Who We Are — Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, June 10 to 16, 2012 (Tenth Week of “Ordinary Time”)

This feast tells us who we are. We are people who have become the body of Christ through the blood of Christ.

We did not become Christ’s body by “entering a second time into our mother’s womb and being born again.” Nicodemus had that right (see John 3:1 ff.). We are not ‘reborn” as the body of the baby Jesus.

Nor do we find our identity in following the words and example of Jesus “teaching... proclaiming the good news of the kingdom and curing people” in his ministry. We are not a “body politic,” as defined in the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780: "a voluntary association of individuals... by which the whole people covenants with each citizen and each citizen with the whole people." Our covenant to live, not by human laws but by the word of God, does not make us the “body of Christ.” Nor does “joining the Church” by voluntary acceptance of her teachings, authority and structure.

We have to be “born from above.” By “water and Spirit.” We must go into the waters of Baptism as into the grave, die with Christ and rise with him. The Jesus whose body we are is “the one who came by water and blood; not with the water only but with the water and the blood. And the Spirit is the one that testifies, for the Spirit is the truth.” The only “body of Christ” we can be is his risen body.

To be this we first have to die. This is the significance of the blood sacrifices that sealed the covenants between God and Abraham, God and his people (Genesis 15; Exodus 24). By killing animals as symbols of themselves, the people expressed that they were not just pledging to God the behavior specified in the Covenant, but giving their whole selves to him: their being, their lives — as God was giving himself to them: life for life. The Covenant was a mutual pledge, not just of behavior for behavior, but of being for being, life for life. To keep the Covenant it was not enough to keep the rules. The Covenant meant mutual giving of self; living in total union with God.

This union would be brought to fullness only when the “grace of the Lord Jesus Christ” was revealed: the “favor” of actually sharing in the divine life of God by being incorporated into the body of Jesus on the cross, dying with him, and letting him rise from the grave of Baptism in us, to continue his life and ministry on earth in us as his risen body.

The Feast of “Corpus Christi” is the feast of “the Body and Blood of Christ.” We celebrate, not only his body in Eucharist. We celebrate ourselves as his body — his real body, risen from his blood.

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