As with last week’s Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, our celebration today of the Body and Blood of Christ should not prompt a scientific investigation. While what the Church teaches about Christ’s real presence in the consecrated bread and wine is consonant with reason, we tend to get too hung up on how this happens- the physics or, in this case, the metaphysics involved in this mysterious transformation.
In theology, it was noted last week, a mystery isn’t something utterly unknowable. Theologically, a mystery is something we know because God has revealed it. While we can, do, and should employ reason to make sense of these mysteries- theology is still best described as "faith seeking understanding"- reason cannot fully comprehend divine mysteries. In fact, reason only barely scratches the surface of divinely revealed realities.
Not only everything we do but everything we are flows out from and back to the Eucharist. The Eucharist is the intersection in space and time “of Jesus' life as the Son of God who lived a fully human life, died, rose and is present in the church today.”1 In our day, what we need to focus on is not scientific explanations for the transformation we believe occurs but what this transformation is supposed to effect.
The effect I am talking about can be expressed in one word: koinonia. As you probably guessed, koinonia is a Greek word. It is the word Saint Paul used in our second reading last Sunday. If you remember, our so-called “epistle” reading last week was from the salutation found at the end of the apostle’s Second Letter to the Corinthians. Its ending is Trinitarian: “The grace of our Lord Jesus and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with all of you.”2
“Fellowship” in that sentence by Paul is a very weak translation of koinonia. A better translation is easy to make: communion. It is koinonia, communion, that not only makes three divine persons one God, living and true, or that links today’s solemnity to last week’s, communion, koinonia, is what makes us the Body of Christ, his verum corpus, the one with hands, feet, eyes, and a heart.
This week, too, it is our reading by Saint Paul that comes to the fore: “Because the loaf of bread is one, we, though many, are one body, for all we all partake of the one loaf.”3 My dear sisters and brothers, we are the Body of Christ. Our partaking of the one bread and the one cup makes us what we are and is continually transforming us into what we are to become.
Through the Eucharist, Jesus is not just present to us, or even merely here among us- though both are true.4 What the Lord seeks to accomplish through the ordinary acts of eating bread and drinking wine, by the power of the Holy Spirit, is to be present in and through you wherever you are. It is through the Eucharist that, again, by the Holy Spirit, he wants to make us one as he is one with Father so that the world may believe that he was sent by the Father.5
You are to take the communion you experience here with you and make it, make him, present everywhere you go: home, work, school, hiking, etc. This is your missio, your mission. As Pope Benedict XVI insisted: “The Church exists to evangelize.”6 Without the Eucharist, there is no true evangelization.
Jesus’ statement to his disciples during the Last Supper Discourse in Saint John’s Gospel is a complete ecclesiology, a comprehensive explanation of the Church: “This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”7 Love here is a translation of another Greek word: agape. Love is the essence of communion. For a lot of people, this is not their experience of Church.
Just as agape is the essence of koinonia, kenosis, or self-emptying, is the essence of agape. God’s very nature is kenotic, that is, self-emptying, other-directed love.8 Creation is kenosis. Incarnation is kenosis. Eucharist is kenosis. It is this essence, this being (in Greek ousios), with which Christ seeks to imbue his Church. Because the Eucharist makes the Church and the Church makes the Eucharist, divine being is communicated through the Church to all her members.
As the Bread of Life, the Eucharist is meant to be shared. For Christians, what is sacred cannot be secret. Christianity is not a mystery cult, like those that proliferated in the ancient Mediterranean world and that once again flourish in our day. Such cults are inherently elitist, separating the insiders from the outsiders, the initiated from the hoi polloi. To God, no one, no person, belongs to the undifferentiated many, the “them.” Rooted as it is in the Eucharist, being Catholic is the opposite of being sectarian.
Elitism and sectarianism have no place in Christian life, the essence of which is koinonia. For a Christian there is no us and them, only us- those loved so much by God that for their sake “he gave his only Son.”9 On this Solemnity, let us take to heart the reality that the only convincing proof, or disproof, that the bread and wine become the body and blood of Christ are the lives of those of us who partake of it. Then, let us take up our mission to “Go and announce the Gospel of the Lord.”10
1 Andrew Hamilton, S.J. “Corpus Christi in a world where the bodies are hidden.” La Croix International. 10 June 2023.↩
2 2 Corinthians 13:13.↩
3 1 Corinthians 10:17.↩
4 Second Vatican Council. Dogmatic Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy [Sacrosanctum Concilium], sec. 7.↩
5 John 17:21.↩
6 Pope Benedict XVI. Homily for Mass for the Opening of the Synod of Bishops. 7 October 2012.↩
7 John 13:35.↩
8 See Philippians 2:1-11.↩
9 John 3:16.↩
10 Roman Missal. The Order of Mass, sec. 144.↩
No comments:
Post a Comment