Sermon for the Feast of Corpus Christi
“For the bread of God is he which cometh down from heaven, and
giveth life unto the world.”
In the spring of 1983, Marilyn and I were in Florence for the Feast of Corpus Christi. We processed around the cathedral with the Sacrament, singing Martin Luther’s great hymn ‘Ein’ Feste Burg’, before attending Mass. More than just an ecumenical moment it conveyed a deeper sense of the larger meaning of the catholic faith.
The Feast of Corpus Christi goes back to the 13th century and became ‘universal’, at least in the West, in the 14thcentury. Through the influence of “Blessed Juliana of Liege,” at whose insistence the institution of the feast is attributed (c. 1240), and along with the Eucharistic devotions of Thomas Aquinas, which have become associated with the Feast, the celebration of Corpus Christi belongs to a Western Christian interest in the question about our participation in the saving work of Christ.
The Feast emerges out of the cauldron of controversy about the meaning of the Holy Eucharist as the central act of Christian worship. Celebrated on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, it relates back to the “Institution of the Holy Eucharist” on Maundy Thursday but without the overwhelming concentration on the Passion during Holy Week. In this Feast, the institution of the Holy Eucharist is looked at from the standpoint of our being continually sustained by the fruits of his Passion through the divinely ordained means of our participation by grace in the divine life itself.
The Reformers did not retain this feast in their various calendars of commemoration. Why? Because, in my view, at the time of the Reformation the Feast had become associated with a particular theory about the action of the Mass, namely, “transubstantiation,” albeit in a form hardly recognizable as deriving from Thomas. Cranmer and the subsequent English Reformers were countering what Fr. Crouse called “a superstitiously materialistic notion of the Presence, popularly associated … with a debased idea of transubstantiation”, and one which undermined the Chalcedonian sacramentalism to which classical Anglicans were committed as constituting an important aspect of essential catholicism.