"This is my Body" - Rector's Rambling for June 3, 2018

“This is my Body”. (Matthew 26:26)  These simple words of Jesus sum up the reason for today’s special celebration of Corpus Christi.  In fact, Corpus Christi means “The Body of Christ”.  Today we celebrate the great gift that Jesus gave to us – his very self under the species of bread and wine.

This feast actually falls on Thursday night for a good reason.  It mirrors the celebration of the institution of the Sacrament of Holy Communion on Maundy Thursday, when Jesus with his apostles celebrated the Passover meal together and Jesus took the elements of that remembrance meal and gave it a new, more powerful Sacramental meaning.  Maundy Thursday is the day before Good Friday, and gets lost in the busyness of Holy Week.  So the church, in her wisdom, created this secondary feast to celebrate the occasion again.

I remember the first time I attended a Thursday evening celebration of Corpus Christi.  It was a Solemn High Mass at St. Clement’s Church in Philadelphia and several things stuck out that night that have stayed with me to this day.  First was that it was ridiculously hot and sweaty and I don’t think I had ever been so drenched in sweat outside of an exercise situation.  But more wonderfully, I remember the fantastic music (Shubert’s Mass in G), precise ancient liturgy, and amazing devotion to Jesus in the gift of the Blessed Sacrament.  Years later, after I was ordained, I got to participate in the liturgy  for this feast day at St. Clement’s and it may be the closest to heaven I think I have ever experienced.

Here at St. John’s we celebrate this Feast today, but we also have other opportunities to deepen one’s devotion to Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament.  On Thursdays, year-round, we have the service of Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament after the celebration of Holy Communion.  In Lent we also have Benediction on Fridays after Stations of the Cross.  And every time the Holy Communion is celebrated, we can draw nearer to Jesus in the way that He gave himself to us on that night before he died.

For more information on this devotion, both in the U.K. and in the U.S., please go to the St. John’s Web site page for the Confraternity of the Blessed Sacrament at www.StJohnsDetroit.org/cbs.htm.