Homily for the Solemnity of Corpus Christi (B)
Today’s readings are bloody. Some years the readings for Corpus Christi emphasize the bread that becomes the body of Christ, and they remind us that the Eucharist is our nourishment and also the source of our unity. A single loaf of bread is formed from many individual grains of wheat.
But today’s readings are full of blood. This is not a Sunday for the squeamish. Blood sprinkled, blood shed, blood poured out, drinking blood. If we are tempted to imagine that worship is something abstract or comfortable or safe, the blood-spattered images in today’s readings should give us second thoughts. In the ancient world and in the time of Jesus, worship was a matter of flesh and blood, of life and death. Entering the Temple of Jerusalem would have been a shock to the senses—crowds of visitors both from Judea and from the Jewish diaspora; animals—birds, sheep, goats, bulls—and all their animal noises and smells; the sounds of these animals being slaughtered; the smell of blood; and the songs of prayer, of the psalms rising to heaven, with the smoke of burning incense and roasting meat. Worshipping God was not for the squeamish.
I think the fact that today’s readings speak rather vividly of the blood of goats, heifers, and bulls—bowls of blood—is perhaps a way of reminding us that Christianity—following Jesus—requires a certain courage. In one way or another we all have to overcome our squeamishness, whatever form it might take. The perfect act of worship, after all, the sacrifice which is the model for all other acts of worship, the death of Jesus on the cross, was not only bloody, but brutal. There was nothing abstract or comfortable in the scrouging and beating, in the nails, the crown of thorns, or the agonizing hours on the cross. And yet this was not, in the final analysis, merely an act of violence or a miscarriage of justice but an act of self-giving love. The blood of the new covenant was shed for those Jesus calls to be his friends and disciples.
But why blood? What is the meaning, for example, of what probably seems to us the very strange gesture of Moses who, to seal the covenant between God and his people, splashes blood upon the altar and then sprinkles it on the people. When I read this passage one of my first very modern, very practical thoughts is, “How are the Israelites going to get all that blood out of their clothes? What a mess!” But we are told, in the letter to the Hebrews, that it is blood—the blood of Christ—that cleanses.
I won’t try to take away the squeamishness, but I will offer a couple of notes of context about blood in the Bible. All of the acts of worship that we see in today’s readings are variations on the theme of sacrifice. Sacrifice is one of the most complex and important themes in Scripture and in our liturgy. The blood that is poured out in today’s readings is sacrificial blood.
Sacrifice is not unique to the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. I might have mentioned to some that I usually spend at least part of my summer every year in South Dakota in the USA, where I work in a Lakota parish. One of the most important and well-known rituals of the Plains Indians is the sun dance, which is act of sacrifice. The sun dancers carve little bits of flesh out of their chest and arms to offer in sacrifice. They do this as part of a spirituality in which the natural balance of the universe is central. When we do something to upset that balance, we need to offer something to restore it. A similar sense of cosmic justice is present in the Bible and, I suspect, hardwired into our moral sensibility.
One of the meanings of sacrifice in all religions, then, is atonement or redemption or cleansing or restoring—however you want to put it, sacrifice is a way to restore justice to relationships and to a world that has been knocked off balance by sin. So blood, which usually creates a stain that’s hard to wash out of clothes, becomes what restores and what cleans. The blood of Christ, as the Letter to the Hebrews says, will “cleanse our consciences from dead works.” And not just that. According to Hebrews, we will be cleansed in order “to worship the living God.” The living God.
It should not surprise us that blood is seen as restoring what is lifeless in the Bible because, in the Biblical understanding, blood is the source of a body’s life. Blood was the vital force running through the body. Understanding the connection between blood and life helps to make sense of the rite described in the book of Exodus. The people had just received the covenant from Moses; he had finished reading the ordinances of the law to them. They had agreed to live by these commandments; the Lord would be their God, and they would be his people. The covenant bound them together. To seal this covenant, the blood of sacrificed bulls was poured out first over the altar and then sprinkled on the people. They were united in a new bond of blood. Even today we use the phrase “related by blood” to speak about family. And what we see happening in the first reading is the creation of a new family, the people of Israel becoming, as it were, the family of God. A new relationship of life is established, and it all centers on the worship that happens on the altar. In fact, one of the other reasons sacrifices were offered and shared in the ancient world was to form relationships; they were a form of gift-exchange.
The Mosaic covenant, sealed in the blood of bulls on the altar in the wilderness of Sinai, casts a reflective light on the new covenant—new and eternal, sealed in the blood of the Son of God, made present for us on this altar. At this altar we too are given new life, the life that runs through the veins of the Son of God, divine life, which makes us a new and more perfect creation, which restores the peace and the justice thrown off balance by our sins, which makes us a new people, a new family, the sons and the daughters of God—not strangers anymore but, as it were, blood relatives “who are called to receive the promised eternal inheritance.”
Readings: Ex 24:3-8, Heb 9:11-15, Mk 14:12-16, 22-26
June 2, 2024
Oratorio San Francesco Saverio del Caravita, Rome
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Tony Lusvardi, S.J. 