This Precious Gift

This weekend we celebrate the great Solemnity of Corpus Christi, the Body and Blood of Jesus. It is also the day when ninety-two of our children will make their First Holy Communion, and we pray for them and for their families. They have prepared long and hard for this day and we hope it will be an occasion in which their faith and their understanding of the real presence of Jesus in this most precious of sacraments is deepened and more fully appreciated.

My mind on this day often goes to the gospel account of Jesus telling the disciples that unless you become like little children you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven. Notice how Jesus doesn’t specify or say anything about age when he mentions the children. What he wants us to understand and appreciate is something more, something deeper about the kingdom and its centrality to our lives and the best way we can grasp this is by changing our whole perception of how our relationship with Jesus and thereby with the kingdom is viewed. As we know, children are open and loving and quite willing to take things on trust, not in any naïve or unreasoned way, but within an experience of generosity and loving kindness, which is established by coming to both knowledge and truth about the person who reaches out to them. These realities are the building block of the kingdom, and they are laid upon that foundation stone of Jesus. Where do we see this at work? In the lives of people who take the living Jesus into their hearts. People who receive the fulness of his sacramental body and blood as their ‘food for the journey’ and who allow his loving presence to mould and shape the pattern of their lives.

Recall the disciples who were at table in the presence of that stranger at Emmaus. Here is the example par excellence that renders all we need to help understand the eucharist as an image of vibrancy and joy. We see in these two characters a snapshot of how our lives can often seem devoid of hope. Yet it is in the breaking of bread that their eyes are opened so that they recognise him, their hope revived, and their joy reignited. They have turned into children of the kingdom, their faces alight with new expectation, their bodies reinvigorated, their minds cleared of any doubt about what they have experienced. The Risen Jesus is present with them! Renewed and filled with the bread of life they truly are companions – sharers of and partakers in the bread that is the body and blood of the Risen Lord. They go back, no longer disillusioned and downcast, but as kingdom makers.

May our hearts be similarly renewed and revitalised now, on this day and in the weeks ahead, Sunday after Sunday. We all come to the table as children to be fed, for the cup we bless, is a communion with the blood of Christ, and the bread we break, is a communion with the body of Christ.