Corpus Christi

Sermon by the Revd Dr Brutus Green
Readings: Genesis 14:18-20, 1 Corinthians 11:23-26, John 6:51-58

This week the Church celebrates the feast of Corpus Christi, now sometimes called ‘Thanksgiving for Holy Communion.’ It was introduced at the suggestion of Thomas Aquinas, historically the most influential theologian in history, to Pope Urban IV in the thirteenth century. Most Protestant churches, including the Church of England, abolished it in the sixteenth-century; But it has since made a come-back across many churches, and the Anglo-catholic revival in the nineteenth-century saw a return to processions of the Blessed Sacrament, which were a feature of the day across all Europe in the middle ages. For us it may provide a point of reflection on a contentious area of theology. What is the relationship between the historical, resurrected body of Christ, the body of Christ which is the church, and the body of Christ received in the Eucharist.

That is the crucial question. We frequently speak of these three things as the body of Christ: Jesus, the Church, the sacrament. Why? What do we mean by it?

But related to it is a question – not one of the causes of the Reformation – but a central fracturing point within it: What happens in the Eucharist? Specifically, are those little wafers in some way changed by the prayer of consecration?

There is a second and more pressing question that goes with these: What change happens to our bodies? And what change will finally happen to our bodies? After death and decomposition, what is the final state of our bodies? Are they left in the earth? Or regathered? Or transformed into something new?

We should not lose sight of the fact that the dominant forces within the Reformation are political. The unrest, the persecutions the wars came as a result that the Reformation empowered secular princes to take back control. They were also a democratic movement like the Arab Springs, and between these stirred up new nationalistic forces. But the theology matters, not least because the Reformation began a new age of secularism which undermined all religion – an age of scepticism, demythologising, disenchantment and materialism.

The Eucharist became in some ways a first battlefield between faith and secularism. The language used of the Eucharist always ends up sounding technical. It doesn’t help that the way people spoke about things was quite different in Aquinas’ day to the Reformation and then today, so it doesn’t translate very well – or, if it does, it just makes people of older times sound a bit naïve or ignorant.

For Aquinas, in essence, in the Eucharist, while the bread and wine still appear, touch, taste, look, like bread and wine, they become in their inner substance the body and blood of Christ. Thus trans-subtantiation – a change in substance.

Luther rejected many Catholic practices and obviously didn’t use the same medieval language as Aquinas; his position was not remarkably different, though, in asserting the real presence in the Eucharist. Even Calvin, though, as much as he wants to avoid the capturing of the Christ in material elements, wants to assert the real presence of Christ received in the Eucharist, writing: ‘the true and substantial communication of the body and blood of the Lord [is] exhibited to believers under the sacred symbols of the Supper, understanding that they are received not by the imagination or intellect merely, but are enjoyed in reality as the food of eternal life’. And actually Calvin wants a greater sacramentality of life: ‘Christ can exert his energy wherever he pleases, in earth and heaven, can manifest his presence by the exercise of his power, can always be present with his people… can feed them with his own body, communion with which he transfuses into them. After this manner, the body and blood of Christ are exhibited to us in the sacrament’.

So if the majority of the church acknowledges the real presence of Christ received in the Eucharist, we might wonder at all the squabbling that’s gone on over the last 500 years.

One aspect is our attitude to things. Under more catholic positions – things that are consecrated or blessed remain holy in themselves. Consecrated wafers and wine can’t be just thrown away. Even if intellectually we could justify a casual attitude – it’s just bread – Is it really respectful to treat items as ordinary when we’ve spoken Christ’s words over them? And if we believe that God’s blessing remains with us after it’s pronounced should we not expect all creation to be able to receive blessing and consecration?

I think what we see in a writer like Calvin is a desire for increased sacramentality: that God is not just seen in specific functions of the church called sacraments, but everywhere. Too often the Protestant attitude has been to rail against the excesses of Catholic sacraments seeing in them idolatry or magic. This has been a great inspiration and contributor to secularisation and the pushing of God and faith out of the world, what has been called ‘the disenchantment of the world’. But the great Reformation theologians saw sacramentality in all of life – they wanted people to see God at work in all things not just limited to certain priestly activities.

So let’s return to our original questions. What’s the relationship between the sacrament, the church and the historical body of Christ. It’s a deep and interesting question. There must be a relationship between the three that goes beyond metaphor. The Church of England has a broad enough theology to allow different answers, but it’s perhaps enough to say that Christ and so God must be really  present in all three, or they’re not what they say they are. Having said that we should not want to limit God’s presence to these three areas, and although sacraments are a sign and a promise of God’s covenantal presence with us – like a fixed date night in the week – that does not prevent God being discovered and received anywhere and indeed everywhere.

Should we treat blessed and consecrated elements as holy? Yes – if we take the promises of God seriously. They are vehicles of God’s presence. And what will happen to our bodies? I think I’m not out of line with either Catholic or Reformed theology in viewing our bodies as sacraments; And certainly those that have consumed the sacrament, become part of the church, have that physical bodily incorporation with the body of Christ. As we in our limited ways have treated and reverenced the body of Christ as holy, so we can trust that God in his infinite mercy will regard our bodies as holy. They may suffer any amount of deterioration or desecration, but what is sewn in dishonour will be raised in glory. As St Augustine wrote long before Aquinas:

“Whatever has perished from the living body, therefore, or from the corpse after death, will be restored. Simultaneously with what has remained in the grave, it will rise again, change from the oldness of the animal body into the newness of the spiritual body, and clothed in incorruption and immortality. Even if the body has been completely ground to powder in some dreadful accident, or by the ferocity of enemies; even if it has been so entirely scattered to the winds or into the water that there is nothing whatever left of it: still it cannot be in any way withdrawn from the omnipotence of the Creator; rather, not a hair of its head shall perish. The flesh will then be spiritual, and subject to the spirit; but it will still be flesh and not spirit.” 
Amen.