Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of the Lord, Vigil

June 10, 2023

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.10.23_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us on the Solemnity of his Body and Blood, popularly known as Corpus Christi.

* In the Gospel for the feast, Jesus’ disciples as well as critics grumble after he tells them that he is the living bread that came down from heaven and whoever eats that bread, his flesh for the life of the world, will live forever. “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?,” they mumble aloud. And Jesus doubles down, saying, “Unless you gnaw on the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you do not have life within you. … Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me.”

* In response, the critics would ultimately say, “This teaching is hard, who can endure it,” and many of Jesus’ disciples — who had listened to so many of his life-changing words, who had witnessed so many of his stupendous miracles, including the multiplication of five loaves and two fish to feed more than 5,000 people — left. They were right in saying that Jesus’ teaching about the Eucharist was very hard. To them it sounded like cannibalism. Jews couldn’t even touch blood without becoming ritually impure and Jesus was telling them they needed to drink his blood. Sometimes I think the reason why some Catholics, like some of our fellow Christians, don’t find this teaching hard is because they think Jesus is only talking symbolically. He’s not. He stresses his flesh is real food and his blood real drink.

* We need to approach this difficult reality with faith. After many of the disciples had left, Jesus turned to the 12 and asked if they wanted to leave. That’s when same Peter who had stepped forward in Caesarea Philippi to say that Jesus was the Messiah and Son of the Living God, courageously stuck his neck out and said, “Lord to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the holy one of God.” What he was essentially saying was, “Jesus, we don’t have the foggiest idea as to how you will give us your flesh to eat and blood to drink but what we do know is that we believe in you, and because of that faith, we believe in what you say. So if you say that we must eat your flesh and drink your blood to have life, just show us how!” And Jesus would during the next Passover, when during the Last Supper in the Upper Room in Jerusalem, he would totally change the bread and wine of the Passover celebration into his Body and Blood and say, “Take and eat. … Take and drink.” St. Thomas Aquinas described the Eucharistic faith of St. Peter and of the Church when he wrote in his famous Corpus Christi hymn, Adoro Te Devote, “I believe whatever the Son of God has said, because nothing is truer than the word of truth.”

* The difficulty of Jesus’ teaching about the Eucharist is what led to the first Corpus Christi. A priest named Fr. Peter of Prague had lost his faith in the Real Presence of Jesus, but he hadn’t yet lost his faith in God and, hence, decided to give God the opportunity to give him that faith by doing something quite drastic. In 1263, he decided to make a pilgrimage to Rome, to pray at the tomb of his patron, St. Peter, for the gift of renewed faith in the Eucharist.