with evidence that points to death and destruction. We’ve had natural disasters -whether it’s earthquakes in Japan or Haiti that killed hundreds of thousands of people in a matter of minutes – that we cannot even begin to comprehend the devastation. We’ve grown numb and barely muster a response to attacks that are waged on life, family, marriage that are all done in the name of privacy, inclusion and tolerance. Even within the walls of our own churches, we’ve gotten comfortable, sometimes making Mass simply a part of our weekly routine. I know even in my own family we’ve said “yeah I wanna make Mass Saturday Night so I can have Sunday free.”
This feast and this Gospel invites us to take a step back and really consider what it is Jesus offers us who are “welcomed to this table.” Jesus shares with us His very Body and Blood. That’s why we always have that crucifix before us, to remind us what He endured to make that possible. And we believe that in the Eucharistic prayer, that sacrifice is made real and present here on this altar. We’re brought to Calvary at every Mass.
If we can let those realities sink in, and realize what a special gift it is, then we begin to realize our call to make a radical shift in our lives to embrace the life of God. To see that there is joy in humble service to others; to be focused on the life of Jesus, a life which is centered on unconditional, total, sacrificial love; to not look for fulfillment in the conventional wisdom of this world – but the holiness of the next. In the “bread” Jesus gives us to eat – we become the Body of Christ with and for one another; in his blood of the new covenant, his life of compassion, justice and selflessness flows within us.
The husband of that woman who woke up at her own funeral told a reporter: “I am very angry and want answers. She wasn’t dead when they said she was and they could have saved her.” He was obviously upset by the response of the doctors to his wife’s situation. Because they believed she was dead, because they perhaps treated his wife in a manner that was too routine it resulted in a tragedy.
What about us? What about our response to the gift of Himself that Christ gives us in the Eucharist? If someone who is totally unfamiliar with our faith tradition were to sit here and watch our reception of Communion, would how we act reflect at all the immensity of what we claim to believe? Would our gestures, our appearance, our attire speak to how special this is? Would our observer be able to see on some level that through our reception of the Eucharist we are coming into communion with God? Would they see the effect of this communion with God by how we live, what we say, what we do even minutes after we pull out of the parking lot?
I sometimes wonder if God is too subtle for His own good. One of the dangers of our celebrating Mass is repetition, that can, if we are not careful, make us somewhat lazy, overly familiar, and can dull our senses, both physical and spiritual. It can be easy for any of us to take the gift of the Eucharist for granted that can result in a spiritual tragedy.
