Sunday June 2, 2024
The Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi)
(click here to listen to or read today’s scriptures)
This is my blood
We will do everything the Lord has told us.
God’s patience is everlasting. Unlike mine.
How many times have I said these very words (or nearly), sincerely meaning them, and then done “my own thing” almost immediately? I just couldn’t be bothered by obedience.
When I write this, I feel ugly.
Moses sent young men to sacrifice young bulls as peace offerings to the Lord. He took half of the blood and put it in large bowls; the other half he splashed on the altar. He sprinkled the blood on the people, and he said, “This is the blood of the covenant that the Lord has made with you.”
Sound familiar? Those are the words Jesus used at his last supper with the disciples, the Words of Institution which transformed Passover into the Eucharist. Jesus’ body and Jesus’ blood, sprinkled “on the people.”
On Friday Margaret and I drove through a rainstorm over the 70 year old, majestic, high, arching mile-long bridge into Corpus Christi from the coast. Water stretched below us for miles both east and west. Construction for a replacement bridge was visible everywhere, but the new bridge is taking years and at least a billion dollars to build.
Twice Moses spent 40 days and 40 nights, neither eating nor drinking, atop Mount Sinai in the presence of Yahweh. He ascended Mount Sinai eight times during these months in the desert. God gave him directions about building his tabernacle and ark of the covenant, about how the Israelites were to live, about their priesthood, about their sacrifices. In every case, God spoke and the people listened.
We will do everything the Lord has told us.
Exodus 19-31 … all is well. But there are rumblings, while Moses spends so long alone with Yahweh. Forty days? What can possibly be happening up there in that cloud? We want to worship God, we want to make a festival for the Lord.
Exodus 32. They melted down their earrings and Moses’ brother made a golden calf. They sacrificed burnt offerings, offerings God did not require or request.
Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry.
Corpus Christi was named after the Feast in 1519 by Alvarez Alonzo de Pineda, first conquistador and cartographer to sail around the coast of the Gulf of Mexico. Three hundred years later, a few years after Texians under Sam Houston captured General Santa Anna and became a republic, impresario Colonel Kinney established a frontier trading post, “hard-bitten and lawless.” From there and then it grew into what is sometimes called “the sparking city by the sea.”
But the sparkling city has been torn to pieces by at least 10 hurricanes in 1916, 1919, 1961, 1967, 1970, 1978, 1980, 1999, 2017 and 2020, not to mention those between 1519 and 1916. This city has more than nine lives. This city is literally named The Body of Christ. In those wild winds from heaven, much blood has been shed.
I have no doubt that in the wake of these disasters the people repeated the words of the Israelites.
We will do everything the Lord has told us.
Aquinas shaped most of the liturgy for this Corpus Christi holiday, first observed in 1246.
Here beneath these signs are hidden
Priceless things to sense forbidden;
Signs, not things are all we see …
Thousands are as one, receivers,
One, as thousands of believers,
Eats of him who cannot waste.
Driving over the bridge, considering the storms that continued throughout the day, sitting in the evening listening to God in the stories of Moses and Jesus, recalling Aquinas as well as Senor Alvarez de Pineda, I think of what I read in the Port Aransas Island Moon weekly paper – headlined “Time to Reason with Hurricane Season. Predicting 115 Days Under Threat”: “We will see two dozen named storms and a dozen hurricanes, one of the most active seasons on record, with a higher than normal number heading for the Gulf Coast.”
Of course we don’t reason with hurricane season any more than the men and women who melted down their earrings reasoned with God. But Yahweh loves us, always has and always will, and offers us far more than bowls of blood from killed calves to sprinkle on our heads.
Take it, this is my body. And he took the wine, gave thanks and gave it to them. This is my blood of the covenant, which will be shed for many. Amen.
 (Exodus 24, Psalm 116, Hebrews 9, John 6, Mark 14)
(posted at www.davesandel.net)
