Cycle C - Year II:

29 May 2016: Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ

(Liturgical color: White)

Gospel: Please read Luke 9:11b-17

He is truly present!

The Church celebrates another important feast this Sunday: Solemnity of Corpus Christi, the celebration of the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.

The Holy Eucharist, or Corpus Christi, is the very center and source of our Christian life. That is why, even after His ascension Jesus chose to remain with us in the sacrament of the Eucharist. Because in the Eucharist we encounter Jesus Himself and thus receive a foretaste of heavenly glory.

St. Luke provides the Gospel proclamation for this Sunday, which is about the multiplication of the loaves and fishes. This miraculous feeding of the crowd was a prelude to something much more wonderful, the miraculous gift of our Lord Jesus Christ Himself in the Eucharist. Today's incident on the feeding of the crowd teaches us that Jesus desires to nourish His exhausted, hungry flock with bread and fish. This was a foreshadowing of our Lord's desire to spiritually nourish the whole world with His own Body and Blood in the Eucharist at Mass.

For it is within the holy sacrifice of the Mass that we have our immediate experience of this encounter

with Jesus. We are invited to prepare our minds, heart and bodies in anticipation of the representation of the paschal mystery. That means to say, our minds and hearts and bodies ought to be be oriented toward adoration of our Lord, contrition for our sins, thanksgiving for our blessings and crosses and supplications offered with our particular intention in mind.

For Catholics, the doctrine of the Real Presence asserts that in the Holy Eucharist Jesus is literally and wholly present, body and blood, soul and divinity, under the appearances of bread and wine.

The great Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote that Jesus' presence in the Eucharist is "visus, tactus, gustus". That means His presence is not imaginary in our mind. Because when we receive Jesus in the Holy Eucharist, we actually see (visus), touch (tactus), and taste (gustus) Him. He is an "edible" God, as some theologians would say.

It is a a good reminder for everyone that as Jesus makes Himself present to us as a gift in the Holy Eucharist at Mass, so too we must prepare ourselves to respond to His gift of self by our proper disposition during Holy Mass. Thus, our bodily postures of kneeling and genuflecting should remind us of who we are about to encounter as we approach the altar for Holy Communion. Even our discipline of an hour fasting before receiving the Lord into our bodies and souls should remind us of the purity and sense of mortification we must adopt if we want to imitate Him authentically.

So then as we prepare to go to Mass we should ask: "Ho will I offer myself to God during Mass in order to match Jesus' love and gift of self to me?" And we will soon discover that as much as we think we are giving to Jesus, in reality He is never outdone in His generous outpouring of His very life into our own... in the Holy Eucharist.

A blessed Sunday to us all. And thank you for a moment with God.

Ad Jesum per Mariam!