Tag: worship

A bloody Sunday: Corpus Christi homily

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.  

Moses, Michelangelo

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.

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On Spiritual Communion

I was very pleased to get the new issue of Worship, where I have an article that brings together some thoughts from the early days of the COVID lockdown with research related to my work on baptism of desire. It provides some of the intellectual background for my thoughts on the limits of e-worship in America.

The article “Spiritual Communion or Desire for Communion?: Sacraments and Their Substitutes in the Time of COVID-19” appears in the April 2022 issue of Worship.

Here’s the abstract:

This article critiques the concept of “spiritual communion” in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. It traces the idea’s roots to the earlier doctrine of baptism of desire and explores how the scholastic distinction between the sacramentum and res sacramenti supports it. However, it argues that such a distinction runs the risk of reductivism, discounting the embodied and communal dimension of the celebration of the sacraments. It suggests that understanding the Eucharist to represent a single irreducible good which produces multiple secondary goods provides a better way to understand the sacrament. Such a framework is able to account for what is positive in such practices as spiritual communion or televised liturgies while avoiding the danger of presenting them as replacements for the sacrament itself.