From our earliest days as Catholics, whether from the cradle or as adult converts, we have been taught that the Body and Blood of Christ which we receive from the altar are but shadows and sign of the heavenly reality that we one day hope to experience. The Eucharist is without doubt the most powerful of all realities for a devout Catholic. But how closely in fact do we relate our faith in the Real Presence with the actual person of Jesus?
The Eucharist brings us face to face in an encounter with a living person; the person of Jesus Christ. He once walked the earth amongst us. He taught with authority. He healed. He drove out demons from the possessed. He showed power and authority over nature when he multiplied the loaves and fishes or calmed the storm at sea. He even, incredibly, had the power to raise people from the dead. Most wonderfully of all, he, the Son of almighty God, was able to empty himself of all his power and authority, become a humble human being like ourselves. He was able to place himself in our power, to suffer at our hands and die on our behalf and to rise from the dead, breaking the power of the one thing that humans fear above all and cannot avoid; the inescapable power of death over us, which before him was the one certainty of our human existence.
All this was done by someone to whom we could reach out, whom we could touch as surely as we could reach out and touch the person sitting beside us in this church; someone with whom we could speak, whom we could know and love as surely as we can know and love anyone on this earth. But how can we encounter someone who lived so long ago, who as a being of flesh and blood has so long passed from our existence, beyond our knowing him as his contemporaries know him? That is the question to which Corpus Christi supplies an answer.
When Jesus passed through death and was raised in the Spirit, he passed beyond mere mortal existence. He moved into a realm of eternity which we can scarcely grasp. His glorified risen body was no longer bound by time and space so that, through the same Spirit who raised him from the dead, he is able to make himself present to us, to live amongst us, at any time and at any place in the reality of our existence. He is always near to us, wherever we are and whenever.
One of the ways in which he comes to us is in the Eucharist. In it, he gives himself to us as he gave himself to his disciples at the Last Supper. In the Eucharist, we sit at table with him as surely as the Twelve did in Jerusalem two millennia ago. That event is as alive to us now as it was then; and it is made possible because his risen, glorious body is no longer bound by time and space. In our hearts we understand this when we receive Holy Communion at Mass.
But the Body and Blood of the Lord Jesus are not ends in themselves. We worship a person, a living Lord. And it is he for whom we must earnestly search, whom we must discern in the Eucharist. The Eucharist is a living link that brings us face to face with Jesus, and encounter between us and the living Lord who has destroyed for us death, the greatest of all our enemies, and who makes us fit for eternal life with God. He is waiting for us in that encounter. “Behold, I stand at the door and knock,” he says. “If anyone opens to me, I will enter and sit down to table with him.” That is exactly he wants to do in the Eucharist. And the door that we must open is that of our hearts. Let us welcome him thus into our lives; today and henceforth.
Fr Phillip
