Homily for Solemnity of Corpus Christi

Homily for the Solemnity of Corpus Christi

June 2, 2024
Mark 14: 12-16, 22-26
Heb 9: 11-15
The Fountains, Tuckahoe, N.Y.
St. Francis Xavier, Bronx
Our Lady of the Assumption, Bronx

“On the 1st day of the feast of Unleavened Bread, when they sacrificed the Passover lamb…” (Mark 14: 12).

When Israel was enslaved in Egypt and looking for redemption, Moses instructed them to kill lambs, paint their doorposts with the lambs’ blood, and feast on the lambs’ roasted flesh.  Then the Angel of Death passed thru the whole land of Egypt and struck dead the 1st-born sons of all the Egyptians, “from the 1st-born of Pharaoh on the throne to the 1st-born of the slave girl at the handmill” (Ex 11:5).  But the Angel passed over the houses of the Israelites marked by the blood of the lambs.

Death of the First Born (Alma Tadema)

We read in John’s Gospel that John the Baptist recognized Jesus as “the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world” (1:29).  The Letter to the Hebrews expands on that:  “With his own blood, Christ obtained eternal redemption” (9:12).  This Lamb’s blood preserves us from the Angel of Death we call Satan.  This Lamb’s blood redeems us from a more pernicious slavery than the “hard work in mortar and brick and all kinds of field work” (Ex 1:14) and the lash of taskmasters that Israel suffered in Egypt.  This Lamb’s blood “cleanses our consciences from dead works,” the works that produce death, and empowers us “to worship the living God” (9:14).  Our Lord Jesus Christ is the true, eternal Passover lamb:  true because the blood he shed really, effectively paints our souls and delivers us; eternal because he lives forever and touches the guilty conscience of every woman and man anywhere.

This Lamb’s blood creates a new covenant between God and the new Israel, the new people of God, the “many” for whom our Lord Jesus died on the cross.  He forges this new covenant between his Father and us thru his body offered for us, his blood shed for us, his Body and Blood that we consume in his Eucharistic sacrifice, this “memorial of [his] Passion” thru which redemption comes to us, salvation from our sins and from the Angel of Death.

by Anthuensis Clakissins