Homily for the Solemnity of
Corpus Christi
June 10, 2012
Ex 24: 3-8
Ursulines, Willow
Dr., New Rochelle
 |
| Fr. Jonathan Parks. Photographer unknown. |
“Moses
took the blood and sprinkled it on the people, saying, ‘This is the blood of
the covenant that the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words
of his’” (Ex 24:8).
Our
1st reading this morning shows us Israel
and the Lord God sealing a covenant between themselves at the foot of Mt. Sinai. God has just delivered Israel from
slavery and from the might of Pharaoh’s chariots; he’s guiding them thru the
desert toward the Promised Land where their ancestors Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob
once dwelt and are buried; he undertakes to continue to defend and guide them.
For
their part, Israel
undertakes obedience: “We will do
everything that the Lord has told us” (Ex 24:3) thru his words to Moses: the commandments, the rituals, worship of
YHWH alone, etc.
If
you’ve ever read The Adventures of Tom
Sawyer, you probably remember that Tom and Huck became blood brothers,
cutting their fingers with a knife and mixing their blood, and committed
themselves to stand by each other.
That
sharing of blood is an ancient idea. A
solemn blood ritual concludes the covenant agreement between YHWH and Israel. Animals are slaughtered and their blood
collected. Blood represents the life of
the creature, and the Hebrews treat blood with extreme reverence because God
alone is the author and master of life.
Now, half of the blood of the sacrifice is “splashed on the altar”
(24:6), which represents God: God is
solemnly bound by this covenant, bound by his own life’s-blood, as it
were. The other half of the blood is
“sprinkled on the people” (24:8), affirming God’s life upon them, binding them
to the Lord with a blood connection—and cleansing them too, for in the rituals
of the Law blood is a purifier.
The
ritual of sharing blood joins the 2 parties, YHWH and Israel. They become partners, or we could say, blood
brothers. The reading doesn’t mention it
today, but the oxen sacrificed on the altar would have been eaten by the people—or
at least some of them—so that both parties to the covenant partook of it, parts
of the oxen being given over to YHWH by being burnt, and the rest consumed by
the people. In fact, 24:11 (3 verses
after our reading) affirms that “after gazing on God, they [Aaron, Nadab,
Abihu, and 70 elders] could still eat and drink,” which, presumably, refers to
the sacrifice.
This
same sharing happens thru the blood of Jesus, the blood of the new covenant
that the Lord has made with us in accordance with is words, that he would lay
down his life for his sheep. Shed on the
cross, his blood makes of the cross an altar.
Offered to us in the cup, it “sprinkles” us, linking us to the altar-cross,
binding us to the Father, making us a new Israel, mingling Christ’s blood with
our own, cleansing us of our sins. And
we eat the flesh of the sacrifice that’s been offered to God on the cross and
is offered to us from our own altar.
In
this new covenant, the Father undertakes to save us from the slavery of sin,
from the oppression of eternal death—“cleansing our consciences from dead
works” and “promising an eternal inheritance” (Heb 9:14,15). We promise, in our turn, to keep the words of
the Lord—starting with a living memory of Jesus—“Do this in memory of me” (Luke
22:19)—but living out the words of Jesus, adhering to his teaching by loving
the Lord with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength, and our neighbor as
ourselves—a teaching we were reminded of at Mass just last Thursday (Mark
12:28-34).
To
love the Lord our God and him alone with all our heart, soul, mind, and
strength is, like Jesus, to center our lives on the Father: in our worship, in all our decisions, all our
activity. It’s to acknowledge him as the
sovereign master of the world, and of ourselves in particular—not a symbolic
and essentially powerless sovereign like Elizabeth II*
but a sovereign with power and authority over us: the Lord who created us, loves us, pardons us,
demands loyalty of us, and dispenses justice to us. We’ve come from his hand, and he created us
to return to him—in Christ, in love.
To
love our neighbor as ourselves is to keep Christ’s new commandment, linked to
the Last Supper and thus to the Eucharist, even if St. John doesn’t place the Eucharist
there. All who partake of the Eucharist
are our sisters and brothers, for we all share in the sacrifice of the Lord’s
body and blood. Even those who don’t
share in the Eucharist have been redeemed by the blood of the Lamb, and so have
a destiny to become God’s children. Many
of them act more like God’s children than some who partake of the Eucharist, as
we know, because they honor God implicitly or explicitly and practice love of
their neighbor—keeping a covenant they may not even be aware of, as St. Paul
writes to the Romans: “When the Gentiles
who do not have the law by nature observe the prescriptions of the law, they
are a law for themselves even though they do not have the law. They show that the demands of the law are
written in their hearts” (2:14-15).
Well,
we know and acknowledge Christ, and thru him we strive to honor the Father; by
his grace and power we strive to love one another—grace and power we draw upon
in the Eucharist, which is his eternal covenant with us, his lasting commitment
to be with us, to strengthen us, to assist us in the long process of living out
our Baptism, the process of becoming truly God’s children, washed in water,
cleansed in blood, made one with Christ our blood brother by sharing in the
sacrifice of his body and blood.
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