Body and Blood of Christ Year B 2024

Peter H. Davids

Ordinary Time • Sermon • Submitted 7 months ago • Presented 6 months ago

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The central mystery of our faith is a blood covenant. It begins in the Sinai covenant where the blood of victims is sprinkled on the people and the book and the altar and the flesh of the victims is eaten, repeated at Passover in an ongoing memorial. But it is fulfilled in the greater tabernacle, the heavenly, in which Jesus is priest and victim and one with the God to whom it is offered. He also gave the statues that lead us into the worship of God. However, Mark completes Hebrews in that the anticipatory trans-temporal Passover celebration by Jesus gives us a meal to both spiritually feeds us now and draws us towards it final consummation in the wedding supper of the Lamb when he will be physically present. The implications of this call us to contemplation and worship.

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Title

Blood Covenant

Outline

The central mystery of our faith is the blood covenant

It was more understandable in pagan cultures, as C. S. Lewis shows in Til We Have Faces, but our culture masks and suppresses the idea.

To have a blood covenant one must have a victim whose flesh is the sacrificial meal and blood is used to make the covenant, but our culture uses victim for one who suffers some type of abuse or mistreatment and it hardly uses the term “covenant”, reducing it to contract, which often has economic overtones even if it is not primarily economic. Furthermore, one needs two covenanting parties who need not be equal. Contracts require agreement, but covenants can be offered unilaterally by the more exalted party. Finally you need a priest, one who mediates between the parties, carries out the sacrifice of the victim, and uses the flesh and especially the blood in the covenant-making process.

In our readings all of this is evident

In Exodus the covenant forms a people as the people take Yahweh for their God-King. Therefore, he gives them his statues as the terms of the covenant on their side. Moses ratifies the covenant in the name of the people by taking the blood of animal victims (the bulls were communion offerings, the flesh of which was eaten by the people), splashing it on the altar Godward and, after reading the scroll of the covenant, splashed it and the people with the rest of the blood. New members of Israel, whether born into the people or naturalized into the people, came under the covenant through circumcision of males and participating in the feasts that placed them at the covenant-making event. They then must keep the Torah or else they would be “cut-off from their people.”

Hebrews deliberately parallels Christ to this covenant making ceremony, but now he is the victim and the priest who takes his own blood into the presence of God (who he also is in that as Son he is in the Father) in the trans-temporal, trans-local “more perfect” tabernacle and by it transfers people from servitude to “dead works” into the people of God who “worship the living God” which is what it means to live out the terms of the new covenant. There is also a heavenly land to inherit, no longer the so-called promised land, but one where they have an eternal inheritance.

But the typology is not yet complete.

Jesus, in the Gospel, prepares the Passover meal (via his disciples and Mary and other women), which is the basic covenant meal for Israel (although John situates the actual meal the next day) and as priest transubstantiates (although Pope Benedict XVI and others prefer other language) the “cup of blessing” and the bread into his body and blood, which would be offered the next day, and which Hebrews says was a “heavenly” sacrifice, trans-local and trans-temporal, and leaves us with a covenant meal in which we eat his body, the flesh of the victim, and drink his blood (rather than having it sprinkled on us), the blood of the victim, of the covenant. This gave us a covenant meal into which new believers could be initiated and by which we could be fed in the spiritual as well as physical dimension pointing towards a final timeless celebration to which Jesus invites us when he will again bodily “drink it new in the kingdom of God.” As often the case, the disciples will not get it until after his resurrection.

Sisters, we will never get to the depth of this event

What it means on level is that we are joined to the people of God down the ages and participate across time in the timeless and ever growing covenant of God with people that makes them his people. We are one.

What is means on another level is that we experience the deep meaning of Calvary as a sacrificial meal that translates our worship into the heavenly tabernacle with the angels and saints. Jesus is there in the center.

What is means on still another level is that through this covenant meal Jesus is in us, we consume the victim, making us ever more one with his people and drawing us along the journey to our ultimate meeting with him at the wedding supper of the Lamb.

That is what we have time for and what we may contemplate. The only response that I at least can make is to bow before him in humble worship.

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