BREAD FOR THE LIFE OF THE WORLD: A REFLECTION ON CHRIST’S BODY IN FAITH AND WITNESS, PART I

The Last Supper, by Fritz Eichenberg. Public Domain

A talk given for the Corpus Christi celebration 
at Christ Church Cathedral, Vancouver, BC (by Zoom)

God our Father, whose Son our Lord Jesus Christ in a wonderful Sacrament has left us a memorial of his passion: Grant us so to venerate the sacred mysteries of his Body and Blood, that we may ever perceive within ourselves the fruit of his redemption; who lives and reigns with you and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen. (BCP 1979, p. 252) 

The Feast of Corpus Christi, initiated in part by none other than Thomas Aquinas, celebrates the Body of Christ in the Eucharist, the gift of the “wonderful Sacrament” our Lord Jesus instituted for us. It’s a common tradition for congregations to leave the building on this day with grand processions in which the Blessed Sacrament is taken onto the streets with lavish reverence. Image the scene: a canopy is carried over someone bearing a monstrance, backwards-walking thurifers, and young children scattering flower petals on the ground before the Blessed Sacrament. When that happens, of course, we see not only the Body of Christ in the Eucharist but also the Body of Christ in the church as its members follow along. This is a perfect expression of what is meant to happen from our Eucharistic celebrations: we leave transformed, sent into the world for witness and ministry. 

The very fact that Jesus Christ has a body is central to the Christian faith. The incarnation — or enfleshment — of God is a scandalous claim and an even more scandalous reality. By dwelling among us, the eternal Word became real for us and for the world, manifesting for us “the reflection of God’s glory and the exact imprint of God’s very being” (Hebrews 1:3 NRSV). In other words, in the life, teaching, and ministry of Jesus Christ is revealed to us the very nature of God. The embodied God-among-us also made possible the Paschal Mystery. Without a body, there is no suffering, no death, and no resurrection. So on the feast of the Body of Christ, we do well to give thanks for Christ’s physical body, too. 

That physical body was wounded and scarred. Even after the Resurrection, Jesus’ body bore the signs of human failing — not the failing of Jesus, of course, but rather the sinful failing of humanity to apprehend and revere perfect love incarnate. It’s important to note that Christ’s body after the resurrection still bore those scars. Human sinfulness was not entirely erased, but rather it was redeemed. Those very marks made it possible for Thomas to exclaim, “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28). 

A little more than three weeks prior to Corpus Christi was Ascension Day. Jesus Christ has returned to sit at his Father’s right hand. But Jesus did not abandon his church; he never abandons us. Instead, at his Ascension, Jesus promised that by the coming of the Holy Spirit, the church would be “clothed with power from on high” (Luke 24:49). And this is where we are today. Jesus sits as our mediator and advocate at his Father’s right hand. We live in the fellowship of the Holy Spirit. And we continue to carry out the work Jesus has sent us to do, making disciples of all nations and teaching people to obey the commands that Jesus has given (Matthew 28). 

This brings us to the Holy Eucharist. Jesus commanded us to celebrate this sacrament, knowing that every time we receive the consecrated bread and wine as his body and blood, we proclaim his death until he comes. Every church, every Sunday, proclaims and celebrates the Paschal Mystery of Christ’s passion, death, and resurrection. This sustains us for our journey. 

Now we Anglicans, if we’re honest, have had a range of views and experiences of the Holy Eucharist. At times, we tended toward a more representational view of what we’re doing. And at other times, some of wanted us to adhere to a full-fledged articulation of transubstantiation as our faith. But the Anglican settlement of the sixteenth century is wise. Our liturgy takes a very nuanced approach to our celebration of Holy Communion, leaving a bit of wiggle room for various approaches. 

Perhaps we do well to simply take the prayer book at its word: the Holy Communion is the Body and Blood of Christ. We don’t have to hash out the details of when and how that takes place to believe it. As a parallel example, imagine a wedding: we’d hardly want to pause the ceremony to discuss the cognitive science behind the feelings of love people experience or to set out the precise limits beyond which love is or is not possible. Rather, we celebrate love as it is found in those to be married. So it is with the Holy Communion: we can simply see that our communion is a faithful observance of Christ’s command, and we can know that he is present to us in a trustworthy way. 

