THE MOST HOLY BODY & BLOOD OF CHRIST
(B)
(Exodus 24:3-8; Hebrews 9:11-15; Mark 14:12-16,
22-26)
It was noticeable that our first
reading taken from the book of Exodus, and also the second one from the letter
to the Hebrews, spoke of the sanctioning and saving power of blood: the blood
sprinkled on the Israelites by Moses in the desert, and that poured out by
Christ on Calvary.
At the Last Supper however -- as St.
Mark’s Gospel told us -- Jesus blessed and offered bread first of all, saying
“This is My Body”, and only afterwards some wine, saying, “This is My
Blood”. Now, why did Jesus not simply
offer His Blood? Why did He bless bread
and offer His Body before offering His Most Precious Blood?
Our Lord’s wisdom is beyond any
merely human scrutiny; and that is why Mother Church offers us several readings
at Holy Mass, so that we might gain some understanding and appreciation of
Jesus’ words and actions in the Gospel account by viewing them in the light of
other bible texts, both of which, in this case, as I said, speak only of blood,
thereby inviting me, and I hope you also, to wonder why Jesus took bread and
wine to offer both His Body and His Blood.
In our first reading, Moses led the
people of Israel out of Egypt to their first destination, Sinai, where Moses
encountered God on the mountain top and was given the Law; then we were
told:
When Moses
came to the people and related all the words and ordinances of the LORD, they
all answered with one voice and said, "We will do everything that the LORD has
told us." Moses then wrote down all the
words of the LORD.
Our second reading from the letter
to the Hebrews spoke of Jesus ascending, not simply to the top of a mountain,
but to heaven itself with His blood:
When Christ
came as High Priest of the good things that have come to be, passing through the
greater and more perfect tabernacle not made by hands, that is, not belonging to
this creation, He entered once for all into the sanctuary, not with the blood of
goats and calves but with His own blood, thus obtaining eternal
redemption.
Both readings emphasize the blood,
used by Moses and given by Jesus, and both tell us what the blood was
for:
Moses took the
blood and sprinkled it on the people, saying, "This is the blood of the covenant
that the LORD has made with you in accordance with all these words of His."
If
the blood of
bulls and goats and the sprinkling of a heifer’s ashes can sanctify those who
are defiled so that their flesh is cleansed, how much more will the blood of
Christ, Who through the eternal Spirit offered Himself unblemished to God,
cleanse our consciences from dead works to worship the living
God?
The blood was, therefore, for a
sacrificial cleansing leading to a commitment to God by observing His laws,
following His teaching, and loving His Word Incarnate.
By those two readings we are
encouraged, indeed almost obliged, to think, on hearing the Gospel passage: why
did Jesus add the bread, His Body? This
question becomes all the more important when we realize that blood offered and
sprinkled evokes easily and clearly cleansing from sin and commitment to God;
but when bread also is offered we begin to think of bread and wine as one --
food and drink -- with the result that the sacrificial Body and Blood are not
only to be offered to God but also to be received by disciples for sacramental
nourishment and spiritual refreshment.
The People of Israel, the original
Chosen People, as you heard, pledged themselves to keep the Law given to them
through Moses by the Lord:
All the people
answered with one voice and said, "We will do everything that the LORD has told
us."
However, both early on in their
desert wanderings and increasingly over the span of many centuries leading to
the Messianic times, they failed, repeatedly and seriously, to keep their part
of the covenant they had originally entered into with God at Sinai, and they
failed because they tried to do the impossible.
It was not that God had required what was impossible of them, but
because, over the centuries, they had gradually failed in their recognition and
appreciation of the divine aspect of their calling; and this, because the basic
sin of devilish pride was ever gnawing into and gradually eroding and destroying
the integrity of Israel’s ‘official’ worship of, and ‘personal’ relationship
with, their God. Instead of invoking
God’s help in their weakness and His grace for their ignorance, they tried to
keep the Law not so much by aspiring towards and praying for its spiritual
fulfilment, as by reducing its scope to the level of their own natural
understanding, and its requirements to the limits of their own personal capacity
for meticulous observance. In that way,
their fulfilment of the requirements of the Law became a testimonial to their
own undeniable strength of character bolstering an ever more spurious holiness,
rather than a means for their education into a truly spiritual understanding of
God’s choice of Israel, and an invitation to their whole-hearted acceptance of
and response to the wisdom and love of His plan for their privileged
participation in the salvation of all mankind.
The offering of sacrificial blood
alone came to remind the Israelites above all of obligations to be fulfilled and
requirements to be met in a vain attempt to legally fulfil their side of the
bilateral agreement made at Sinai. For
the old covenant entered into by Moses at Sinai had been one of the type made
between a sovereign Lord and his vassals, a type of treaty common in the Near
East of those early days, a treaty in which a Great King would offer a binding
covenant to His subjects, whereby He would protect them, and they, in return,
would fulfil certain specific obligations of praise, honour, and service as His
servants. However, such treaties were
not commonly considered -- by the subject nations around – to bind the minds and
hearts of those obliged to obey.
Humankind has always striven, since
stretching out a grabbing hand for forbidden fruit in the original temptation of
Eden, to become like to God without in any way becoming godly:
For God knows that in the day you eat of
(the apple) your eyes will be
opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil. (Genesis
3:5)
Indeed, such is the extent of the
human version of devilish pride, that some human beings will even seek to make
themselves superior to God: trying to force Him, for example by magical
practices and incantations, to do their will.
The Son of God, out of His great
love for His Father and compassion for our suffering and subjection, came as One
among us offering both His Body and His Blood, in order to convince His People
of their constant need for both cleansing and strength. The Gift of such Eucharistic Food -- Bread
and Wine, Body and Blood -- is meant to help us become a humble and grateful
People, constantly aware of our need for the purification and the power of that
heavenly nourishment whereby we can walk safely and successfully, by the Spirit,
along the way of Jesus through the desert of this world towards the promised
fulfilment of our heavenly Father’s home.
But there is yet more, for by
bringing in the aspect of food and nourishment whereby we constantly look to God
for help and strength to follow His guidance and do His will, we are also made
aware of our calling to an eternal banquet in heaven, where we will find
ourselves being given a place at the divine table that we, most certainly, could
never have grabbed for ourselves: a position of honour and – in Jesus, by the
Spirit -- of a certain equality with God, as His adopted children in the Kingdom
and Family of their eternal Father. The
New Covenant is no longer a mighty-Lord-and-vassal covenant but a living bond of
mutual love -- in Jesus by the Spirit -- which allows us to share in the very
relationship that exists between Jesus and His Father, as children of the
Father, adopted indeed, but most truly His children, because the Spirit uniting
Jesus and the Father is our very life, the spiritual blood coursing through our
veins and in our heart, the breath of life that fills our lungs.
Today, therefore, thanks to the
readings Mother Church has chosen to give us along with Saint Mark’s account of
Jesus’ institution of the Holy Eucharist, we have come to recognize something of
what Jesus’ offering of Bread and Wine can mean for us: it both humbles and
exalts us. By directly humbling us it
can save us from the folly of human pride; while the exaltation it promises us
is above anything we could ever have imagined, and thereby, indeed, humbles us
yet more, spiritually this time, in a gratitude that knows not what to acclaim
loudest, “Thank you Lord for such unimaginable blessings”, or “Lord, I am not
worthy.” And since neither acclamation
can ring pure and true without the other, let us, therefore, most
whole-heartedly embrace both, and, leaving aside our own cogitations, calmly
trust the Spirit both to guide us in our choice and form us by their use.
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