Sermon for Corpus Christ Feast

Introduction

Today Thursday, we are celebrating Corpus Christi feast. Why on a Thursday and not on a Sunday? Because it is on Maundy Thursday that Our Lord Jesus instituted the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist. On Sunday, when we can, we have the solemnity of the feast simply because during weekdays in non-Catholic countries, many Catholics are working and cannot honor properly Our Lord.

Let us consider the Mystery of the Holy Eucharist, which is the Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ under the appearances of bread and wine.

1.      The Mystery of the Holy Eucharist

We read in the Gospel of St John the announcement of the Holy Eucharist: “I am the living bread which came down from heaven. If any man eat of this bread, he shall live for ever: and the bread that I will give is my flesh, for the life of the world…Except you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you shall not have life in you. He that eats my flesh and drinks my blood has everlasting life… he that eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him… he that eats me, the same also shall live by me.” (Jn 6;51-58). And at the Last Supper, Our Lord Jesus fulfilled his promise: “He took bread and blessed and broke and gave to his disciples and said: Take ye and eat. This is my Body. And taking the chalice, He gave thanks and gave to them saying: Drink ye all of this, for this is my Blood of the New Testament, which shall be shed for many unto remission of sins.” (Mt26;26).

All these words are very clear by themselves and the insistence of Our Lord Jesus to say that we must eat His Flesh and drink His Blood sweep away any attempt to say that His words had only a symbolic meaning. We know that Our Lord cannot make a mistake Himself, cannot cheat us in any way: “I am the Way, and the truth and the life” (Jn 14;6). When He says that this is His Body and this is His Blood, it has to be indeed His Body and His Blood. But now, on the other side, for the Apostles at the time of the Last Supper like for us at Mass when we look at the consecrated Host and Wine, we don’t see human flesh and blood but bread and wine, we don’t taste human flesh and blood, but bread and wine, we don’t feel touching human flesh and blood but bread and wine. So, how to reconcile these two elements: on one side Our Lord saying in truth “this is my Body, this is my Blood” and on the other side the perception of bread and wine by our senses? There is only one solution to that mystery, summarized in one word: “transubstantiation”.

2.      Notion of Transubstantiation

The word Transubstantiation is made of two words: “trans” and “substance”. “Trans” indicates the idea of a change or move: for example we say “to transform”, which means to change the form or shape of something into another one; we speak about the “Transsiberian train” which means the train going across Siberia.

“Substance” means what subsists, the part of a being which is not changing but stable. When we consider an object or a person, we distinguish two elements: what is stable and subsists, and what is changing and not subsisting by itself. Take the example of a human being: imagine him when he is a foetus in the womb of his mother, and then when he is an adult: is he still the same person, the same human being? Yes, he is. But does he look the same? Not at all, he has changed a lot: his size, the colour of his hair or of his skin, the traits of his face, and so on. In that man, something has changed and something has remained the same. What has remained the same, we call it “Substance”, it has subsisted under the changes; what changed, we call it “accidents”. The accidents are the colour, the shape, the softness or hardness, the roughness or smoothness, the taste, the size, and so on. They cannot subsist by themselves: for example, have you ever met the blue colour as such walking in the street? No, of course: there is a blue sky or a blue car or a blue water, but not blue as such by itself. The accidents are necessarily attached to a substance, to an object or to a person.

Substance and accidents are really distinct but concretely they are intrinsically united and we come to know the substance through the accidents. When we look at a pew for example we perceive first the accidents (colour, the shape, the size) and from this perception our mind penetrates this object and identify it to be a pew. When we look at a piece of white bread, we see its white colour, its shape; when we touch it, we feel it soft or hard; when we taste it, we taste its specific flavour. And our intelligence analyses and combines all this information and through them identify the substance of this object: this is bread, and not wood or elephant or whatever else. Substance and accidents are intrinsically united, and if we want to modify the substance of something, we necessarily modify also its accidents: when you turn wood into charcoal, you necessarily modify the original aspect of the wood; when you turn water into steam, you necessarily modify the original aspect of the water.

Now, when we speak about “transubstantiation”, we mean the change of a substance without any modification of the existing accidents. As if you turned the inside of your wood into charcoal while maintaining the exterior aspect of wood (colour, size, shape, hardness…); as if you turned your water to be steam while maintaining the exterior aspect of water. It sounds strange and impossible, and indeed it is totally impossible to human power to do so: we cannot modify the substance of anything without modifying also its accidents. But is it possible to Divine power? Yes, it is because it is God who created all things, who created the substance and the accidents and who united them, as he could associate them, He can also dissociate them: not a problem! He can change the substance of an object without modifying its appearance, if He wants it. This specific action, necessarily Divine and not human, we call it “transubstantiation”.

