Father Rick Bolte's Homily

B: SOLEMNITY OF BODY & BLOOD OF CHRIST

 2009-06-14  

In most religions, especially in the primitive ones, there is a strong connection between worship and sacrifice.  It seems at the core of our relationship with higher beings (whether real or imagined) there is a sense that something has to die.  Most often this is an animal but sometimes it is a person captured in a battle and even sometimes the best of their children.  For Israel, even covenants between individuals would be sealed in the blood of an animal symbolizing both that it was to last a lifetime and the sacrifice involved.  Their sense that something had to die was on target but what had to die was usually not clear.

 

Paul speaks to that in the second reading today.  The Jewish people allowed their sacrifices and external following of the Law to suffice for what they needed to sacrifice.  But that wasn’t what really needed to be sacrificed.  The Psalms and Jeremiah will speak of a need for a new covenant, one not written on stone but on the heart.  The external sacrifice was only a symbol of the dying that was to happen internally.

We may regard this idea of external sacrifice somehow pleasing God as folly.  We would certainly agree with the psalmist who, speaking for God, asks whether the people really think God is hungry for the animals being sacrificed.  Yet we too can focus on our external sacrifices as if somehow they sated God.  How many of us attend Mass as if this were a sacrifice of our time and sleeping in on a Sunday morning?  We expect God to reward us for showing up.  How many of us are casual about being on time, leave before the final song or even after Communion with the idea that we’ve put in our time, we’ve made our sacrifice for the week?  Even those of us who attend regularly and come early and leave late can still have a sense of that has been our sacrifice.  Like the Israelites, we still need to remember what really has to die.

We get a clue of this from the first recorded covenant which took place between God and Abram.  As a result of this new relationship, Abram’s name is changed to Abraham.  One’s name at this time defined who a person was.  Abram meant “exalted father” while Abraham meant “father of many nations.”  The difference was that Abram was focused on himself but Abraham was focused on his care for the nations.  What needed to die was his self-centeredness.  The covenant called for a choice of this relationship with God and his people over trying to care for himself.

Those of us who have chosen to marry know something of this covenant relationship.  Sometimes people marry because they simply enjoy the other person and the fun things they can do together.  But for a marriage to last there has to be some dying.  Both people have to die to their self-centered focus on what is good for them and choose to live for the love they share in the relationship.

This is what God asks of us in our covenant relationship with him.  In our first reading from Exodus a bull is sacrificed and its blood sprinkled on the people and the altar.  The sacrificed bull symbolized the dying to self-centeredness and the choice to live for the good in the covenant relationship.  Paul tells us that Christ’s sacrifice now surpasses all the others.  Christ is the unblemished sacrifice who chooses to sacrifice himself.  His life was a sacrifice as he chose to give up the very things that we hold on to so tightly as we seek our self-centered ways.  Jesus’ life was a life lived for the love shared in the covenant relationship with his Father and all God’s people.  This is the covenant relationship we are invited to live for.

On this the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ, it is good to remember that the Eucharist is a celebration of this covenant.  We are called to ritually participate in the sacrifice not by the external giving up an hour of our time, but by seeking to give our whole selves joined to the sacrifice of Christ.  When the bread and wine are brought to the altar, we pray that “this our sacrifice may be acceptable to God.”  We’re not praying that the wine is a good vintage or that the bread is not stale.  We’re praying that we may be a worthy sacrifice.  That our willingness to choose the life of covenant relationship with God and one another over a life of self-centeredness may indeed be a worthy sacrifice to be joined with Christ’s.

There is something that needs to die in our relationship with God.  It’s not an external sacrifice or an external following of the rules but the selfishness within that must die for us to truly love.