Corpus Christi is not just a feast of the Eucharist. We have other feasts of the Eucharist. The celebration of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday is the feast of the Eucharist par excellence, when Christ actually spoke the words “this is my body” and “this is my blood,” which we’ve been repeating at every Mass since. Every Sunday is a feast of the Eucharist in that the whole body of Christ comes together to worship God in spirit and truth and to receive the sacramental gift of Christ’s life broken and poured out for us. We have plenty of feasts of the Eucharist. What makes Corpus Christi unique among them, I think, is that it’s a feast of the Eucharist precisely on the move.
What’s the image we most commonly associate with the feast of Corpus Christi but the procession of the Eucharist through rose-petaled streets of medieval towns and modern cities, past the watchful doors of homes and business, through summer fields of rural communities, under shading canopies, in measured chants of praise? I realize that this could perhaps be a rather Western image conditioned by the customs and climates of the northern hemisphere more than anything else. This is where my imagination happens to come from, so I would be curious to see how such traditions are kept in other parts of the world. The point, though, is that Corpus Christi is when the Eucharist normally takes to the streets. It’s a rendition of how the Eucharist comes to us, how the Eucharist has made its way to us down through our histories, going especially to our human extremities, knocking on hospital doors, sitting by hospice bedsides, squeezing between prison bars, patrolling our warzones, slipping over closed borders and into persecuted undergrounds.
That’s the dynamic we can see in our first reading from Deuteronomy. Before there was the Eucharist, God fed his people in the desert for forty years on manna. After forty years of wandering in the desert, I am sure that the ancient Israelites knew that landscape in and out. I am sure that they had found ways to get themselves into every cave, nook, crevice, and oasis that that desert had to offer, maybe they even had names for the rocks, but once the manna started, it fell on them every day of their exodus except for sabbaths. It was like a pandemic, if we allow ourselves a little Latin wordplay, this bread (panis) that fell on all (pan) the people wherever they were, whatever need they were in, and which was then shared out among the people according to their need. The manna found them in every circumstance and nurtured them not only in body but also in the humility, trust, and obedience they needed to inherit the promised land freely, which is where the manna stopped.
If Corpus Christi, then, is the feast of the Eucharist on the move, what are we to make of this year’s feast when the Blessed Sacrament remains shut up in our churches and absent from our streets? How does the Eucharist meet us in our circumstances when there’s so much hunger once again literally to eat the flesh of the Son of Man and to drink his blood?
Well, the Blessed Sacrament may be absent from our streets, but the Body of Christ most certainly has not been. We may not have the image of the eucharistic procession to work with this year, but our time of pandemic has provided us with two other images to frame our feast and break open its costly grace for us. The first image is that haunting Urbi et Orbi blessing that Pope Francis gave on March 27, holding the Blessed Sacrament out over an empty St. Peter’s Square as the gold gilt of the monstrance caught the chiaroscuro effect of the basilica fires and the rainy Roman twilight. The second image is a black man pinned underneath the knee of a police officer in a Minneapolis gutter. The two images don’t just stand alongside each other. They overlap. They superimpose. They reveal each other. We don’t have the luxury of seeing the Body of Christ broken in the hands of our priests and pastors without also seeing the Body of Christ broken in our streets, alleys, and societal crosshairs, especially in bodies broken down by racial injustice and discrimination. If we can commit to seeing the one without the other, then our putative faith in the Eucharist will amount to nothing more than a voyeuristic, self-enclosed spirituality that in the end judges us as just one more damned goat.
When we eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, one of the things we’re committed to is not consuming the flesh or blood of anyone else. One of the things that made Jesus’s language in the Bread of Life Discourse from the sixth chapter of John’s Gospel so drastic is that this image of eating flesh and drinking blood in the scriptural imagination of the time was not one of life but of punishment for Israel’s oppressors. As God speaks for example through the prophet Isaiah, “I will make your oppressors eat their own flesh, and they shall be drunk with their own blood as wine” (49:26). Jesus in the Gospels lambasted the scribes and Pharisees for eating up the substance of the poor, widowed, and orphaned by their self-preferential applications of the law, which is why the Letter of James says that pure religion “is this: to care for orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself unstained by the world” (1:27). We eat our own flesh and drink our own blood when we consume the substance of others, when we settle complacently for self-aggrandizing systems of power and privilege that keep whole communities compromised in terms of housing, healthcare, employment, safety, education, mobility, fill in the blank, but the Eucharist frees us from our social cannibalisms. The Eucharist feeds us on the very life of God so that we ourselves can proclaim by the witness and work of our lives that the meek, the poor, and the peacemakers are the ones who will inherit the earth. We ourselves will be among the least of Christ’s brothers and sisters who cross Jordan waters into the land of promise.
Corpus Christi is meant to get us seeing the Body of Christ in our streets. These past few weeks, we have seen bodies of people driven to the streets to speak up for those who have been pinned down there. God’s passion for us is no less intense. Even though our access to the sacrament is still mostly limited right now to watching through our screens, God’s life rushes to us like the father in the parable of the two sons, to pick us up from the ways that we have divided his heritage by our entitlements and self-righteousness, and to return us safe and sound to the communion of his household. God directs our journey back to the Eucharist with the humility, hunger, and healing that we need for it to issue into true kingdom communion.