Cycle C - Year I:

23 June: Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ

(Liturgical Color: White)

Readings:

First Reading: Genesis 14:18-20

Second Reading: 1 Corinthians 11:23-26

Gospel: Please Read Luke 9:11b-17

Jesus: The Bread of Life!

In the "dancing sun", we look for God's presence in our world. And sometimes even in the clouds above, we are amazed when the clouds seem to form a silhouette image of the Lord. Or, we marvel at reported "dancing" statue of saints, and the Marian image that allegedly sheds tears. Perhaps, in our thirst for God and the divine, we are inclined to believe these manifestations of God's presence in our world.

But then we forget, that our Lord Jesus Christ is really and truly present with us in the Holy Eucharist.

We celebrate this Sunday another important feast: The Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ, or more popularly known as Corpus Christi.

Our belief in the Body and Blood of Christ in the Holy Eucharist is the very center and source of our Christian life. That is to say, even after His ascension into heaven Jesus chose to remain with us in the sacrament of the Eucharist. And so in the Eucharist we encounter Jesus Himself and thus receive a foretaste of heavenly glory.

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

It is within the holy sacrifice of the Mass that we have our immediate experience of this encounter with our Lord Jesus Christ. So 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 oriented toward adoration of our Lord, contrition for our sins, thanksgiving for our blessings and crosses and supplication offered with our particular intention in mind.

Now for us Catholics, the doctrine on the Real Presence asserts that in the Holy Eucharist our Lord Jesus Christ is wholly present, body and blood, soul and divinity, under the appearances of bread and wine.

That is why the great St. Thomas Aquinas wrote that Jesus' presence in the Eucharist is "visus, tactus, gustus." It 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) our Lord Himself. And so He is an "edible" God, as some theologians would say.

It is 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 traditional 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.

As we prepare to go to Mass we should ask: "How 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.

Finally, we cannot properly receive the Bread of Life unless at the same time we give the bread of life to those in need wherever and whoever they may be. Amen.

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

Ad Jesum per Mariam!