Sensing the Eucharist

Sermon for the Sunday in the Octave of Corpus Christi

You come to the altar, reverently kneel at the rail, open your mouth or hold out your hands and what happens?

The priest gives you what looks like a little wafer of unleavened bread and tells you it’s the Body of Christ.

Perhaps you say, “Amen” after receiving it. This means that you agree that this wafer is indeed the Body of Our Lord.

Do you really agree? The evidence of your eyes says otherwise. According to what you see and taste, you are not eating any more than bread and wine. So how do you agree that you are receiving truly the Body and Blood of Christ as the Catholic Church has always taught?

[PAUSE]

Think back to what you were taught. How many senses are there?

Perhaps you’re thinking as many others do that there are only five senses: sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch. However, we don’t just have these five senses. This is an oversimplication. What of your sense of balance, of temperature, of being able to pinpoint where something is by sound? That’s at least eight, and neurologists believe that there are between nine and twenty-one, but they do disagree on that number!

We believe that we aren’t just a body, but a spirit which we often call a soul, though we can mean different things by “soul”. This spirit has senses too. You have a sense of justice, a sense of your own consciousness, a sense of something being amiss but not being able to put your finger on it. But we do have to learn to use these senses of the spirit, just like a newborn.

A newborn baby has to get used to all the different senses that it experiences. For a newborn they are all confused and mixed up. A baby might be able to feel colours, smell sounds, taste what it sees. As that baby grows older, it sharpens what it can do with its senses so that it can do something as simple as stand up, and eventually something as complex as hitting a cricket ball for six.

Our Lord tells us that we need to be born again by water and by spirit. In so doing, He is showing us that we need to be awoken to the senses of our spirits so that we may perceive things that are from heaven. Just as He comes healing the blind and deaf, even more so does He come to open the eyes and ears of our spirit to develop into full human beings.

We have seen on Whitsun how we are not only to see with the eyes of our body, but also with the eyes of our spirit. This is the trouble that the world that only believes with its material senses has with our Faith which is why it refuses to accept the existence of anything spiritual as being real.

[PAUSE]

St Paul exhorts us to use our spiritual senses when it comes to the Eucharist.

“[L]et a man examine himself, and so let him eat of that bread, and drink of that cup. For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning the Lord's body.”

It is clear from what Jesus says to us that the wafer and wine are transformed really and truly into His Body and Blood and that we each receive Him fully and truly in the Sacrament. Outwardly we have the appearance wafer and wine, but inwardly – one might say beyond physics – we have the true Body of Christ, as real and as local as we are ourselves present at Mass. We use our eyes of flesh to see that we do receive and the eyes of our spirits to see what we receive. The eyes of our flesh will always only see that small white disc but the eyes of our faith will see the reality of Christ Himself present to be received in our bodies and in our spirits.

[PAUSE]

At the consecration, the reality of the wafer and wine has gone, replaced with the reality Body and Blood of Christ – reality that goes far beyond what we can see or hear. All that remains is a shadow of things that have passed away. However, what we receive in faith, what we receive trusting God to keep His promises to us, will open our whole being, body and spirit, to the truth of our reality and of the reality of God Himself. Not bad for a small white disc, is it?