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The Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ
June 7, 2026
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."
R. Praise the Lord, Jerusalem.
Glorify the LORD, O Jerusalem;
praise your God, O Zion.
For he has strengthened the bars of your gates;
he has blessed your children within you.
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!
He has proclaimed his word to Jacob,
his statutes and his ordinances to Israel.
He has not done thus for any other nation;
his ordinances he has not made known to them. Alleluia.
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.
Sequence — Lauda Sion
Lo! the angel's food is given
To the pilgrim who has striven;
see the children's bread from heaven,
which on dogs may not be spent.
Truth the ancient types fulfilling,
Isaac bound, a victim willing,
Paschal lamb, its lifeblood spilling,
manna to the fathers sent.
Very bread, good shepherd, tend us,
Jesu, of your love befriend us,
You refresh us, you defend us,
Your eternal goodness send us
In the land of life to see.
You who all things can and know,
Who on earth such food bestow,
Grant us with your saints, though lowest,
Where the heav'nly feast you show,
Fellow heirs and guests to be. Amen. Alleluia.
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."
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."
*****
The Eucharist is at the centre of the life of a Christian. Essentially it is a communal meal, but a special one for it is celebrated as a memorial of Jesus' death. As a shared meal it expresses that he died for the unity of all people with the Father and among themselves. It is also and above all a mystical (sacramental) communion in his life.
In our ritual celebration in the mass we begin with a teaching session. To set the context for the day's memorial, selections of scripture are read and commented on. Unfortunately the set format of the liturgy requires a lot to be packed into a small space of time and the chance of learning anything is slim indeed. In a written reflection we can do better, and today I'd suggest that we begin today's reflection by reading the whole of Chapter 6 of John's gospel, to have a context for the very short selection that will be read in church. You can get your bible out for this, or just click here. https://biblehub.com/niv/john/6.htm
“Eat my flesh”. The phrase sticks in the throat as much for us as it was for the people who quarrelled among themselves about its meaning at the time. I have heard people complain about the overtones of cannibalism, but the bigger issue is the way it seems to put emphasis on the body. The use of the word [i]sarx – flesh[/i] rather than the more generic [i]soma – body[/i] is quite deliberate but also off-putting. I believe what Jesus had in mind was not people getting their teeth into his flesh but that they accept him as the man they knew, the carpenter's son from Nazareth – not as a magician or some kind of ethereal being, Not only is his humanity as real as ours, but his humanity is our point of access to his Spirit, to the Divinity. Through the very human Jesus we go to the Father.
It seems to be easier for some people to accept Jesus as an inspired teacher and social reformer, a 'saviour' in the secular sense, but to think of him as actually an embodiment of the Divine in the real is a step too far. This problem John sees as a major issue, which leads him to develop his teaching on the Eucharist far beyond the other gospels.
The three synoptic gospels tell the story of his time among them pretty much as matter-of-fact history. John on the other hand is concerned to have his readers investigate the life that Jesus would give to those who believe in him. This is a very difficult project; you can see John struggling to find words and expressions that would make it real to us. Hence he dedicates the whole of Chapter 6 to the task, building on the ancient story about the 'manna' God provided as food for the people during their forty years in the wilderness. He has Jesus declare: “Your ancestors ate the manna in the wilderness, yet they died. But here [pointing to himself] is the bread that comes down from heaven, which anyone may eat and not die. I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats this bread will live forever. This bread is my flesh, which I will give for the life of the world.”
“I am the living bread that has come down from heaven”. When we celebrate Eucharist we need to focus, not on the sign of the sacrament which is the wafer of bread but on what it signifies, for it points to Jesus. “I am the living bread”. He is giving us Life that is altogether of another order from the life that we get with our toast at breakfast. It is the Life of the Father which animates the Son, and which the Son extends to those who believe in him – to those who can swallow him whole, human [i]and[/i] divine.
We will spend the rest of our time contemplating this Life:
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.
There's never a dull moment with the Spirit! I would have read this hundreds of times, and today it strikes me afresh as utterly extraordinary. "Just as...So also..." Think about that. John says that as Jesus lives of the Father so we live of Jesus. That means we live of the Father as the Son does: we get to be incorporated within the Holy Trinity.
If we choose to think of the life of any community as a network of relationships, we might go on from there to think of Life within the Trinity as a web or fabric of relationships. The Son, as Logos -"Word" of the Father, is the Father's self-knowledge. What the Father knows of the God-Self is expressed in the Son. The same is true in some small way of any father-son relationship insofar as the parent sees himself/herself reflected in the child. As the Father likes what he sees the two are bonded in the Spirit. (It is impossible to write about such things without sounding irreverent but that is a risk worth taking at times.)
We can then extend the metaphor of the web of relationships to include ourselves. We are being woven into that web as threads of a tapestry. If that is so, we can also say that we are integrated, incorporated, embodied within the living God.
I see the gospel writer, John, directing all his energy at sharing this notion, that through Jesus we participate in the Life of God. He makes one final attempt to put it into words in his reflections from the last supper where he has Jesus using the grapevine as an illustration of how life is flowing from him through his members: (John 15):
“I am the vine; you are the branches. If you remain in me and I in you, you will bear much fruit; apart from me you can do nothing. If you do not remain in me, you are like a branch that is thrown away and withers; such branches are picked up, thrown into the fire and burned. If you remain in me and my words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. This is to my Father’s glory, that you bear much fruit, showing yourselves to be my disciples. “As the Father has loved me, so have I loved you. Now remain in my love."
The astounding thing is that the life we are talking about is the Life of God. We live God's Life. Our living is an extension of God's Life into time and will be blended into the timeless present in God when we pass over from this world...
Finally, to link back to where we began, if we are to take Jesus in his full humanness, we must also take ourselves that way too. Authentic Christian spirituality is firmly grounded in the earth, in our being what we are, fully human. A spirituality that would strive to lift us out of our human condition must be suspect at least. I've been noticing lately how much the Bible is an encyclopedia of human emotion with examples of all our strengths and weaknesses. We wonder, if God intends to make a 'new world', why he doesn't just get on with it. It is so far in the distance that people just give up hope. The answer is found in this, that he is working in and through our humanness. God is making us into the new creation; not some other species, but us, our species, with all the emotions – from anger and hatred to compassion and love – that make up our daily life. The education and integration of one's emotional life is the work of a lifetime...