Do you know that there are some people who have trained their memories so well that they can memorize a deck of cards in the exact order each card is turned over? I used to watch my family members on Sunday nights when they played pinochle. While they didn’t have highly trained memories, still the best among them could remember how many trump cards have been played and even which ones! If their memory failed it could cost them the game and raise the ire of an uncle sitting across the table — their pinochle partner. Most of us have ordinary, fallible memories, I guess. Who hasn’t misplaced the car keys at one time or another? No big deal–eventually we find them tucked away in the coat we wore yesterday.
In today’s Deuteronomy reading Moses is speaking to the people of Israel as they neared the Promised Land after a long 40 years of hard wandering. He appeals to their memory, calling upon them to remember how God cared for them during their travels. “Remember,” he instructs, “Remember your God.” It’s not just a nostalgic or theoretical remembering he is asking of them. He calls them to remember God’s concrete actions on their behalf. He spells out the specifics of what God did for them and reminds them that God sustained them in their desert journey by giving them manna..
What good would remembering do the people? Moses is not calling them to paint paintings or build shrines depicting their traveling years. He wants them to remember God’s fidelity in their past, so that they would be faithful to God after they entered the Promise Land. Don’t hard times tend to make us more conscious of our dependence on God? Don’t we tend to pray more when the going is rough? Don’t we also tend to go into cruise control in less testing periods and feel we can make it on our own? Once they are settled in their homes in the Promise Land, Moses advises the people to be faithful to God. They mustn’t forget how God cared for them and established a covenant with them. In the land that they are entering they must remember their dependence on God and live according to God’s statutes. It pays to have a good memory–and not just for card games.
The reference to manna in the first reading connects us to today’s gospel. Jesus’ hearers are initially repulsed by his reference to eating his flesh–wouldn’t you be? (In fact, he mentions eating his flesh four times!) “Flesh and blood”–it’s a way mothers refer to their children. “They are my flesh and blood.” So too, in Jesus’ time, it was a reference to being a human being. Jesus is God’s entrance into our lives as a human–flesh and blood. Jesus’ listeners are not only having a difficult time thinking about eating his flesh and drinking his blood–they are having trouble accepting that in Jesus, God has entered the world.
Paul is speaking to a fractured community in Corinth. They may have had beautiful liturgies, but they weren’t living as the body of Christ. The rich were not sharing with the poor, nor were the vulnerable being helped. Paul has to challenge them to become the food they eat–the body of Christ. That’s certainly a challenge we continually need to hear: is our faith community an obvious sign that we are the body and blood of Christ? What signs would convince other people that we are?
Paul reminds us that we not only personally to become the Christ we eat, but that our community is also formed into the body of Christ. “We though many are one body for we all partake of the one loaf.” By our partaking of this food and drink, we are joined more closely to one another as the body of Christ.
In the Middle Ages people went from church to church on this feast to look at the consecrated host, hoping for answers to prayer. This was a time when they were more occupied in gazing at the body of Christ than receiving it. Today’s feast is not a static occasion, a time to gaze in wonder on the eucharistic species for private devotion and communication with the Lord. The feast we celebrate together is not an invitation to just look, but to receive the body and blood of Christ and then, nourished by the divine life we receive, to be the body and blood of Christ to the world.
Having received the body and blood of Christ today we can ask ourselves some questions. For example: how are we to reflect the Prince of Peace we have received in our world? How are we to be like Christ and feed the hungry and heal the sick? Or, how are we to be like Christ and lay down our lives for others? In our reception of the Body and Blood of Christ we become what we eat and drink and must act accordingly.
When we come to receive Communion today and the Eucharistic ministers hold the sacred food and drink before us, they will say, “the Body of Christ; the Blood of Christ.” They are not only naming what they are offering us to eat and drink, they are also naming each one of us, for we are, “the body of Christ and the blood of Christ. In other words, the real presence is not only to be found in church, but in each baptized Christian nourished by the Eucharist and becoming the real presence of Christ to the world.
What a shame modern life affords so little time for family and friends to gather around table and eat together. Unless we are in a very unhealthy, dysfunctional setting, there can be something healing about eating together. Often we put aside petty differences with those around the table and can experience healing and growth in our relationships. If that is so on a human level, how much more does it apply to our faith community that gathers around the eucharistic table to hear the scriptures, our family story, break bread and share the cup?