Just What Is This Anyway? Manna? Series

Corpus Christi 2023

Today’s solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ is called Corpus Christi, for short, because prior to the major calendar changes late in the last century, the Precious Blood of Christ had its own separate feast. So we celebrate today the fact that Christ’s promise related in Mt 28 to be with us “always until the end of the age” is realized in the substantial of His Risen Body and Blood while having the appearances of bread and wine in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

Twice in today’s reading from Deuteronomy we see the miracle of God in the desert called “manna which you did not know, nor did your fathers know.” The scene is the terrible time after the liberation from Egypt when the Israelites were running out of food–and hope. They had thought they were really something else when marching between walls of water that then drowned their enemies. But they were learning humility. They were nothing of themselves. God, YHWH, had delivered them, protected them, and was now going to feed them. The “stuff” they found the next morning on the ground was unknown to them. In fact, the word “manna” seems to mean “what’s this?” But it had nourished them for two generations in the desert, as the water “from the rock” had refreshed them and their flocks.

St. Paul continues the theme of “what’s this” in His letter to the church at Corinth. The chalice of benediction, a carry-over from the Jewish Passover meal, the last cup shared by Jesus with His disciples at the Last Supper, is actually “a participation in the blood of Christ.” John shows Jesus on the cross that Good Friday pleading “I thirst” and taking the fourth cup as a taste of sour soldiers’ wine, raised on a stalk of hyssop herb to His lips. That completes His Passover as He declares “it is finished.” So each time we celebrate Eucharist, it is our participation in the Passover of Christ, of the Messiah. We take His very Body and Blood and pray He change us, make us as individuals and community into His own Mystical Body.

In the Gospel we are given Jesus’s definitive take on “what’s this.” His Father gave the People of Israel manna in the desert, but they died. The Bread that Jesus wants to give all of humanity is His own flesh for the life of the world. He Himself is the Living Bread come down from heaven. Eating of His flesh and drinking His blood sacramentally transforms our own human persons into what we were supposed to be in the beginning–images and likenesses of the God who never dies. Athanasius and Augustine and all the great Doctors tell us that this is the means of our transformation: God became human so that humans could become divine. Let’s cooperate with that call every day of our life.