FEAST OF CORPUS CHRISTI
I AM THE BREAD OF LIFE! (Jn.6:35) I AM THE LIVING BREAD WHICH CAME DOWN FROM HEAVEN…AND THE BREAD WHICH I SHALL GIVE IS MY FLESH FOR THE LIFE OF THE WORLD (Jn.6:51)
We have gone, step by step, in the course of the liturgical year, from the consideration of the mysteries of the life of Jesus to the contemplation of the Blessed Trinity, whose feast we celebrated last Sunday. Jesus, our Mediator, our Way, has taken us by the hand and led us to the Trinity; and today it seems, as though the three Persons Themselves wish to take us back to Jesus, considered in His Eucharist.
"No man cometh to the Father but by Me" (Jn.14:6), Jesus said, and He added, " No man can come to Me except the Father … draw him" (ibid. 6:44). This is the journey of the Christian soul: from Jesus to the Father, to the Trinity; and from the Trinity, from the Father, to Jesus. Jesus brings to the Father, the Father draws us to Jesus.
A Christian cannot do without Christ; He is, in the strictest sense of the word, our Pontiff, the great Bridge-builder who has spanned the abyss between God and us. At the end of the liturgical cycle in which we commemorate the mysteries of the Savior, the Church, who like a good Mother knows that our spiritual life cannot subsist without Jesus, leads us to Him, really and truly present in the Most Holy Sacrament of the altar.
The solemnity of the Corpus Domini is not just the simple memorial of an historical event which took place about two thousand years ago at the Last Supper; rather,it recalls us to the everpresent reality of Jesus always living in our midst. We can say, in truth, that He has not "left us orphans," but has willed to remain permanently with us, in the integrity of His Person in the fullness of His humanity and His divinity. "There is no other nation so great," the Divine Office enthusiastically sings, "as to have its gods so near as our God is present to us" (RB). In the Eucharist, Jesus is really Emmanuel, God with us!
(Fr. Gabriel of St. Mary Magdalene, OCD: Divine Intimacy)
