Homily
for June 14, 2009
Liturgical Year B - Cycle I
Corpus Christi
By Dcn. Ray Alcouffe Topic:
The Source of Everlasting Life
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“This is my blood of the
covenant which will be shed for many.”
On this feast day of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ we
celebrate an amazing gift of God to us as the people of God and to us
as individuals. This gift is the source of new life for us and the
readings for today give us the highlights of the story of this gift. We
begin in the book of Exodus where Moses performs a rite of the sealing
of the covenant between God and his people. Actually the story begins
much earlier with the creation of the universe and the covenant God
made with Adam, then Noah, and then Abraham. But the covenant with
Moses is especially recalled because this is the covenant that Jesus
fulfilled. This covenant was articulated through the giving of the Ten
Commandments and the Law that followed from them, the ‘words’ mentioned
in today’s passage. The rite of sealing of the covenant involved the
key components of (1) the altar of sacrifice and (2) the blood of the
animals that were sacrificed for this purpose. The sealing then
consisted of taking half of the blood and pouring it on the altar which
represented the presence of God, and then sprinkling the other half
over the people as they assented to the covenant. In this way God and
the people were bound to each other with the promise to endure with one
another for ever. It is no accident that analogies abound in the Bible
between covenant and marriage. In this rite the blood represented life
and so with the sealing of the covenant new life is given to the people
of God.
Of course. we know that the people failed to live up to the Mosaic
covenant. They sinned against it and hence against God. In order to
expiate these sins, there was a rite coming from this Mosaic sealing
rite that used the blood of sacrificed animals and the temple
sanctuary. Once a year, on the Day of Atonement, the high priest would
take this blood and enter the sanctuary and offer it on the altar. This
is what is alluded to in the reading from Hebrews where Jesus is the
perfect high priest and offers his own blood, not in the temple, but in
the sanctuary not made by hands. He thus becomes the source of new life
in this covenant with God. With his sacrifice, Jesus reconciles us with
God once and forever giving us everlasting life. This sacrifice is not
repeated until his coming again in glory. The Mass then, our
Eucharistic celebration of these events of Jesus offering himself for
our union with God, is a re-presentation of that action in time. In
this way we are as privileged to be present to Jesus’ self giving as
were those first disciples in that upper room. Now what is to be our
response?
First we need to clarify our concept of a covenantal relationship with
God. Because of the Mosaic covenant process,we have inherited an
impression that a covenant is a sort of legal contract where we promise
to do such and such and God promises to do God’s part. So it is our
actions in agreeing to this contract that binds us to God sort of
independent of how we feel about it. But actually the more we
experience God’s presence among us, especially since Jesus’ coming to
us, we realize that a covenant is an unsought gift of God to man - it
is not a pact built on recoprosity, but rather a gift, a creative act
of God’s love. It is a surprise - not something we have pounded out by
negotiations. It is a gift from God who is not afraid to give himself
to us as his body, blood, soul and divinity. To get a feel for the
magnitude of the giving, consider the young boy in the following
episode from a newspaper article from 1910.
Jimmy, age 10, was a devoted brother to his sister, age 6. He got very
afraid when his sister fell off her bicycle and cut a large artery in
her leg. The bleeding was profuse, and by the time the doctor arrived
at the scene, the little girl was close to dying.
Now in the early 1900s blood transfusions were not yet common practice.
Carrying the girl into the house, the doctor managed to clamp the cut
end of the artery, but the little girl’s heart was still failing. In
desperation, the doctor turned to Jimmy and asked, “Jimmy, will you
give some of your blood to help save your little sister’s life?”
Jimmy hesitated, swallowed hard, but nodded his head. So the doctor
placed him on the kitchen table and began withdrawing blood from one of
his veins. Then he injected the blood directly into the little girl;s
vein.
For the next 30 minutes, the doctor and the family anxiously watched
over the little girl and prayed. The doctor kept the stethoscope over
her heart to note its beating. Finally, she was over the crisis. The
doctor wiped the perspiration off his brow. Only then did he notice
that Jimmy was still stretched out on the table, tense and trembling.
“What’s the matter, Jimmy?”, asked the doctor. “wh-wh-when will I die?”
replied Jimmy through clenched teeth.
The doctor realized that Jimmy misunderstood what the request for his
blood really meant. Jimmy imagined that his sister was going to need
all his blood, which meant that Jimmy, though hesitating and swallowing
hard at the doctors original request, had silently agreed to die for
his little sister!
The doctor had tears in his eyes as he reassured Jimmy that he had
extracted only a little of his blood for his sister, and that Jimmy was
not going to doe. Jimmy was willing to sacrifice, even his life, so
that his sister might live.
Don’t we sometimes get tears in our eyes when we realize what Jesus has
done for us? So when Jesus offers us the gift of not only his blood,
but his whole self, what is to be our response? - accept the gift. In
its simplest terms that is our part in the new covenant. Why should we
accept it? Because of what we have heard from the Mosaic covenant that
Jesus is fulfilling with his action. By accepting God’s gift of Jesus
himself, we establish a kinship, a blood relationship between him and
us. That is, through this covenant, God established a mysterious
consanguinity between himself and man, as Pope Benedict tells us in his
work, New Covenant. By declaring the cup to be the ‘blood of the
covenant’, Jesus is stating that his blood, poured out in his Passion
and made really present in the Eucharist, will reestablish the bond of
kinship between God and me. Thus looking back to Moses we see that the
Lord’s Supper was fundamentally the sealing of the covenant and the
Eucharist is now an on going re-presentation of this covenant renewal -
our cosmic Day of Atonement. Take and eat. Take and drink.
As we digest this we look to one of the early Fathers of the Church,
St. Cyril when he says about this, “Do not doubt whether this is true,
but rather receive the words of the Savior in faith, for since he is
the truth, he cannot lie.”
PS116:
The Lord is merciful and upright, our God is tenderness...
My trust does not fail even when I say, “I am completely wretched.”
In my terror I said, “No human being can be relied upon.”
What return can I make to the Lord for his generosity to me? I shall
take up the cup of salvation and call on the name of the Lord.