A REFLECTION FOR THE SUNDAY WITHIN THE OCTAVE OF CORPUS CHRISTI
One of the most basic natural requirements of
the human body is food. The first thing
a newborn baby learns is to cry when it wants to eat. It’s a habit acquired from our first day of
life, and one that we never seem to lose.
If there’s one thing that never fails to bring people together, it’s a
good meal. Conversely though, the
inability to satisfy our hunger is guaran-teed to take us past the boiling point. Deprive the people of bread and there’ll be a
revolution. We see this with the French
in 1789, when the mob supposedly asked Queen Marie Antoinette for bread, and stormed
the Bastille after they were told that they could go and eat cake. In 1917 Russia, Lenin and his revolutionary
mobs took over the streets, chanting the slogan “Power to the Soviets, Bread to
the Starving!”
We even see this spirit of revolution in the Old
Testament, when the Hebrews who had followed Moses out of Egypt rebelled
against him, bitterly complaining that he had led them into the wilderness only
to die of starvation. God’s response was
to rain down bread from heaven, Manna, which our Lord would later refer to as
the Bread of Angels, a foreshadowing of the Holy Eucharist, the true Bread of
Heaven. The miracle of the Manna was
reflected again in the New Testament, when our Lord performed the miracle of
the Feeding of the Five Thousand with only five pieces of barley bread. Once again, our Saviour reminds us of the
importance of relying on Divine Providence, by telling us to stay calm and
simply ask God to “give us this day our daily bread.”
Bread has formed an important part of
history. It represents food in its most
basic aspect, and is one of those things that are essential to the survival of
the human body. As such, it is the
perfect symbol for something far more important, something that is essential to
the survival of the human soul. It is no
wonder then, that on the night before he suffered, our blessed Lord took bread
into his sacred hands, and having blessed it, he gave it unto his disciples saying,
Take ye, and eat ye all of this, for this is my Body!
The Body of Christ. Corpus Christi. No longer bread, but under the form of bread,
this host we receive on our tongues in Holy Communion is truly the Body of
Christ. Like the Manna that falls from
heaven, it drops down upon us, unfailing and inexhaustible, like the dew of the
morning, instilling in us the infinite graces of God for our salvation. Through the daily Masses offered by Catholic
priests all over the world, the faithful are never deprived of their “bread”, we
never need to rebel. What depths of evil
would it take for the Church to stop celebrating Mass and taking food from the hungry
mouths of her children? What kind of
revolution would it provoke if the Church were to deprive us of our heavenly
bread? Vatican II and a new, probably
invalid form of Mass perhaps? Or maybe a
global pandemic? We should never forget
how cunning the Devil really is, and how he tricks the children of God that the
new Mass feeds them with the Bread of Angels when it is merely flour and water. Or how he tricks people into offering up the
deprivation of the sacraments during COVID-19, as though we were merely giving
up candy in Lent.
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