When we celebrate Holy Eucharist, a number of things are taking place simultaneously. We are offering our praise and thanks to Almighty God. We are praying for the needs of our community and the whole world. We are doing what Christ has commanded us to do. We are taking part in a foretaste of the heavenly banquet we all hope to enjoy in the life to come. We are being nourished for our journey; that is, we are fed by God’s grace and mercy in the Body and Blood of Christ. 

In all this, there is a danger that we privatize our celebration — that we imagine it’s all about us or even just about the church. We’re not helped by the frequently unhelpful explanation of liturgy as “the work of the people.” The much more important aspect of what we do is the work of God. And a better translation of liturgy is “a public work.” That is, what we are doing is not for ourselves alone but for the good of the whole world. Our Sunday celebrations of Eucharist are part of our offering to God for our neighbors, our communities, our nations, and indeed for the whole world. 

Still, even with that perspective, we might be tempted to spiritualize what we are up to when we gather. It’s not a new problem. There is a saying attributed to John Chrysostom that goes, “If you cannot find Christ in the beggar at the church door, you will not find Him in the chalice.” That’s not quite what he seems to have said, but it’s a decent if pithy summary of one of his sermons. Chrysostom actually said, “Give Jesus Christ the honor which he himself has asked for, by giving your money to the poor. Once again what God wants is not so much golden chalices but golden souls.” In other words, we have to connect our observance of Eucharist to the observance of our Christian responsibility to attend to the needs of the world. They cannot be separated.

We owe the revival of publicly celebrating Corpus Christi to Anglo-Catholics of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One of the great lights of that movement was Frank Weston, who served as Bishop of Zanzibar. In 1923, he gave a stirring address, near the end of which he said this: 

If you listen. I am not talking economics, I do not understand them. I am not talking politics, I do not understand them. I am talking the Gospel, and I say to you this: If you are Christians then your Jesus is one and the same: Jesus on the Throne of his glory, Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, Jesus received into your hearts in Communion, Jesus with you mystically as you pray, and Jesus enthroned in the hearts and bodies of his brothers and sisters up and down this country. And it is folly— it is madness — to suppose that you can worship Jesus in the Sacraments and Jesus on the Throne of glory, when you are sweating him in the souls and bodies of his children. It cannot be done. … Now go out into the highways and hedges… Go out and look for Jesus in the ragged, in the naked, in the oppressed and sweated, in those who have lost hope, in those who are struggling to make good. Look for Jesus. And when you see him, gird yourselves with his towel and try to wash their feet. 

That is what the Eucharist is meant to do for us: to train us to see Jesus when we gaze at him, whether in the confines of our churches or in the streets of our cities. 

I love that Corpus Christ celebrations often merge the piety and reverence of the liturgy with the mission and ministry of the church in the world. It is fitting. On Maundy Thursday, at least in the USA, we hear as our Old Testament reading the story of the original Passover meal in ancient Egypt. We hear extensive and careful instructions about what eat and how it is to be cooked, and then we get to this: “This is how you shall eat it: your loins girded, your sandals on your feet, and your staff in your hand; and you shall eat it hurriedly. It is the passover of the Lord” (Exodus 12:11). 

This is one of the most important meals in the Bible and yet it is to be eaten hurriedly, for God is on the move, and God’s people are on the move. It’s a sensibility I wish we had more of in our churches. God is on the move, and God’s people are meant to be on the move. We should never be too settled, because we never know when God will call us to new service, new ministry, new adventures. 

This is why I love seeing the Blessed Sacrament paraded around in Corpus Christi celebrations. We are literally on the move. We are taking what is most important to us and offering it to the world. We are blessing our streets, our towns, our neighborhoods, and our neighbors with Christ’s presence. We don’t need to wait for people to peek through our doors; we can throw open our doors and take the church out to them.