Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: This is Sundays with Bishop Ken.
Thanks for sharing some quiet time with the Lord today. We welcome guest reader Deacon Eric Bissette.
Deacon Eric is a beloved spiritual leader in his home parishes of the Diocese of Rochester, New York.
Little Book's listeners will recognize Deacon Eric as a regular narrator for our daily reflections.
And now, here is today's gospel and homily,
[00:00:46] Speaker B: A reading from the Holy Gospel According to John.
Jesus said to the Jewish crowds, I am the living bread that came down from heaven.
Whoever eats this bread will live forever, and the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.
The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying, how can this man give us his flesh to eat?
Jesus said to them, amen. Amen. I say to you, unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you do not have life within you.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day.
For my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink.
Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in Him.
Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me.
This is the bread that came down from heaven.
Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died, whoever eats this bread will live forever.
The Gospel of the Lord.
Today is the feast of Corpus Christi, which is a feast begun in the 13th century.
So it has been going on for over 700 years.
And the feast was established to emphasize two things about the first, that the Lord is truly and really present, and second, that the Eucharist is food.
Now, we believe both of those and we would get it correct on a multiple choice test.
But it deserves emphasis and I would like to emphasize it for myself and for you today to renew and refresh our belief in what is the most Catholic of all sacraments, the Eucharist.
At the Passover meal, the person leading the Passover with the Jews would take the bread and say, this is the bread of affliction, which our ancestors ate as they left Egypt.
Jesus, at the Passover meal, the Last Supper, took the bread and did something different.
He said, this is my body.
And he took the cup and said, this is my blood.
Now, in ways that of course, we cannot understand, the living, risen live Jesus Christ is present.
You hold in your hand, you take into your body the living, real risen Jesus Christ.
Now, if I announced Jesus Christ was going to live in Ithaca, people from every state of the union would be present Here, crowding, jamming, because Jesus Christ was going to touch down.
Well, this is as real and more real than that.
And it's so awesome that we have to pinch ourselves and remind ourselves. It's true.
So this feast was inaugurated to help us pinch ourselves.
So I call on all of us because we can take it for granted.
I know I can.
The way we walk, the way we put out our hand, the way we say amen.
I call on all of us to realize more deeply what we're doing.
Secondly, the feast was meant to emphasize that it was food because for several hundred years, by the 13th century, people had stopped going to Communion.
They came to Mass and watched, and they didn't go to communion because there was this feeling that they weren't worthy.
So to get people to go to Communion, they said, this is meant to be food that shapes it.
This isn't come and watch.
You are what you eat.
Take it in and it will shape your soul, your spirit. It will shape you.
So that was the emphasis, and it took a long time. But over the centuries and more recently, actually within the last hundred years, people started coming back more than once a year for communion.
But not entirely.
Not entirely.
It's been about a thousand years since people stopped taking the cup.
It wasn't offered.
Even though Jesus said, take this, all of you, and eat it.
Take this, all of you, and drink it.
People stopped going to communion.
When they did go to communion, they weren't offered the cup.
Well, this is the feast of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ.
And if this is food, then it is meant to be a full banquet. And it is meant to shape us by what we do.
On this feast of Corpus Christi, I call on all of us, number one, to a deeper reverence, and number two, to a recognition that this is food meant to shape us and each shapes us differently. Although it's the same Jesus Christ, if you haven't taken the cup, could you start doing it?
I'm asking you to think about it.
Because you are sons and daughters of God.
You sit at the banquet table, the Lord's own banquet table, and you're called to and deserve to eat fully at the banquet of the Lord.
On this feast of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ, Corpus Christi, let all of us renew the depth of our awareness of this greatest of our gifts.
[00:06:59] Speaker A: Thanks for joining us today.
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[00:07:56] Speaker B: Sa.
