Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for Most Holy Body and Blood of the Lord, Vigil
June 1, 2024
To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.1.24_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 Corpus Christi, the Feast of the Body and Blood of the Lord. In some ways, it’s the most important conversation a human being can have. Jesus takes bread and says to the apostles in the Upper Room, and to us each day, “Take it; this is my body.” Then he takes wine in a chalice and says, “This is my blood of the covenant, which will be shed for many.” These words would have been shocking to the apostles on Holy Thursday in the Upper Room. The wonder should never wear off. As we sing in the Panis Angelicus, “O res mirabilis! Manducat Dominum pauper et servus humilis.” “O what a mind-blowing reality: a poor and humble servant eats the Lord!” But that dialogue that leads to our drawing our life from Jesus in the Holy Eucharist just as he draws his life from God the Father leads to the possibility of a conversation that, incredibly, can continue every day in prayerful Eucharistic adoration when we have a chance to listen to God whisper to us interiorly, to bring to him our praise, thanks, sorrow, prayers for others and for ourselves, and learn how to abide in him and him in us. That existential conversation is then able to overflow into the whole of our life as we seek to love others as he has loved us first, giving us his body, blood and very life, and seek to be his instruments to bring others — our family members, friends, coworkers, fellow students and everyone we meet — into a similar dialogue, a similar communion of love and life.
* In the Gospel this Sunday, before we get to the words of institution or consecration, Jesus speaks with his disciples about preparations for the Passover, and Jesus gives them detailed instructions about how to find the room where he intended to fulfill the ancient Passover rite as the definitive Lamb of God and how to get everything ready. It’s a good reminder to us of how we’re supposed to “prepare to eat the Passover,” to arrange our life to enter with Jesus into the new and eternal Covenant. A Catholic should be ever in a state of preparation to meet Jesus in the Eucharist, because the Eucharist is the supreme manifestation of the love of God for us. Jesus’ taking on our humanity and entering into the world through the fiat of the Blessed Virgin Mary wasn’t enough. His being born in poverty, hunted down as an infant by assassins, living three decades in relative obscurity weren’t enough. His whole public ministry — preaching, healing, exorcising, even raising three people from the dead — wasn’t enough. Not even his passion, death, and resurrection were enough. Jesus loved us so much that he willed to become our very food. He promised as he gave his valedictory address before ascending to the Father that he would remain with us always until the end of time and he does so by his real and substantial presence in the most holy Eucharist, outside of us in our tabernacles and monstrances for us to come to be with him, and inside of us in holy communion. That’s why Jesus in his apparitions to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, and the Church in her documents, refers to the Eucharist as the Sacramentum Caritatis, as the efficacious sign instituted by Christ himself to give us his love. He not only laid down his life for us on Calvary,
