Corpus Christi

Sollemnitas Corpus Christi
2 June 2024

 I want to tie Corpus Christi with a simple lesson from the Garden of Eden.  God made man in His image and likeness.  Male and female He created them.  There is in this a sign of origin and ownership.  God does not treat man like an object, but there is an ownership in the sense that God is sovereign over His creation.  Man’s identity and meaning are found in this relationship to God.  Man is a physical being in that he is made from the dust of the earth and made with a body.  Yet, man is also a spiritual being in that the breath of life from God is breathed into man’s bodily nature.  There is within man a living principle that makes him different from mere dust.  Something about man is alive and makes him different than mere material creation.

 The story of Adam and Eve in the Garden, the story of the Fall, is a story that, among other lessons, tells us that by pride and disobedience man attempts to do something with his body and with his being that is contrary to God’s plan and God’s sovereignty.  In eating from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, the Book of Genesis tells us that man was seeking to be like God.  In other words, man was seeking to not be subject to a higher authority over himself.  He was seeking to be that higher authority.  Man was seeking to claim ownership over his own being, over his body, and over the meaning of his existence, in a way contrary to God and contrary to the truth and order of creation.

The distance that sin creates between God and mankind must be healed so that we can be saved.  But, God does not abandon us in this sorry position of sin.  Just as God had provided all good things in the Garden and established man to walk with Him in harmony, God comes close, gives us those gifts needed to re-establish harmony, and does not leave us orphans.  His presence remains with us.  This presence of God with us is an extension of the fact that God has taken on human flesh that belongs to him.  He takes on this flesh in the incarnation to show us how to live in this body as stewards.  He takes on flesh in order to lay it down in humility, and in contrast to the pride and disobedience that is at the root of man’s destruction.

Pride and disobedience are raging still in our time, such that the month we have now begun (so-called “Pride” month) will be marked by blasphemous displays of grasping and replacing God’s authority with that of man alone.  It is the same pattern of arrogance that we see in the Garden when mankind grasped for those things that were forbidden in order to claim for himself a sovereignty and a control over creation and over himself.  This month stands as the microcosm of how serious Christians feel under daily assault year-round in a society that has adopted secular progressivism and atheism as its religion.  But just as in the Garden when God did not abandon Adam and Eve in their sin, we likewise do not give up hope and compassion for those who are deep in the many serious sins that come from pride and disobedience.  We know that at least some of these are people in our own families, among our friends and loved ones.  We ourselves are sinners.  But the Gospel is Good News!  We have something good to offer the world: we have the message of the Gospel by which we hear of our dignity in God’s image and likeness, and we have the hope of true human flourishing that can come about by conversion and the rejection of the anti-Christian notion that we are only slaves of our desires and feelings.  We are not defined by our feelings and desires.  No, we are defined by our belonging to God.  When we learn to live in accord with God’s ways we find the antidote to the destruction caused by pride and disobedience.

In the complicated landscape of our time, marked by so many struggles and sins that can ensnare us and our friends, we observe today that God has not abandoned us.  He has not left us orphans.  He is truly present with us.  In fact, he teaches us and reminds us that our whole being belongs to Him.  He makes Himself present to us in sacramental form by those words of humility, sacrifice, and obedience when he says: This is my Body.  In the course of the Eucharistic Procession for Corpus Christi we carry and walk with this presence of God, presenting to the world outside these walls the One who calls all men to strop grasping for a sinful authority that misuses the body and leaves us separated from God, but rather to take on the true Christian spirit that recognizes our defects and sins and calls out to God to strengthen us in the battle of conversion.  We ourselves need this grace, and we are called to be witnesses of this grace so that others may come to insert themselves in the drama of salvation and leave behind the false gospel of secular progressivism and atheism.

As we worship God who lowers Himself to be present in the humility of the Sacred Host and the Chalice, may we be nourished by this same presence so that we have the courage, compassion, and conviction to call to others to stop grasping in pride for distortions of human nature.  Mankind is in a particularly strong and raging battle these days over the meaning of the body due to a radical autonomy that seeks to replace God.  Today we renew our faith that the “This is my Body” spoken by Jesus and spoken still through his priests, makes him truly present, Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity, in the Holy Eucharist.  May our reverence for this Real Presence, our devotion to Holy Mass, our commitment to time in our Adoration Chapel, and our presentation of this gift to the world (through devotions like the Eucharistic Procession) bring about conversion to the goodness of God who has sovereignty over us and who does not abandon us in the darkness of pride and disobedience.