I — FEAST OF “CORPUS DOMINI”

Thursday after the First Sunday after Pentecost

Presence of God. — “O living Bread that hides my Treasure, before You, prostrate, I adore You!” (St. John of the Cross, Poems).

Meditation

1 — Stage by stage, through the liturgical year, from considering the mysteries of Jesus’ life we have risen to contemplation of the Most Holy Trinity, whose feast we celebrated last Sunday. Jesus, our Mediator, our way, has taken us by the hand and brought us to the Trinity, and today it seems that the Trinity itself wishes to lead us back to Jesus, contemplated in his Eucharist. “No one comes to the Father except through me” (Jn. 14:6), Jesus said, and then added: “No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father” (Jn. 6:44). This is the itinerary of the Christian soul: from Jesus to the Father, to the Trinity; from the Trinity, from the Father, to Jesus. Jesus leads us to the Father; the Father draws us to Jesus. The Christian absolutely cannot do without Christ; He is, in the strictest sense of the word, our Pontiff, the One who made Himself bridge between God and us. Once the liturgical cycle commemorating the mysteries of the Savior is closed, the Church, as a good mother, knowing well that our spiritual life cannot subsist without Jesus, brings us to Him, living and true in the Most Blessed Sacrament of the altar. The solemnity of Corpus Domini is not the mere remembrance of an event that happened historically about two thousand years ago on the evening of the Last Supper, but the feast of a present fact, of a reality always present and always living in our midst, so that we can truly say Jesus has not “left us orphans,” but has willed to remain stably with us in the integrity of his Person, with all his Humanity, with all his Divinity. In the consecrated Host we have our God (Roman Breviary). Yes, in the Eucharist there is permanently Emmanuel, God with us.

2 — The Eucharist is not only Jesus living and true in our midst, but it is Jesus made truly our food. This is precisely the principal aspect under which today’s liturgy presents this mystery to us; it can be said that there is no part of the Mass that does not treat it directly or at least allude to it. The Introit alludes to it, recalling the wheat and honey with which God nourished the Hebrew people in the desert, a living and life-giving food, but nevertheless only a distant image of the “living Bread” of the Eucharist; the Epistle speaks of it, recalling the institution of the Sacrament, when Jesus “took bread and, after giving thanks to God, broke it and said: ‘Take and eat: this is my Body’”; the Gradual sings it: “The eyes of all hope in You, O Lord, and You give them their food in due season”; and at greater length the beautiful sequence Lauda Sion sings in praise of it, while the Gospel, echoing the Alleluia, reports the most significant passage of the discourse in which Jesus Himself announced the Eucharist: “My Flesh is truly food and my Blood is truly drink”; the Communio then, taking up a phrase from the Epistle, reminds us of the necessity of receiving worthily the Body of the Lord, and finally the Postcommunio tells us that Eucharistic Communion is the pledge of the eternal communion of heaven. But to better understand the immense value of the Eucharist, we must return to the very words of Jesus which, most fittingly, are reported in today’s Gospel: “He who eats my Flesh and drinks my Blood lives in me and I in him.” He has made Himself our food in order to assimilate us to Himself, to make us live His life, to make us live in Him, as He Himself lives in His Father. The Eucharist is truly the sacrament of union, and at the same time it is the clearest and most convincing proof that God calls us and urges us to intimate union with Him.

Colloquy

“O God, O Creator, O Spirit of newness who fills your creatures with ever new spiritual gifts, You grant your elect the gift ever renewed: the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ!

“O Jesus, You instituted this Sacrament, moved neither by fear nor by desire for any profit that could come to You, but solely moved by a love that has no name except this: love without measure. You instituted this Sacrament because your love surpasses all words. Burning with love for us, You willed to give Yourself to us and placed Yourself there, in the consecrated Host, wholly and forever until the consummation of the ages. And You did this not only in memory of your death, which is our salvation, but also to remain wholly with us, always with us.

“My soul, if you wish to enter into the depths of this mystery, your sight must be sharpened by love! You must see and know! Consider the Last Supper; consider Jesus Christ aware that He must soon separate bodily from humanity; consider his love by which, wishing to remain united with us forever, He instituted this Sacrament so that He might be bodily and forever united to humanity. O inextinguishable love! Truly ardent love was this, O love of Christ, O love for men! O Jesus, You already had before your eyes the death awaiting You; the pains and atrocious torments of the Passion were already piercing your Heart, and nevertheless You willed to offer Yourself to your crucifiers and to make it so that, through this Sacrament, they could always have You as a gift of eternity, O You whose delights are to be with the children of men!

“O my soul, how will you not wish to plunge yourself wholly into the love of Him who never forgot us and desires to unite Himself to us forever?” (cf. St. Angela of Foligno).