Today’s readings: Deuteronomy 8, 2-3.14-16; 1 Corinthians 10, 16-17; John 6, 51-58.
It is imperative today for the Church’s conscience and for a deeper relevance of what we stand for as Christians to situate the Eucharist where it really belongs, that is, in the context of our life stories rather than just relegating it as merely an object of adoration.
Deuteronomy recalls how the Lord God guided His people through the vast and dreadful wilderness, described as a “waterless place”, recalling how, in the face of new trials, the Jews held fast to the memory of God’s promises. This is not simply appealing to some form of nostalgia for the past. Scripture always evokes the past to be read and interpreted in contemporaneity. Reading this text, our stories and trials are vividly evoked and we are called in our contexts to understand what people thirst for today and how we are remedying.
We have to beware of the rites we celebrate and which are so rich in symbolism, lest they become void of meaning. I write this on today’s feast because, as St Paul implies in the second reading, the true body of Christ is not that which is on the altar but that which is gathered around the altar. The true body of Christ is the single body we form by sharing in the one bread.
But the truth is that very often we fail to recompose that body, which is broken for various reasons and which still ails with divisions, with lack of solidarity, with lack of sensibility, and with all the dominant collective and individual attitudes that continue to exclude so many from the table of worship and of prosperity. This brokenness is actually what divorces the rites we celebrate from life, devoiding our liturgies from their symbolic power and meaning.
On this feast of Corpus Christi there are two major points that need to be highlighted: first, that the Eucharist, strictly speaking, stands for the memory of the Christian community; second, that for Christians, the Eucharist is the lifeline not merely on a spiritual level but for life taken in its entirety.
Deuteronomy refers to the memory of God’s people, what they had gone through not just as history but in terms of how, in those events, they experienced God’s real presence and saving power. Memory is not simply remembrance or commemoration. Memory is identity. A basic feature of Alzheimer’s disease is not just that you become forgetful, but that you lose bearing of who you are and who you belong to. Throughout time we lost this meaning of the Eucharist as memory because we preferred shrouding it in devotion and reserving it to the holier than thou.
This is precisely what St John’s gospel is highlighting. Throughout his gospel, John uses a rich variety of images to better render the relationship we can establish with Jesus in our journeys. Jesus is shepherd, vine, door, the way, the truth. But the imagery that renders with utmost depth this living relationship with Jesus is that of nourishment, Jesus as the living bread.
Food stands for sustenance, nutrition and energy, and on a social level for conviviality. The Eucharist, seen mainly as nourishment for the journey, is the pledge of the resurrection, of the possibility of going beyond what disfigures life and disconnects us between ourselves. When the Eucharist loses its true meaning, it becomes just another ritual that recalls the past but evokes nothing that connects with life as it unfolds.