Corpus Christi

One

God wants to make us His family

From the beginning, God wanted us to be part of His family, literally sharing His divine life as His children. 

But, of course, we aren’t God’s children by nature. He only has one Eternal Son. So He will have to adopt us, He’ll have to bring us into His family, and that’s not as easy as it sounds. 

To bring us into His family, God has to overcome the infinite distance that separates a creature from its Creator. This is the natural difficulty in humanity being adopted by God. He has to overcome our pride, our perverse resistance to being united to God. This is the sinful difficulty in humanity being adopted by God.

So how can God make us His family, despite these major hurdles?

Two

The Blood Ritual of Exodus

The big problem has always been our pride. We were not ready to receive the gift of God’s life. So, God had to prepare us for this over a long time. 

God made covenants with Adam, Noah, and Abraham. And God made his fourth covenant with Moses.

In the first reading at Mass today from Exodus 24, Moses calls all the people together. He sacrifices oxen. Then he takes half the blood of the oxen and throws it on the Altar, and he throws the other half of the blood on the people. 

Why does he do this? Because blood symbolizes life. The blood is poured on the altar, representing God, and it is poured on the people. Blood poured on the altar and on the people signified the making of a blood covenant between God and Israel because a blood bond forged a family bond. But this was only symbolic.

Sharing in the blood of oxen could not really make the Israelites part of the family of God. It was just a sign, and this sign did not have the power to affect what it signified. It didn’t have the power to really make us share in the life of God. 

It was only a foreshadowing of what Jesus would do in the New Covenant.

Only the precious blood of Jesus in the Eucharist has the divine power to make us one with God. This is why Jesus said, “If you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you will not have life in you.”

Three

Failure of the Ritual

Unfortunately, Moses’ blood ritual didn’t seem to work very well. The people didn’t seem to become any more intimate with God, and they didn’t share in His holiness.

In fact, just a few chapters later, they utterly rejected God and replaced Him with a shining metal statue of a young bull, a golden calf. It’s like the blood ritual didn’t take. And after all, it was only a symbol. It was just cow’s blood sprinkled on an altar and on a crowd of people.

If God really wanted to be related to His people by blood, well, that would require a lot more work. First, God would have to become human Himself. He would need some blood of His own, which would mean becoming man, made of flesh and blood. And then He would have to establish some kind of distribution system by which He could share that blood with His people.

So that’s what He did. And He did it in the Upper Room.

Four

The Institution of the Eucharist

1400 years after Moses, God was ready to enact a new blood ritual. And this one wouldn’t be just symbolic. It would be real.

In the upper room, on the night of the last supper, God was seated at table, for He was now God-made man, with real human blood flowing in His veins. And it was time to share His blood with His apostles, time to make them His family even in a biological way.

He took a chalice, and said, “Take this, all of you, and drink from it. For this is my blood.”

The good God, always infinitely ingenious, especially in showing His love for us, was presenting His system for introducing His blood into our bodies. He had given us the Eucharist. And then He said to them, “Do this in memory of me.”

From then on, the bishops and priests, the successors of those first apostles, would be the blood-transfusion technicians whose job it would be to make humanity related to God by blood.  

Five

Related to God by Blood

Do you see how much God loves you? Do you see how creatively He has shown His desire that you should be His children?

It’s not enough for Him to be your benefactor, He wants to be your Father. It’s not enough that He should teach you the path to happiness, He wants you to be blood to Him.

We are God’s family. We have the blood of His Firstborn Son in our systems after every Mass. We too are His children even according to the flesh, the flesh of God’s Son which we consume in the Eucharist. We will never find a more loving God, we will never find a better Father, than this.

By Baptism and the Eucharist God has made us part of His family, we are now sons and daughters of God. That is our true identity and infinite worth.

So let’s not act like the Israelites, and try to construct our identity in some other way, by a calf of gold, or human achievement, fame, or comfort, or lust.

Let’s rest in the goodness of being His beloved children, chosen by Him and now even bonded to Him by the body of His Son which He gives to us in the real Blood-Ritual of the Eucharist that makes us one family.