The fact that we are celebrating the body and blood of Christ, Corpus Christi for all of you old Latins out there, at a time when we are unable to receive the body and blood of Christ in Holy Communion seems almost like a meanie joke. To reflect on the importance of the Holy Eucharist and its centrality in the life of Catholics and then say, “not so fast; not for you today,” feels like bait and switch. This situation got me thinking about the “corpus” part of Corpus Christ, to ponder what we are talking about when we say “the body of Christ.” We know something about bodies. After all, it is to protect our fragile, disease-prone bodies that we have been social distancing and self-isolating and wearing masks these past few months. Bodies are limited in what they can do. Bodies are susceptible to illnesses caused by the smallest of creatures. Bodies get tired, get hungry, get stressed, get anxious, get frightened, face loss and grief, get restless. Bodies die. So why in the name of God, and that is not a oath but an appropriate modifier, would there be such a feast as “the body of Christ,” as Corpus Christi? What divine truth is being revealed when we say that the second person of the Trinity, the Son of God, needed a body in order to save the world? What is there about being embodied, about body-ness, about this mass of flesh and bones and teeth and skin and livers and kidneys that God required to fulfill the plan of redemption? Why enter the womb of Mary, experience the laughter and the tears that human bodies are capable of, face the many ways that bodies can be tortured – the nails, the scourging, the thorns, the weight, the falls, the cross? Why a body?
The Bible puts it: the Word became flesh. The Word became enfleshed. The Word became embodied. We say in our Creed that Word came down from heaven was incarnate of the Virgin Mary and became a human being. The reason that is in the Creed is because at various points in the Church’s history people have denied the em-bodied nature of the faith. Come on, some would say, God is all the things bodies are not – immortal, immutable, unchanging, all powerful. Jesus must have only used a body, not been embodied. Or others would say, Jesus was only a nice guy, could not have been the Son of God, for God could not be limited by a body. To which the Church has just kept repeating the words of the Bible: the Word became flesh. God was embodied. Bethlehem was where a body was born.
Maybe we’re asking the wrong question. Instead of trying to figure out why a body was necessary in the plan of salvation let’s ask the flip side of that question: what is it about bodies, about our embodied nature, about being a human being that made it the fit instrument for the Son of God to assume? Putting it this way suggests that there is something about being an embodied human being that was capable of bearing divinity. In other words the body is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine. The whole point of the creation of the human body was to transfer into the visible reality of the world the mystery hidden since time immemorial — to be a sign of God. The body of Christ was, from this perspective, simply the culmination of what human existence is all about. “Through him all things were made,” says the Creed so that God would find the exactly right way to break into creation.
This kind of thinking stands on its head some of the spirituality that we inherited. Back in the day we would talk about body and soul. Soul was the good part, the spiritual part, the part of ourselves which mattered. Body was the problem part, the part that got us into trouble, the part that needed fixing. But if a body was what Jesus needed for salvation then our bodies are the instruments of salvation as well. (Have you ever noticed that when we profess our baptismal promises we say that we believe in “the resurrection of the body.” The idea of the immortality of the soul is not part of our creeds. Rather, since we are embodied what is raised up will be a body. What that looks like is not defined – Saint Paul says what is raised up is a spiritual body but what does that mean? — but the ancient teaching is that there is an eternal significance to being a body.) Catholics have always used bodily stuff as concrete expressions of our faith – bread, wine, oil, water, hands. We use symbols our bodies can relate to in order to place ourselves in God’s presence – smells, bells, music, candles, color, art, statues, dance. Catholics consider marriage a sacrament which says that even our sexuality is revelatory of the mystery of God. Since Christ had a body all genuine Christian spirituality must be embodied as well.
So we are back to Corpus Christi, to the celebration of the Body of Christ. We read in the epistle “The bread what we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ!” A spirituality that takes bodies seriously is all about participation, about involvement, about engaging, about connection, about becoming a part. Jesus participated in bodily existence demonstrating the sacred character of human life. A sacrament is a sacrament because bread and wine and water and oil enables our bodies to participate in the very life of God. We are the body of Christ when we participate in one another’s lives by loving service. I sing the body incarnate, says the Christian, for his body saved us, his body feeds us, his body raises us to have life and have it to the full.
