Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi)
[In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen]. You can imagine, and maybe you have even experienced this in your life, a young engaged couple, getting ready to be married, looking at their grandparents or and older couple who have been married 50 years. The young couple sees the way they hold hands while walking together, carefully shuffling their feet while progressing ever so slowly. They see the love that exudes from the golden jubilarians, not with the large flames of exuberant love, but with the white hot coals that is less demonstrative but no less strong. The young couple notices how the older couple anticipates each other’s needs and can even finish each other’s sentences with a cuteness that not even a Hallmark Christmas movie could muster. They see that love, that dedication, that seeming success in married life, and they wonder, ‘How do we get that?’
Last Sunday we celebrated the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity. We celebrated our Triune God, Three Divine Persons but One God, as He fully revealed Himself as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We celebrated their unity in substance, but their diversity in Personhood. We celebrated a Communion of Divine Persons.
That last set of words, Holy Communion, gives us the key to understanding how we “get that.” Last week we meditated on that Communion of Divine Persons, the full outpouring of love between the Father and the Son, a love so strong that it breathes forth or spirates another Person: the Holy Spirit. And if we fully entered in to our celebration of the Most Holy Trinity, we likely, even if not strongly, had a tugging at our hearts, wondering how we could have that kind of communion with God, how we could enter into that eternal outpouring of love.
Christ gave us the Eucharist as the way we share in Trinitarian love. Yes, we may share in that love of God in other ways, especially by God creating us in His image and likeness. But through Holy Communion, Christ unites us to Himself, and in our union with Christ we have union with the Father and the Holy Spirit, who give us life.
And that is why Christ can say, as He does in the Gospel, that in order to have true life within us, we need to eat His Sacred Flesh and drink His Precious Blood, as we do in the Mass. If God is the source of life, and Jesus is God, then when we worthily consume the Eucharist, life Himself enters into us. And if we have the life of God inside of us, then we are also caught up into the life of the Blessed Trinity. We probably most often think of Christ entering into us, but at the same time, in a mystical way, Christ is carrying us up into heaven and into that Communion of Persons that we called the Most Holy Trinity. God draws us into Himself, and into the Love which truly makes all creation exist and thrive. God draws us to the eternal wedding banquet of the Lamb, the nuptial feast where Christ’s love for His Bride, the Church, is eternally consummated in an act to which God allows access sacramentally across the millennia.
