corpus-christi-2016

Solemnity of Corpus et Sanguis Christi, 2016 Christ Church St Laurence, Sydney Fr Martin Davies, Director of St James’ Institute In the narthex of S Matthew’s Church in Great Peter Street London, just a block or two from Westminster Abbey, is a memorial to Bishop Frank Weston. He had served a curacy at S Matthew’s Westminster, and as some of you will know, went on to become the great missionary bishop of Zanzibar from 1907 until his death in 1924. The Weston memorial is a beautiful work by the great craftsman of the Catholic revival Martin Travers. Let me describe it: The memorial is a triptych. In the centre panel is a carved crucifix, somewhat larger than the one overlooking this pulpit. The left-hand panel is an image of S Francis of Assisi; and to the right of the crucifix is the bishop, vested.

Just a year before his death, Bishop Frank Weston delivered the concluding address at the 1923 AngloCatholic Congress in London.i It is described as the most eloquent and moving religious address of that generation, with its words that remain famous to this day: You cannot claim to worship Jesus in the tabernacle if you do not pity Jesus in the slum. ii Before and since that time, the actions and words of many people have been devoted to making that a strongly present reality in the Church. Listen to these more contemporary words: A true eucharist is never a passive, comforting moment alone with God, something which allows us to escape the cares and concerns of our everyday life. Eucharist is where all these cares and concerns come to a focus, and where we are asked to measure them against the standard lived by Jesus when he proclaimed for all to hear that the bread that he would give would provide life for the entire world. But it will do so only if, finding ourselves with a basket of bread, we have peered deeply enough into the heart of Christ to know what to do with it.iii Many years ago someone gave me a card with a simple line-drawing of a wheat sheaf and a few grapes; a loaf of bread and cup of wine. My gaze was often drawn to that picture as it served as the bookmark for my current reading. The message was simple: through the generosity of God, the fruits of the earth, combined with the work of human hands, become the means by which Christ’s life, death and resurrection live on in us. As so often, the beautiful and wonderfully tender words of the twelfth-century Cistercian abbot Guerric of Igny, express the depth of this truth. He said: … when the moment was at hand for [Christ] to leave his disciples, he seemed overwhelmed by the depth of his affection for them, and unable to disguise the overflowing tenderness which until then he had hidden from them. … Handing over to them the sacrament of his body and blood, he instituted the celebration of the eucharist. It is hard to say which was the more wonderful, his power or his love, in devising this new means of remaining with them, to console them for his departure. In spite of the withdrawal of his bodily presence, he would remain not only with them but in them, by virtue of this sacrament.iv This feast of Corpus Christi just shortly after the conclusion of Easter’s great fifty days, gives us the opportunity for a more leisurely reflection on the Eucharist than is possible on Maundy Thursday when we celebrate the institution of the Lord's Supper. At that time we are preoccupied with much else, as we prepare to go to the garden, await Jesus' betrayal, and proceed over the next days to his crucifixion, burial and resurrection. What most absorbs me on this feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, is that the eucharist calls us to be every bit as generous as God. We ourselves must give life for the world; life to the world.

Just as we share the bread of heaven in communion, we are called to ensure that the bread of the earth is shared equally among all people. The wine of Christ’s blood which we share, is life-giving drink. Christ drank wine to celebrate his joy at being with his disciples. We must always be mindful that we drink this life-giving and joyful wine in a world that is often life-denying and sorrowful. In drinking this same cup, we align ourselves most intimately with Christ who poured out his life for the world.

We will not understand this way of speaking unless we locate ourselves in a union of prayer with Christ; right at the very centre, at the supper and at the cross. For in that moment of broken bread, poured wine and crucifixion, the whole world is contained in the mystery of God’s generosity through Christ. It is no wonder then, that whether simply or more elaborately, we surround this celebration with all the reverence and beauty possible.

All of this points to the fact that the Great Thanksgiving - the Eucharistic Prayer - is the centre of all Christian prayer. In this moment we are totally identified with the sacrifice of Christ. We are not just remotely remembering something that happened long ago. The strong Hebrew understanding of memorial is helpful to us here: whereby an event of the past becomes real and effective in the present to give hope for the present and the future. For us this means not least, as Kenneth Leech puts it, that The Eucharist is Christ, present and active now in the fullness of his redeeming work.

So the effects of Christ’s sacrifice live on in us.

In Communion, we become sharers in the Divine life, in the very communion of God. We receive the Body of Christ which we already are: so we eat what we are, and become what we are. And this communion with God is not simply a personal state of bliss, it is shared with the rest of the Body … …

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In the … Eucharist we can see the pattern of all spirituality: offering, blessing, breaking and sharing.

Our lives are offered to God within the redemptive offering of his Son.v Let us linger a little longer on the generosity of God giving us Christ in the Eucharist: the Eucharistic bread is the symbol of all bread shared. We share the Eucharist in order to be able to share the world. God feeds us so that we can help to recreate the world.

I want to leave you with a thought about the tension between past and present. The Eucharist does not stay in the past – whether in the room of the Last Supper, or in the various doctrines or ceremonies which have (or have not) accompanied it down through the centuries. The Eucharist is now; Christ is here now, and we must ensure that our participation in Christ through prayer, through the Mass, through our action as Christ’s body now, reveals and conveys Christ in the Eucharist for the Church and for the world now.

Thomas Merton catches what I am trying to say when he writes: True loyalty to tradition does not consist in the canonisation of a particular stage of history ... always criticism of the present before the tribunal of tradition, but also criticism of tradition before the tribunal of the present day.

Real loyalty does not revolve around repetition, but carrying things a stage further.vi What therefore is the gift of this feast – this solemnity – of Corpus et Sanguis Christi for us now; for the Church and for the world now? What is the relation between the tabernacle and the world? i

http://anglicanhistory.org/england/congresses/blain_hickton2015.pdf http://anglicanhistory.org/weston/weston2.html iii Paul Bernier, Bread Broken and Shared iv Guerric of Igny, Sermon on the Ascension v Kenneth Leech, True Prayer (Sheldon Press, 1980) 106, 109 vi Thomas Merton, quoting Rudolf Bultmann (source unknown to me) ii