The One who satisfies all hunger: Corpus Christi

Exodus 24.3-8 This is the blood of the Covenant that the Lord has made with you

Hebrews 9.11-15 The blood of Christ can purify our inner self

Mark 14.12-16, 22-26 This is my body; this is my blood

 

 

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Our gospel reading for this celebration of Christ’s body and blood takes us to the heart of Jesus’ passion and cross, when his body is broken on the cross and his blood poured out.

 

The meal he shares with his disciples is, ‘in the same night that he was betrayed’; it is the night we know as Maundy Thursday.

 

This meal is invested with significance beyond even the Israelites celebration of the Passover and their re-living God’s deliverance of his people from slavery in Egypt to freedom in the Promised Land.

 

The Passover meal heralds the deliverance from sin and death, a deliverance that will be realised in Jesus’ death the following day: after he is betrayed, has a sham trial and a hurried execution.

 

This Passover meal, the Last Supper, is the last meal of a condemned man.

 

And through this Passover meal Jesus - in the taking of bread and wine which he declares to be his body and blood - gives us the meal that is the Eucharist: a meal and more than a meal.

 

The Eucharist is a banquet for those who would otherwise be condemned, left in the cold, spiritually hungry, stuck in the misery of the worst side of being human.

 

The Eucharist is a sacrifice that fulfils the sacrifices of the First Covenant, which are described in our first reading and interpreted in the Letter to the Hebrews:

 

For if the blood of goats and bulls, with the sprinkling of the ashes of a heifer, sanctifies those who have been defiled so that their flesh is purified, how much more will the blood of Christ, who through the eternal Spirit offered himself without blemish to God, purify our conscience from dead works to worship the living God! (Hebrews 9.13,14)

 

Throughout the scriptures God simply wants to feed and satisfy the hunger of his people: this is both the physical hunger and the deep longings of spiritual hunger: as Jesus says in the Beatitudes, ‘Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness for they shall be satisfied.’ (Matthew 5.6)

 

Blessed Mary sees this in her beautiful song in praise of God, the Magnificat, when she declares, ‘He has filled the hungry with good things.’ (Luke 1.53)

 

The psalms describe how God fed his people in the wilderness after they had fled from the captivity of Egypt:

 

[God] rained down manna also upon them for to eat : and gave them food from heaven.

So man did eat angels' food : for he sent them meat enough. (Psalm 78.25, 26)

 

We are delivered from death and sin in Jesus Christ, and he gives us now the bread of angels: the panis angelicus.

 

Christ was even born in a place whose name – Bethlehem – literally means ‘house of bread’.

We are hungry people, in a hungry world: yet we know where to find the true food.

 

Let us tell the world where the food that satisfies is to be found!

 

Jesus Christ comes to satisfy your hunger, direct your desire, so that you are thirsty no more.

 

He teaches us to pray for this ‘daily bread’ in the Lord’s Prayer, to satisfy body and soul.

 

Jesus is this bread.

 

Jesus is the one who satisfies.

 

Jesus saves, because he gives himself for us, to take the weight of our sin, not place it on a bull or goat to be slaughtered, but on himself.

 

Note how St Mark’s Gospel connects the meal the disciples were to share with Jesus with the fact that it was the very day when the Passover lamb was sacrificed.

 

It tells us that Jesus is the sacrificial lamb of God who is killed and whose blood is poured out to reconcile us totally to God.

 

O Lamb of God that takest away the sin of the world,

grant us thy peace.

 

The Eucharist, then, takes us into the heart of darkness and of sacrifice and beyond, into the light of the of resurrection and glorification of Christ, when, like the disciples on the road to Emmaus, our hearts burn within us in recognition of Christ in his word and sacrament, in the breaking of bread, the sign of his life-giving death.

 

Little wonder the crowds, at the feeding of the 5,000 who learn that Jesus gives way more than bread, say ‘Sir, give us this bread always.’ (John 6.34)

 

This bread, Jesus teaches them and us, really is his body, the wine really is his blood.

 

Without eating and drinking we die; without eating and drinking Christ have no life in us (cf John 6.53).

 

That is why the last meal a Christian should ever desire before the end of our earthly life is this one, the one we share now.

 

We are no longer condemned eating this heavenly banquet, but are ‘ransomed, healed, restored, forgiven’.

 

The Eucharist is the sign and assurance of this spiritual and heavenly reality.

 

Today, as at every Eucharist, we receive Christ’s body into our bodies; his blood courses through our bloodstreams.

 

The Eucharist is not the last meal, or Last Supper, of a condemned person, but the banquet of life in all its abundance, the fulfilment of hope, the feast of love, the moment when we are at home, in company with one another and all the heavenly host, eating at the Lord’s table and knowing his joy made complete in us.