Making Christ Present

(The High Feast of the Lamb ((detail) Ghent altarpiece - Jan Van Eyck 16th c)


Today is the Feast of The Body and Blood of Christ (or Corpus Christi, for those who still remember their Latin). Historically it finds its origins in the thirteenth century as a feast in honour of the Blessed Sacrament; in earlier years it was traditionally marked by a procession.

Of course we not only offer devotion to the Blessed Sacrament, but most importantly, we receive it through the sacrament of the Eucharist and the sacrifice of the Mass. Through it we are nourished to live like Christ because through the Eucharist, Christ becomes one with us.

This leads me to reflect on something I saw happen during communion at Mass recently. A regular parishioner received communion, then began returning to their seat as quickly and as steadily as their mobility would allow. Another regular parishioner received communion immediately after, and seeing their fellow Catholic walking as best as they could, put an arm around them to support and guide them.

This was heart warming, yes. Yet it was much more. It reflected the very nature of the Eucharist. St. Augustine tells us that at Mass, we say “Amen” to that which we are. That is, we “become what we receive”; we receive and we are the Body of Christ. The Body of Christ today, the Church, must then commit itself to Christ’s mission. The call to “Love One Another” was acted out so instinctively in the service and love shared between these two parishioners. The very act of communion, becoming one with Christ and with each other, leads us (in the words of Mary MacKillop) to never see a need without doing something about it.

Let us never forget that during the celebration of the Eucharist, Christ is present not only in the person of the priest, the proclaimed word and the eucharistic elements, but also in the liturgical assembly who gathers to celebrate the paschal mystery, the death and resurrection of Jesus.

Torture may be considered a kind of perverse liturgy, for in torture the body of the victim is the ritual site where the state's power is manifested in its most awesome form." - William T. Cavanaugh, Torture and Eucharist

The government memos released last week, detailing acts of torture carried out by C.I.A. operatives in the Bush administration, make for interesting reading in light of the gospel narratives' about Jesus' post-resurrection appearances to his disciples. That human bodies matter is a central truth of the Easter proclamation.

But this is less than obvious in an age when Christians more often associate Easter's meaning with "the immortality of the soul" than with "the resurrection of the body." When we spiritualize Easter—when we imagine disembodied souls reuniting with loved ones in heaven—we miss this point about bodies and we also, as Tom Wright has observed, “cut the nerve of the social, cultural and political critique.”

Resurrection is about the undoing of death and of all our death-dealing ways. But if our deepest Easter metaphors have mostly to do with butterflies, we will miss this. The undoing of death that Easter accomplishes creates a people who do not flinch from the tortured body of Jesus, but who also know that the marks of violence carried in his broken body are now signs by which we claim resurrection as a counter politics to state-sponsored violence that denies the dignity of any human body anywhere.

We know this most fully in the Eucharist. When we consume Christ’s broken body we become it. We enact a politics—a way of being in the world—rooted in witness, in suffering. Eating and drinking at the Lord’s Table become acts of resistance against any false power that would diminish the humanity of other eating and drinking bodies.

Where torture as liturgy is a kind of “scripting of bodies into a drama of fear” (Cavanaugh), the liturgy of the Table is the creation of a body which lives by hope and loves by a power not of its own making.

When Jesus stands among the disciples and declares peace to them (Luke 24:36b), he gives voice to what his resurrection has already accomplished: the end of violence and the undoing of death. And when he goes on to talk about flesh and bones, hands and feet, and to eat a piece of broiled fish, we see how we can never again talk about resurrection apart from bodies—our own; the violated bodies of torture victims; Jesus’ raised body; and his body, the church—sign, servant, and foretaste of the peace he has made possible.

And we give thanks that we “are witnesses of these things” (24:48).