Eucharist for Corpus Christi 19 June 2025

You won’t find Corpus Christi in the Book of Common Prayer. The Reformed Protestants who created the Church of England were grateful for Holy Communion, and they thought it was important, but they were opposed to anything which would have appeared to present the Eucharist as a sacrifice, as Christ’s offering of himself on the altar for their sins as most Catholics thought of the Mass. The mass was, in medieval times, a terrible and awesome mystery, a spectacle, in which few actually participated. The Reformers on the other hand stressed the aspect of remembrance: Do this in remembrance of me. But it didn’t stop people being rather reluctant to come to communion. The fear remained even when the theology changed. So you will find in the Book of Common Prayer a number of Homilies, exhortations to the people to attend and receive, not least to express their gratitude to God by participating in the feast he has provided. 

At its heart, Holy Communion is an act of participation. It is as though we are at the Last Supper, going over the words of the scripture, remembering Jesus, on the night of his betrayal, taking, blessing and breaking bread and giving it to his disciples.  Holy Communion is one of two sacraments, instituted by Christ, baptism being the other. Baptism has us immersed in water, in Holy Communion we eat and drink. Both washing and eating are necessary for us. We may be spiritual beings, but we are first physical beings and sacraments involve our bodies. 

In another sense they involve us as bodies doing something together and in public. The post communion prayer in the Book of Common Prayer thanks God ‘that thou dost vouchsafe to feed us, who have duly received these holy mysteries with the spiritual food of the most precious Body and Blood of thy Son our Saviour Jesus Christ, and dost assure us thereby of they favour and goodness towards us; and that we are very members incorporate of the mystical Body of thy Son which is the blessed company of all faithful people’. 

What, you may ask, is a mystical body precisely? It is the Church, the Church through the ages and the Church of now and the Church in heaven. I know that quite often the Church does not seem very mystical at all, and we all get fed up with its failures, whether it’s the pomposity of it all which gets to us, or its indifference to things we believe are important, or its habit of being judgmental, and sometimes arrogant and cruel. 

But there is something in this notion of a mystical body which I cling on to. It means my faith, my practice, my habit of churchgoing is not all about me. I may drag myself here some days, but when I am here I bring with me so many others, those I love and those I find hard to love, those who have enriched my life and those who have terrified and hurt me. And also all my fellow Christians, those I recognise and those I barely know or not at all. I bring them all into my prayer and into the presence of God as I am sustained by the Body and Blood of Christ. 

There is in Christian culture a particular understanding of how we relate together in society which derives from the Eucharist. You can see it in the use of words like corporation, incorporate or even just body, as in a governing body, or a teaching body, or the body politic. 

It suggests, to use St Paul’s metaphor, that we are indeed members one of another; that our true vocation is not in our individual specialness, but in what we contribute to the whole. Take, Eat is how we incorporate Christ into ourselves and are incorporated into him and into one another. And all this makes us more real, more resilient, more integrated in ourselves and with one another. It is because of this, I think that Christianity has lasted, and has had and still has a profound effect for the good on our history, our laws, our sense of justice, our attitudes to the poor and the weak and those in need. We lose this at our peril. 

And we can see the dangers to society of losing the sense that we are a body, that we participate in one another. I have been thinking a lot this week about the grooming scandal, about the way those abused teenage girls were so uncared for and unlistened to, because the police and the politicians found it inconvenient to identify those who had tormented them. 

Yet they belong to us and we to them, and so in the end do their oppressors who should be brought to justice and know why what they did was wrong. Being part of the Body is important. The Body of Christ, the Mystical Body, the Body of the Church, to Body of society. Like those Russian dolls they are both separate and one, but the inner core is here. Do this in remembrance of me. Do this. Regularly, often. With penitience, prayer and thanksgiving.