Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ 2024
The 20th century English priest and convert, Msgr Ronald Knox, used to say that if you go over all the commands of our Lord Jesus Christ, you find instructions for leading an exemplary Christian life, including the Ten Commandments and the rather stark injunctions to sell all we own and give to the poor to follow Him. There’s also the one directing us to love our enemies and pray for those who persecute us. Consequently, we examine our conduct and realize that we haven’t been all that good at keeping them. Nevertheless, the one commandment that Christians have kept, religiously, over the twenty centuries of the Church is “This is my Body. . .This is my Blood. . .do this in memory of Me.” That one has been kept by Orthodox and Byzantine, Roman Catholics, and, yes, Lutherans and Reformed and Anglicans. All have slightly different explanations, liturgies and language for the action, but whether daily or weekly or just monthly, we all do it. That command we keep. There’s something definitional about it. Like last week’s celebration of the Blessed Trinity, the Eucharist is one action, one sacrament, we really never want to live without.
Let’s consider how our readings today help us understand what we do here, in the sacrament of the altar. Our psalmist tells us that God fed them “with the finest wheat, and satisfied them with honey from the rock.” The Holy Land is described in Torah as a “land flowing with milk and honey.” For travelers in the desert, like Israel after their liberation from Egypt, that sounded pretty good. It meant a land good for their milk-cattle, and a place with beehives to pollinate their crops. And who can pass up a breakfast of biscuits flavored with butter and slathered with honey? The manna they ate for forty years in the desert prepared them for a fertile land, because “It was like coriander seed, white, and the taste of it was like wafers made with honey.” The experience was sweet and brought them into physical contact with the God who gave it to them. Then, once they were in the land of promise, every year they were challenged by Torah to re-enact the Passover and share unleavened bread, a sacrificial lamb and a cup of blessing. That memory was called a memorial, a re-presentation of a divine action that took place and defined them as a people who followed the Lord. The cup of wine made present the blood of the covenant they were continually observing, that made them one people.
The psalm we sang today, which we call number 116, is one of the “Hallel” songs used each year at Passover. The sacrifice of thanksgiving refers to a special rite in which bread and wine are used to give thanks to God for a personal deliverance from some awful affliction, perhaps an illness that could have killed the one offering it, but that the Lord turned around into health and joy.
The author of the letter to the Hebrews tells us that in heaven, eternally, Jesus comes to the Father with an atoning offering of blood—not a symbolic offering from cows or goats, but His own Precious Blood. The result is that we can, at our purification and death, can stand before the Blessed Trinity with consciences clean of all sin.
So when St. Mark, shares the memories of St. Peter through his Gospel, treats of the last Passover Jesus celebrated with His apostles and disciples, he tells us that Jesus changes the ancient liturgical words. Now the lamb of Passover is the ultimate Lamb of Passover, Jesus who earlier John the Baptist called the “Lamb of God.” He takes away the sins of the world, as John predicted, when in faith we share His gift of love. For this we give eternal thanks and praise, at this fulfillment of Christ’s words: “whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him.”
