Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for Corpus Christi Sunday, Year C, Vigil

June 18, 2022

 

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.18.22_Corpus_Christi_C_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday as we celebrate together the feast of the Holy Eucharist, his Body and Blood.

* In the Gospel for this year, the Church has us meditate on the multiplication of the five loaves and two fish to feed the crowd of about 5,000. There are a few reasons why the Church wants us to ponder this miracle on Corpus Christi. First, it happened immediately before Jesus’ Bread of Life Discourse, as Jesus used it to lead us to hunger not for food that perishes but the food that leads to eternal life, the True Manna, his own flesh and blood. Second, because of the verbs we encounter, when St. Luke tells us that Jesus took the bread and fish into his hands, looked up to heaven, blessed and broke them and gave them to his disciples, gestures and words that are identical to what happened in the Upper Room when he transformed bread and wine into himself. Third, many great saints have looked at the miracle of loaves and fish as foreshadowings, respectively, of the multiplication of the Eucharist, represented by the bread, and of believers, represented by the fish caught by fishers of men.

* Despite all of these connections, what I would like to ponder, however, is the great contrast between the miracle of the loaves and fish and the miracle of the Eucharist. In this Sunday’s Gospel, after the Twelve approach Jesus to encourage him to dismiss the crowd so that they could go to the surrounding villages and farms to get provisions, Jesus told them, “Give them some food yourselves.” Even though they could only scrouge up five small buns and two fish, which would have been inadequate to feed the apostles not to mention several thousand, Jesus wanted to incorporate their meager offerings into the miracle, much like in the Eucharist, he does seek to incorporate our efforts, starting not with grains and grapes but with bread and wine, which are not only the fruit of the earth and vine but the work of human hands. But whereas the apostles could actually give the crowds something themselves, however meager, in the Holy Eucharist there was no way the apostles directly could give the crowds the spiritual nourishment they needed even more. Jesus alone could do that. And one year after the miracle of the multiplication, during the next Passover, Jesus took bread and wine into his hands in the Upper Room, totally changed them into his Body and Blood, and said not just, “Take and eat, this is my body,” and “Take and drink, this is the chalice of my blood,” but also, “Do this in memory of me.” Rather than starting with the raw materials of fish and bread the apostles brought him to multiply, Jesus began the miracle himself and then gave the apostles the command, though the Sacrament of Holy Orders, to multiply his Body and Blood, bringing it to feed the crowds throughout time until the ends of the earth. With regard to the spiritual nourishment we need, Jesus doesn’t say, “Give them some food yourselves,” but rather, “This is my Body,” “This is my Blood,” and “Give them this food!”

* On Corpus Christi, we focus on this tremendous self-gift of Jesus and what our response should be. In St. Thomas Aquinas’ famous Lauda Sion Salvatorem that the Church proclaims as a Sequence before the Gospel,