3.      The Holy Eucharist, transubstantiation of bread and wine into Christ’s Body and Blood.

Back to the Holy Eucharist, on one side Our Lord Jesus took some wheat bread and very clearly said: “This is my Body” which means His human flesh, then He took some grape wine and clearly said: “This is my Blood” which means His human blood; but on the other side what the Apostles could see was like bread and wine; when they took it, they felt like bread and wine; when they ate or drank it, they tasted like bread and wine. It means that a transubstantiation happened: Our Lord Jesus by His divine power dissociated the substance of that bread and wine from their natural accidents, and to turned it into the substance of His own Body and Blood, while maintaining the accidents of bread and wine. At each Mass, at the time of Consecration, Our Lord Jesus renews through the priest the same Divine action.

But we can wonder: why did Our Lord Jesus realize such transubstantiation? Because to go to Heaven, we need a special and supernatural strength, we need therefore a special and supernatural food. This was prefigured in the Old testament: the Prophet Elias, persecuted by the queen Jezabel, had a long and dangerous walk to go in order to reach Mount Sinai and meet with God: it was too much and Elias, requesting God to let him die, cast himself down and slept in the shadow of a juniper tree. An Angel of God came bringing bread and water, He touched Elias and said: ‘Arise and eat’. Elias ate and drank that ordinary food and fell asleep again. A second time the angel came and gave him a mysterious food saying: ‘arise, eat for you have yet a great way to go’. And Elias arose and ate and drank and walked in the strength of that food forty days and forty nights without stopping, until he reached Mount Sinai. To go through the dangers of this life and reach Heaven, we need a mysterious and supernatural food: Our Lord Jesus decided to give us nothing less than Himself. Impossible to imagine a more powerful food! But since it would have been very difficult for us to eat human flesh as such, Our Lord Jesus decided to hide Himself under the appearances of bread and wine, so that we could eat Him easily. And so, for the love of us, Our Lord Jesus realizes this wonderful and mysterious miracle: the transubstantiation.

Question: when there is a Eucharistic miracle, for example at Lanciano at Mass after the Consecration, human flesh and human blood appeared openly in the eyes of everybody, instead of bread and wine; Witiking, spying in the army camp of Charlemagne, and witnessing the giving of Holy Communion, saw instead of the Host a little and beautiful Child entering the mouth of the communicants: in these cases do we see the real appearance of Christ as He is since His Resurrection? No, we don’t. Christ is in Heaven and it is in Heaven only or at the end of the world that we will see Him in his proper and actual appearance. During the Eucharistic miracles, Christ allows a change of the appearances of bread and wine into the appearances of human flesh or human blood or of a child in order to help us in believing the reality of the transubstantiation.

Conclusion:

The transubstantiation is a Mystery in the sense that we know for sure that it happens at Mass as it happened at the Last Supper; we understand that the transubstantiation is not something absurd or contradictory, that it is not impossible to Divine power; moreover we are given all possible guarantees that it does happen. But we cannot see it happening and we cannot explain how scientifically it happens.

Since on Saturday it will be the feast of St Anthony of Padua, to conclude this sermon, let me relate a story in the life of this Saint. At the time of St Anthony in the 12th-13th Century, there were some heretics called Albigensians who denied the reality of the transubstantiation, who denied the real presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist. They used to say that the host was just a symbol of Christ, a way to remember Him. St Anthony went to preach to these heretics in the city of Toulouse, France, in order to bring them back to the true Faith. A certain merchant, named Barnavel, started opposing him in public very strongly, to the extent that St Anthony came to declare that even beasts had more respect for God’s words than this poor man. The merchant was furious to be compared to a stupid animal. But St Anthony challenged him: the merchant would not give his mule any food for three days, then the mule would be brought in the middle of the city square, the merchant would be on one side with the best fresh food which he could find for his mule while St Anthony would be on the other side with the Blessed Sacrament, if the hungry mule would recognize the real presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist instead of rushing to the food, then the merchant would acknowledge publicly his errors and come back to the true Roman Catholic Faith. The merchant agreed. So, during the three days, the mule was deprived of any food, and St Anthony on his side, fasted as well and prayed earnestly for the conversion of the heretics. After three days, in the presence of many witnesses, the hungry mule was brought in the middle of the city square, the merchant was on one side with plenty of fresh food for the mule and St Anthony was on the other side holding the Holy Eucharist under his coat. When the mule saw and smelt the food, it started moving to it, but when St Anthony took the Blessed Sacrament from under his coat, lifted it up and commanded the mule to honor its Creator, immediately the mule approached St Anthony and knelt down in front of the Holy Eucharist. The merchant tried by all means to make the mule move away but in vain, and finally he himself acknowledged that he had been wrong and he confessed the reality of Christ’s real presence in the Host.

Let us take the lesson from the mule for ourselves: and let us mind the way we behave and dress in the chapel, let us mind the way we prepare ourselves for Holy Communion and do our thanksgivings afterwards. The Holy eucharist is Our Lord Jesus Christ Himself, the Son of God Almighty.