Corpus Christi, Year C (2025) - Fr Joseph Vnuk, OP

At the end of almost every Mass you are told to go in peace, and off you go, on your own, trying to live a Christian life.  It’s not easy, we sometimes fail; it takes a level of courage and awareness of God and a generosity that is difficult to maintain when so much seems stacked against us.  The light of Christ may shine brightly on us in this chapel, but at times the world outside seems plunged in darkness.  We know that Christ goes with us, but we cannot see him, we are not filled with awe at his presence, and we often feel very much on our own in a world that, to put it bluntly, sometimes simply stinks.

But today we are doing something different. Today as we step out of this chapel, the visible sacrament of Christ’s body will go with us, or rather we shall go with Christ.  As we go we shall pray the Rosary, pondering all these things in our hearts with Mary, stopping every once in a while, not just because I am going to get tired of carrying the monstrance, but so that we can fall on our knees in adoration of the Christ who shares our journey.  We shall carry candles, having with us the light of Christ that was given to us at baptism.  And to have our brothers and sisters walking with us means we are not alone, and makes us bolder.

We are all familiar with the basic symbolism of the Eucharist as bread and wine.  We can imagine ourselves as being nourished for our journey.  We can think of our closeness to Jesus and Jesus’ willingness to share with us, to give himself to us.  But to say that is only the beginning.  Let us use the procession to consider just some of the consequences that follow.

In the Eucharist we not only receive the body of Christ, but we become what we receive.  We do not change the Eucharist into ourselves as we do with normal food, but when we reverently receive Holy Communion, we are changed to become more Christ-like, to fulfil our mission as members of the body of Christ.

When we go out in procession, we celebrate the dignity and glory of the body of Christ: It is placed in a precious and shining monstrance; the priest wears special vestments as he carries it; it is honoured with candles and incense; and when we have a pause, we kneel down before the sacrament of the body of Christ and sing hymns of adoration.

We go out, however, into a world where human bodies are objectified, used as instruments of pleasure or profit, drugged for sterility or for delight or to conform to an impossible ideal shape.  Can we stand in awe at our own body, which shares the glory of Christ’s body, and resist those expectations and temptations?  Can we look upon the bodies of others with the same respect and awe?

Indeed, St Paul considers our union with Christ in the Eucharist like the union of husband with wife, forming one body.  And yet, while forming one body, wife and husband retain their otherness: the wife is a mystery to the husband, and the husband a mystery to the wife, a mystery that is to be continually pondered and relished in all its richness.  Mary, as the most perceptive of women, was the one who grasped most fully the otherness of Jesus, and made pondering it her life’s work.  As we pray the Rosary, Mary teaches us to understand the mystery which now makes us who we are and yet always leads us to something new.

May the sweet smell of the incense remind us that, united with Christ who has conquered death and decay, we are now, as St Paul says, a sweet fragrance in a world of corruption and vice.

The candles which provide an outward light are symbols of the light that now shines on our minds.  As we learn in the Eucharist to remember Christ’s cruel death on the cross as an action of supreme love, may this shed light on our suffering, both what we are actually undergoing and also the suffering that we cannot avoid if we are faithful to Christ.  In that light, we can see that we are not so much called to suffer, as we are called to love in the face of suffering.

And finally, we proceed this evening together, united as one body in Christ.  The one bread that we break is a sign of this unity.  We are bold enough to go out into the world openly as Christians, as Catholics, as people who adore and praise God.  We do not cease to be united to our brothers and sisters simply because they are not visibly present to us, nor should we lose our Christian boldness when we seem to be on our own.  What happens in the procession is, I repeat, the visible sign of the change that has really but often invisibly taken place in us when we receive the Eucharist.

This evening’s procession will be a great occasion, joyful, inspiring and, I hope, a lot of fun.  And then tomorrow or whenever you next go to your place of work or study or to any of those places we pass in the procession, I hope that what can be seen and heard and smelled tonight may be as really present to you even when the sights and the sound and the smell are only a memory.  With the mysteries of Christ constantly in mind, may you be the light, the joy, and the sweet fragrance of Christ wherever you are in the world, to the glory of the Father through the Son in the Spirit, now and for ever.

Fr Joseph Vnuk, OP is the Regent of Studies and the Chaplain to Monash University, assigned to St Dominic's Priory, Melbourne.