Corpus Christi

‘I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live forever.’

+ In nomine …

‘The sacrament of the Lord’s supper was not by Christ’s ordinance reserved, carried about, lifted up or worshipped.’ These words from the sixteenth century 39 articles, found at the back of the prayer book, has often been thrown at Anglo-Catholics by those of a more Protestant persuasion to object to the things we are up to this evening. And they may seem to have a certain point. In the New Testament Christ tells his disciples just to ‘take, eat’ or ‘take, drink’; he says nothing about reserving, genuflecting, processing and so forth. In the old Protestant joke, we might seem to be like children who prefer to play with our food rather than eating it. 

          So perhaps today, the feast of Corpus Christi is a good time to reconsider what we are doing here, what Eucharistic devotion is all about. 

          The origins of this festival lie in medieval piety: Sr Juliana, a Belgian nun of the thirteenth century had a vision of a moon with a black spot, which she claimed represented the Church’s year with the spot being the lack of any festival to celebrate the Eucharist. The local bishop thought this was a good idea and within a century it had gained papal backing, a nice liturgy written by St Thomas Aquinas, and had become virtually universal in the West. Like Trinity Sunday, which it always follows, Corpus Christi is unusual in not celebrating an event but a belief, the presence of Christ in the sacrament of the Eucharist (we already have Maundy Thursday to recall the event). Today we give thanks not just through the Mass but for the Mass. 

John Henry Newman, noted, with his usual donnish precision and ecumenical desire to go beyond historic divisions, that the articles only say that the sacrament was not ordained by Christ to be reserved, carried around and so forth, which is obviously true, but neither do they forbid these things.  

All these other later practices arose spontaneously out of a mixture of practical and symbolic reasons. From the earliest Christian centuries, in both the East and West, the sacrament was taken to the sick in their homes. Initially deacons or others kept the sacrament on their person, but when Churches began to be built it became natural for the sacrament to be reserved there. This practical reason soon led to special vessels being built to hold the sacrament, initially pyxes hanging from above the altar, but then later locked tabernacles like the one we have here on the High Altar.

That word ‘tabernacle’ can perhaps give us a clue as to how the practices of veneration and benediction developed. It points us back to the Jewish roots of so much of our worship in the Old Testament. Before they built the Temple in Jerusalem, the Israelites had a tabernacle, a tent in the wilderness, which God had commanded them to build, which became the place where they met with him, the place of sacrifice and the place for discerning God’s word. In the Holy of Holies, at the heart of this tent, and then later in heart of the Temple, where other peoples had their idols, stood the most sacred thing that the Israelites possessed, the Ark of the Covenant. This golden box, which many have heard of because of the Indiana Jones films, contained the tablets of the law, as well as the staff that was the sign of Aaron’s priesthood and the jar of manna, the special food which fed the Israelites in the wilderness. This was the sign of the covenant, of God’s relationship with his people, made with Moses on Mount Sinai, as the rainbow or circumcision had been of earlier covenants with Noah and Abraham. The Jews turned and knelt towards this sign to pray, it was the focus for their worship, and in the early days when they were travelling in the wilderness and entering into the Holy Land, it was carried before them in procession. Even after it had disappeared they continued to make copies of it for their synagogues where the scrolls of the law are kept, as you can see here in Exeter. 

Hopefully then you can see now how natural it should be from this for Christians to transfer much of this devotion to the sacrament of Christ’s body and blood. The consecrated bread and wine is now the sign of the New and Eternal Covenant, of Christ’s presence in the midst of his people, of the manna by which he feeds us in the wilderness of this life. This is the meeting place between heaven and earth!  When we pray towards the tabernacle as we do week by week, or worship and adore Christ in his sacramental presence in the monstrance at Benediction, or carry the sacrament in procession before us out into the world, as we will in a moment, we stand in a tradition of devotion to the sign of God’s covenant, that has its distant roots over 3000 years ago.          

Normally when we celebrate the Mass, it points beyond itself, like all good signs: [the Eucharist is the gift Christ gave to his disciples at the Last Supper to enable them to understand his death and resurrection and to enable every generation since to understand and receive the fruits of that death and rising. Here Christ enables his disciples to receive his death and resurrection as the continual loving gift of himself to the world, through and beyond the rejection of the world.] But the Eucharist doesn’t just point beyond itself, it’s not just a teaching aid to help us remember things, as certain Protestants seem to have thought. It is itself a gift to be celebrated as we do tonight. The wonderful thing about sacraments is that they are signs which are what they signify, the realities they point to are actually by Christ’s promise given in and through them. When we worship Christ sacramentally present in the Host, it is more than just worshipping him through a painting. Of course the main way that Christ is present in the sacrament, gives himself to us through it, is when we receive communion, when we ‘take, eat and drink’ as he commanded us to. The reformers were right to insist that this is the primary and original purpose of the sacrament, not to be replaced by anything else, as had happened in medieval Europe where people received only once a year. But this is not to say that Christ cannot also be worshipped and adored in this sacrament in the other ways that we will do so this evening.         

So we can celebrate this sacrament today as the gift of a memorial of Christ’s death and resurrection, the gift of his presence amongst us and the gift whereby he continually gives himself to us.  But one final thought: we can also celebrate this sacrament as the gift of our response to God. The Reformers found this difficult to hold onto, but surely here Christ gives us the perfect way of responding to his gift of himself: Here we offer ourselves and everything we have, in Christ, back to God as a sacrifice of thanks and praise. The Mass is truly an offering: ‘bread which earth has given, fruit of the vine and work of human hands’. Here the whole cosmos is secretly transformed by being offered up, ‘Eucharistised’ as St Irenaeus put it. Your priesthood through your baptised is united to the priesthood of Christ to flood the world with glory. This is something to fling open the doors and show the world!                  

          In nomine…                          

AMEN.