This is My Body

This is My Body

Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ

Mk 14: 12- 16, 22 – 26

Today is the feast of Corpus Christi. This is the Latin word for the Body of Christ. On this day we remember Jesus but particularly his body and blood which he gave up for the sake of us all.  

This Sunday’s Gospel is Mark’s account about the Last Supper. Mark situates this last meal of Jesus with his disciples during the Passover. The Passover is the great annual feast of the Jews where they remember their liberation from slavery in Egypt.

On this day, they remember how the Lord commanded each household to slaughter a lamb and take some of the blood and put it on the two doorposts and the lintel of the house in which they were to eat the lamb. The blood on the doorposts and lintel will save them as the Lord will pass over those doors and no one inside that house would die. It was during the Passover when “the Lord passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt, when he struck down the Egyptians but spared Israel’s houses “ ( Exod12: 27).

Mark then tells us that as Jesus and his disciples celebrated the Passover, Jesus took the bread, said the blessing, broke it and gave it to them and said, “Take it; this is my body. Then he took a cup, gave thanks and gave it to them, and they all drank from it. He said to them, “ This is my blood of the covenant, which will be shed for many.”

It would have been quite a surprise for the disciples to hear Jesus appropriate the bread and the wine as his own body and blood. What seemed to be the ordinary bread that was part of the Passover meal now becomes his body. And what was to be the regular wine served during that meal, now becomes his blood. They would have been rather surprised to realize that Jesus was now the meal they were feasting upon.

Mark seems to tell the readers that now, the Passover feast is all about Jesus himself. He is now the lamb slaughtered and eaten, whose blood becomes the cause of their liberation from slavery. Jesus now becomes the sacrifice whose blood, shed for many, will not only deliver many from death but will also be the sign of a covenant – a sign of God’s own commitment to us.

Appropriately, the Gospel situates this meal on the night before Jesus was betrayed and on the day before he was to give his life on the cross. This somehow tells us that despite the infidelities of the people who were closest to him, and the rejection he receives, Jesus nonetheless pours out his life as a sacrifice that would eventually liberate and free all from the enslavement of sin and death.

This willingness to shed blood as a kind of sacrifice was to be a true and lasting sign of God’s own commitment to save us. But more than that, this willingness to be made a sacrifice becomes a true and lasting sign of real love, a love that only God can give, a love that only Jesus can show to us in word and deed.

It is interesting how this Gospel successfully combines the images of fellowship and sacrifice flawlessly. The idea of a meal and the fellowship that it brings is something we are all familiar with especially when we celebrate important events in our life. To combine this with the image of sacrifice which necessarily conjures images of blood, slaughter and pain seems to be out of sync. Could we really celebrate while someone else is being sacrificed? Perhaps not.
But this is precisely the point.  Our celebration is possible only through the sacrifice of Jesus himself, the lamb of God. The fellowship that this celebration brings is possible only through Jesus' self sacrifice much in the same way that the salvation and liberation recalled during the Passover meal would not have been possible without the slaughter of the sacrificial lamb.

Jesus knows the joy that a meal brings and the wonderful fellowship that results from it.  Perhaps that is why he made himself our food and drink so that we could have an unending feast and that through this feast, the human community could have a deep sense of fellowship with one another.

He willingly made himself to be our food and drink, so we may know that life with him will always be a feast, that life with him will always be a celebration knowing that he will always be there to love us with a love like no other. Amen.

“ For our paschal lamb, Christ, has been sacrificed. Therefore, let us celebrate the festival not with the old yeast, the yeast of malice and evil but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.”  - 1 Corinthians 5: 7-8