Most Holy Body and Blood of the Lord (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, June 1, 2024

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: 

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, but gives himself to us every day on the altar. This is what we celebrate on the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of the Lord.
• Since the first Corpus Christi feast 760 years ago, the feast has featured joyful processions of Jesus in the Eucharist out of our Churches into our streets so that everyone can unite themselves to, and properly adore, the Lord not just in our Catholic Churches but in daily life. Many parishes throughout the United States will be hosting solemn Eucharistic processions today. I’d urge you to attend one, lovingly taking Jesus out to the world he redeemed and that he wishes to sanctify precisely through his Eucharistic Presence. I am presently in Philadelphia, on the fifteenth day of the St. Elizabeth Ann Seton (eastern) Route of the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage, a continuous 65-day Eucharistic procession from New Haven to Indianapolis in preparation for the National Eucharistic Congress beginning July 17. On Corpus Christi, led by Archbishop Nelson Perez of Philadelphia, we will have a huge Eucharistic Procession starting from SS. Peter and Paul Cathedral. The city of brotherly love will become a city of divine and Eucharistic love, which is at the root of any authentic fraternity and love of neighbor.
• Eucharistic processions show two essential realities of our faith. The first is its dynamic nature. Jesus never told us to “stay where you are,” “don’t move,” but instead constantly was summoning his disciples to “get up, let’s go.” He summoned them and us to “come, follow me,” and then to “go into the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature” (Mk 14:42; 10:21; 16:15). The whole Christian life is defined by this movement. As St. John tells us, it’s to walk “just as [Jesus] walked” (1 Jn 2:6). Jesus says to us what he said to the paralytic in Capernaum, “Rise and walk” (Mt 9:5), and what he said to the three apostles in the garden, “Get up, let’s go.” We’re all called to say joyfully, with the words of Psalm 116, “I will walk before the Lord in the land of the living.”
• The Second Vatican Council said that this dynamism is the very nature of the Christian life. The Church is comprised, it wrote, of “pilgrims in a strange land” directed and guided by Jesus in our “pilgrimage toward eternal happiness.” The Liturgy reinforces this as we refer to Jesus’ Mystical Body as the “pilgrim Church on earth.” We see this essential aspect of our faith in how God asked Abraham, at 75, to leave his native place and go to a place where he would show him; how Moses and the Israelites left Egypt on a journey of 40 years to the promised land; how Elijah journeyed to the desert, Tobias journeyed with Raphael, Jonah journeyed to Nineveh, and the Jewish people journeyed back and forth to exile in Babylon. In giving the law to his chosen people through Moses, God instituted three pilgrim feasts in which Jews were expected to travel to the Temple three times a year, no matter how far away they lived: for Passover, for Pentecost and for the Feast of Tabernacles, all three of which have clear fulfillments in what would take place in Jerusalem in the Upper Room. Jesus himself, with Mary and Joseph, would make these pilgrimages. In his public ministry, Jesus made them with the apostles, teaching along the road and within the temple precincts and healing many as he passed through towns and villages.
• It’s no surprise then that throughout Church history, the Church has lived out this pilgrim nature. The great commission is a reminder that we are meant always to be on the move, bringing the Gospel to every creature, crossing the road as Good Samaritans to care for those left wounded, following the good shepherd as he calls us by name and leads us out, being docile to the Holy Spirit who blows where he wills and came down on Pentecost as a strong driving wind capable of blowing the Church all over the then-known world. The Church has lived out its pilgrim nature making pilgrimages to the tombs of saints even in times of persecution, making journeys to the Holy Land, to Rome, to Santiago de Compostela, establishing the tradition of the Station Churches in Lent and more.
• This pilgrim nature of the Church is not contradicted, but rather reinforced, by the whole notion of a parish. A parish seems like a stable place where we go to stay, a spiritual home from which some might never leave over many decades, but the word parish comes from the Greek word paroikia, which means temporary dwelling, a residence in a strange land, a hostel or a “station.” St. Peter uses paroikos or parishioner to describe a foreign pilgrim or sojourner (1 Pet 2:11) and paroikia for pilgrimage, exile or sojourn (1 Pet 1:17). The point is that the life of Christians is one of pilgrimage and exile, as we journey through the world without being of the world, because our true homeland is heaven. And the pilgrimage the Church makes throughout time is ultimately a Eucharistic procession, not with canopies, incense and hymns, but like Mary lived the mystery of the Visitation that we just marked on Friday. Jesus accompanies us on this pilgrimage in the Holy Eucharist, normally within us, but sometimes publicly, as many parishes will show on Corpus Christi and as the four-part National Eucharistic pilgrimage is manifesting over 6,500 miles on the road to Indianapolis. As we journey, we are boldly and unambiguously testifying that we believe what we are carrying in the monstrance is not a piece of bread at all, but, as Jesus said, the Living Bread come down from heaven, who has given us his Body and Blood for the life of the world (Jn 6:51). We pray that as a result of the Church’s Eucharistic witness many will seek to join Jesus on the Eucharistic pilgrimage of earthly life all the way to its conclusion in the eternal nuptial feast.
• “Take and eat.” “Take and drink.” Those words of Jesus in the Gospel this Sunday are wondrously repeated every day on the altar of our parishes. By them, Jesus is inviting us to enter into a dialogue of life with him, wanting us to become more and more like himself whom we consume. He wants to make that conversation that echoes each day in our churches the most consequential one of our life so that we can leave Church like Mary left the Annunciation and the apostles left the Upper Room on Pentecost, bearing witness throughout the journey of our life that we do not walk alone, but that we walk with Jesus who walks with us. Blessed be Jesus in the most Blessed Sacrament of the altar! Amen!

The homily was based on the following Gospel: 

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