Real Presence (Corpus Christi)

 

Real Presence

(The Feast of Corpus Christi)

Homily delivered at the Parish Church of St. Mark the Evangelist

Kapahulu, Honolulu, Hawaii

Sunday June 11, 2023 8:30 Low Mass and 10:30 Solemn Mass with Benediction

The Very Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson, SCP, Ph.D.

Homily starts at 28:00 

 

St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), at the request of Pope Urban IV (1261-1264)  when the Pope first established the Feast of Corpus Christi in 1264,  composed one of my favorite hymns in honor of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.  The hymn is found in the Roman Missal as a prayer of thanksgiving after Mass.

 

Adoro te devote, latens Deitas, quae sub his figuris vere latitas: tibi se cor meum totum subiicit, quia te contemplans totum deficit.      

 

I worship Thee devotedly, O God who is hidden, Thou who in these simple                          signs art hidden, yet truly art present.  All my heart throws itself before Thee, since in meditating on thee thus, everything fails me.

 

We are celebrating Corpus Christi today.  Some people mock belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist as superstitious “cookie worship.”  When I first became a chorister in the Episcopal Church, my section leader not only taught me how to do plain song and anglican chant, but also thought I needed to be read into the culture of Anglican choirs,   So he taught me, among other things, the “naughty choir boy” versions of songs:  “While shepherd washed their socks by night, all seated on the ground,” among others, and a very protestant parody of Thomas’s eucharistic hymn:

“Humbly we adore thee in thy little box.

We’re not here to eat thee 

We’re just here to watch.

Monstrances and incense clouds are only just to scare 

But I sit here wondering:

Are you really there?” 

I sometimes wonder whether we moderns and post-moderns can hold anything in awe or reverence. 

 

Part of the problem, of course, is that some people do indeed have superstitious and magical ways of seeing the Eucharist.  “Hocus-pocus” as a way to mock superstition is a corruption of the Latin translation of Jesus’ words when he instituted the Eucharist, “Hoc est corpus meum (This is my body).”  

 

But some peoples’ bad opinions or misuse of doctrine should not lead us to the opposite error of rejecting true doctrine.  We need to follow here the example of the young Elizabeth I, who affirmed her faith in the Real Presence in the elements while ambiguously declining to over-define the matter.  When queried under threat of torture or death as a Protestant heretic by Queen Mary’s inquisitors about her belief regarding the Eucharistic elements, Elizabeth is said to have replied with an affirmation that was later memorialized by John Donne in this quatrain: 

 

Christ was the word that spake it.
He took the bread and break it;
And what his words did make it
That I believe and take it.

 

“What his words did make it,” of course, refers to Jesus’ words of institution at the Last Supper, “This is my body, this is my blood.”   While explicitly rejecting radical Protestantism’s belief that the Lord’s supper was a mere ordinance that remembered Christ’s passion, Elizabeth thus affirmed the real presence.  She also implicitly rejected receptionism, the belief that the bread and wine remain merely bread and wine but with added symbolism and meaning attributed to them by those consuming them.  She declined to endorse transubstantiation, the Roman doctrine of the miraculous substitution of the elements’ character as bread and wine with that of the Body and Blood of our Lord, despite visible appearances, as well as the more Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation, or the adding of Christ’s Body and Blood to the elements’ character as bread and wine.  We Anglicans, like the Elizabeth and the Eastern Orthodox, have been content to leave the matter undefined, and simply trust Jesus’ words, that the consecrated Bread and Wine of Eucharist are truly the Body and Blood of Christ, even while we decline to say exactly how this is so. 

 

I must say that I stand in awe and wonder at how beautifully you worshippers here at St. Mark’s Kapahulu express in your liturgy faith in the real presence:  the placement of the epiclesis before the words of institution, the ringing of the sanctus bells at all the moments in the eucharistic prayer where the common—bread and wine—are made holy, the very body and blood of our savior.  I feel blessed to have celebrated mass here with you in your way,  which is to my mind, the best way.   

