The Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ

Fr Dominic’s Homily

Today is the feast of Corpus Christi - the body and blood of our Lord.

We hear about the last supper in the Gospel reading. It is the feast of the Passover and there are many people in Jerusalem. We hear it called the feast of unleavened bread. Passover was 1 day and then there was an octave of unleavened bread celebration.

A bit like the fact that we have Christmas that is one day followed by an octave or 8 days of celebration but whilst they are separate we call it all Christmas celebration. We lose that distinction. So it was with Passover/unleavened bread.

Jesus has planned how all the events will occur in this last week of his life. He discloses carefully the plan of where the Passover will be celebrated as he doesn’t want the authorities to know because they are keeping an eye out for him as they want any excuse to kill him. He obviously knows that Judas is about to betray him. But he needs to celebrate that final Passover meal before this happens.

People were bringing their sacrificial lambs to the temple where they would be inspected by the temple officials. They had to be perfect and unblemished. They would be slaughtered and then the priest would offer the blood to God. This lamb would then be roasted at their celebration that night.

So we hear that Jesus joins with his disciples to undertake this last meal with them and chose from all eternity that it should be the Passover meal.

So they find a male 1 year old lamb that is without blemish. In other words it is in its prime. It’s taken to the temple where it is sacrificed. The Priest then pours some of the blood onto the altar and the rest of the lamb is taken back to be roasted.

Justin the Martyr was an early Christian martyr (who we celebrated today) who lived in the area and saw and wrote that the sheep were then mounted onto cruciform shaped wooden frames in order to be roasted on a fire. So Jesus would have witnessed this year after year as he was growing up realising at a certain point the deeper significance of what this represented for him on his final Passover celebratio