The Body of Christ for us

A sermon for the feast of Corpus Christi, from Fr Russell Goulbourne

I don’t mean to pry… but I wonder what your morning routine is like. Are you, I wonder, one of those people who wake up bright and early, leap out of bed, look in the mirror at the body before them and marvel at what they see – the perfect specimen of the human form?

No, neither am I.

I have what I’d describe as a more complicated relationship with my body. There are bits of my body I like, and bits I don’t like; bits I wish weren’t there, and bits I wish still were.

But it’s the body I have – or rather, it’s the body I am, for as Christians we believe that we are a body, and that in eternity we will be a body – a resurrected body.

Indeed, Christianity is a religion of the body. Christianity is not simply a spirituality; it’s also a corporeality. Entering into communion with God doesn’t involve us distancing ourselves from the reality of our material existence; rather, entering into communion with God involves us living in the physical messiness of our bodies in a deeper way. As children of God, loved into being and wonderfully made in the divine image, we share in the life of God – and as we do so, we don’t escape from our bodies and everything else that makes us human. No, as we share in the life of God, we become more truly human – more fully alive. Christianity is a religion of the body.

Today’s feast of Corpus Christi – the body of Christ – reminds us that bodies matter. Today we celebrate the gift of the Eucharist – the body and blood of Jesus Christ – in the life of the Church, which is the body of Christ in the world. The Eucharist is the source and summit of our lives as Christians: for it’s there that we find the most telling sign and the most beautiful revelation of the faithfulness and love of the living God.

Today we give thanks for the presence of Christ’s body and blood with us in bread and wine – unremarkable, physical things made by human hands which, through the power of the Holy Spirit, become more than they are. They become a place where God is present to the people of God.

Our sacramental life together as the people of God – as the body of Christ in the world – is founded on God’s great act of bodily communion with us: the incarnation, the taking-flesh, of the eternal Son, sent by the living Father, who came and made his home with us and walked among us, sharing our humanity, showing us what it means to be human. The fact of bodily life is central to our faith.

God in Christ humbled himself to become one of us. He made himself so vulnerable as to entrust his body into human hands: Jesus gave himself in friendship to his disciples, he gave himself in love to the world – and it was human hands that betrayed him. Human hands stripped him of his clothes, beat him until he was bloody and bruised, and nailed him to a cross: his body, broken by human hands.

And yet, knowing all that was to come, the night before he died Jesus sat at supper with his friends and entrusted his body into their hands – not once, but forever, transforming the bread he broke with them into his body; and thereby transforming what happened at his passion and death into a perfect communion – the bridging of the gulf – between God and humanity, opening to us, as we hear in today’s Gospel, the way to eternal life.

So today we give thanks that the God once incarnate in Galilee is lovingly present here with us in bread and wine – the flesh and blood of Jesus of Nazareth: crucified, risen and ascended.

Now, in part, today’s feast of the body of Christ reminds us of the fragility of our own bodies. For just as the bread, which in the Eucharist becomes for us the body of Christ, is fragile – it is broken – so too our bodies are fragile: they break down, they ache, they gain scars.

But today’s feast also reminds us that in the Eucharist, the body of Christ feeds our bodies: the sustenance given by God is both bread and more than bread, surpassing any other food by feeding not only our bodies but also our souls.

For Christ’s broken body, which is entrusted into our hands at the altar and which we take into ourselves, joins our fragile bodies to the life of God in Christ: as we hear in today’s Gospel, he abides in us as we abide in him. We know that we are fragile vessels in the awesome presence of our Lord, yet what we receive in the Eucharist empowers us in ways beyond our imagining, and gives us a foretaste of peace and joy beyond our comprehension.

So when we think our own strength might fail us, we know that we encounter the love of God poured out for us on the cross and to us through the bread of the Eucharist. And when we fear that we might not be able to bear all that we are being asked to bear in our bodies, we know that we are nourished and nurtured through the bread of the Eucharist by the divine love that called us in to being, and that calls us now to life in all its fullness in our physical bodies: until that day when our resurrected bodies will rejoice in the presence of Christ, which now we glimpse in the bread of the Eucharist – but which then we will encounter face to face.

So, bodies matter: Christ’s body and our bodies, drawn together in the Eucharist in ways that we see, hear, smell, touch and taste. In the Eucharist, God draws all people to himself and unites us as equals who are loved into being, and wonderfully made in the image of God. We come to this altar because God loves us – God draws you to this altar because he loves you – and here our Lord’s faithfulness sustains us and enables us, in the bodies that we are, to become our true selves in him.

Remember that truth at every Eucharist – and remember it every morning when you look at yourself in the mirror – and give thanks to God, which is, after all, what Eucharist means.