 

Key in experiencing and honoring the presence of Christ in the Eucharist is having a general idea about what a sacrament is: an outward and visible expression that not only points to, but participates in and achieves an inward, hidden reality.

 

An early Christian hymn by Ephrem of Edessa, whom we commemorated yesterday, expresses wonder and reverence before the consecrated elements of the Eucharist this way:

 

Lord, your robe’s the well from which our healing flows.
Just behind this outer layer hides your power.
Spittle from your mouth creates a miracle of light within its clay.

In your bread there blows what no mouth can devour.
In your wine there smoulders what no lips can drink.
Gale and Blaze in bread and wine: unparalleled the miracle we taste.

Coming down to earth, where human beings die,
God created these anew, like Wide-eyed Ones,
mingling Blaze and Gale and making these the mystic content of their dust.

Did the Seraph’s fingers touch the white-hot coal?
Did the Prophet’s mouth do more than touch the same?
No, they grasped it not and he consumed it not. To us are granted both.

Abram offered body-food to spirit-guests.
Angels swallowed meat. The newest proof of power
is that bodies eat and drink the Fire and Wind provided by our Lord.
                                          (tr. Geoffrey Rowell) 

 

A hymn we sing from time to time speaks of how our worship in the sacrament of the Eucharist must fit into a larger sacrament of life for us:  

 

Draw us in the Spirit’s tether;
For when humbly, in thy name,
Two or three are met together,
Thou art in the midst of them:
Alleluya! Alleluya! Touch we now thy garment’s hem.

As the faithful used to gather
In the name of Christ to sup,
Then with thanks to God the Father
Break the bread and bless the cup,
Alleluya! Alleluya! So knit thou our friendship up.

All our meals and all our living
Make as sacraments of thee,
That by caring, helping, giving,
We may true disciples be.
Alleluya! Alleluya! We will serve thee faithfully.

And simply, in the hymn, “Lord you give the great commission”:  “Lord, you make the common holy, this my body, this my blood.  Let us all, for earth’s true glory, daily lift life heavenward.” 

 

When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we ask “give us this day our daily bread.”  But this is not simply a prayer for basic physical sustenance.   The Greek words—and Aramaic before them—translated by “our daily bread” actually mean something more like “our bread for the morrow,” the bread of the great feast on the Day of the Lord, or “the bread beyond what you meant when you said, ‘man shall not live by bread alone.’”  It is for this reason that the Lord’s Prayer has always been recited as part of the Great Thanksgiving, just before the breaking of the bread. 

 

There is perhaps a larger issue at stake when we talk about Real Presence.  Franciscan friar Richard Rohr writes the following: 

 

“The Eucharistic body and blood of Christ is a place we must come to again and again to find our own face, to find our deepest name, and our absolute identity in God. It takes years for this to sink in. It is too big a truth for any one moment, too grand and wonderful for our small hearts and minds.  So we keep eating this mystery that is simultaneously the joy of God and the suffering of God packed into one meal. (Some have seen the body/bread as eating the joy and the blood/wine as drinking the suffering.) All we can really do is to be present ourselves, because we cannot ever rationally understand this. Presence cannot really be explained.  When the two presences meet, Jesus and the soul, then we have what Catholics brilliantly call “the Real Presence.” We did maintain the objective end of the presence from God’s side rather well, but we seldom taught people the subjective way of how to be present themselves! Presence is a relational concept, and both sides must be there, or there is no real presence.” 

 

That is what St. Paul is talking about when he warns us about taking the eucharist unworthily, without “discerning the body.”  Real presence in the Eucharist requires our real presence, otherwise, we risk missing what it going on, missing the saving act of God in the Eucharistic sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving. 

 

May we all be present, truly present, when we come each to the altar rail to partake the Body and Blood of our Lord.  May we honor Christ in the sacrament through such devotions as Eucharistic benediction and adoration. Let us not be naughty choir boys who ridicule the sacred.  This is just too sweet, too blessed, to make fun of.  It is the way our Lord taught us to welcome him personally into our lives, spirits, and bodies.    

 

Thanks be to God.