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June 07, 2007
Corpus Christi
Today is the feast of Corpus Christi, in most of Catholic Europe a Bank Holiday, but not in Blair's Cromwellian Britain where the mighty Pound is more important that God.
What, you may ask, is this Feast of the Body of Christ? It is in fact a celebration of the institution of the Communion, the central act of worship in all branches of Christianity that consider themselves a part of the Catholic and Apostolic tradition. The breaking of bread as "the Body of Christ" and the taking of wine as "the Blood of Christ" in this act of worship has its origins in the fellowship offering before the Tabernacle in Sinai, and later the Temple in Jerusalem. You can still see it in the form that Christ and his Disciples would have used it in any Jewish household on the eve of the Sabbath when family and friends gather to share a meal before the Sabbath begins. Light is brought to the table by the women who have prepared the food, the bread is blessed and broken by the head of the household and shared by all present, then the meal proceeds and finally, a passage is read from the Torah, and the cup of fellowship is blessed by the eldest son and shared.
On the eve of his trial and crucifixion, our Lord commanded that we, his followers, continue that tradition as a memorial to him, and in our celebration we break bread using his words, "This is my Body, broken for you, do this in remembrance of me."
The liturgy has seen many changes down the years, the earleist would have followed the Jewish pattern and taken place within a meal of Fellowship. Later, as congregations became too large to continue this practice it became a separate act of worship to be followed by a meal shared in groups and later still it has become an act of worship which stands entirely alone. Yet, in this act of worship, more than in any other, we are, however briefly, joined in one with every other Christian, living and departed, for as the words of institution have it,
"We are one Body, because we all eat of one bread."
Posted by The Gray Monk at June 7, 2007 06:52 AM
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