Friends,
The feast of Corpus Christi celebrates Christ’s new covenant with his people: the covenant of his blood, in which he offered himself as a perfect sign of his love for us.
The First Reading recounts the ritual that sealed God’s covenant with his people, a covenant symbolized by blood, the essence of life. This act, which initially signified the Israelites’ desire to share in God’s life, was elevated to a new level of significance by Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross, transforming the covenant into a profound relationship of love.
This relationship is taken up in the Psalm, where the covenanted people express their thanksgiving for all that God has done for them and their readiness to fulfill their responsibilities to him.
The Gospel narrative of the Last Supper tells of the new covenant, so much more wonderful and powerful than the old. Jesus’s action at the Passover table is a ritual that anticipates his brutal, yet life-giving, death. Christ’s deep compassion for humankind inaugurates this new covenant, a new relationship of love between God and his people.
The Second Reading reminds us that the blood of the new covenant is from God’s own Son, so we can literally share in Christ’s life, becoming the ‘blood sisters and brothers’ of Jesus and children of the one Father.
This week, let us pray to be purified in our inner selves so that we can serve the living God.
Joy and peace.
