FINEST FOOD – Corpus Christi, Year B
Our age is very aware of varieties and kinds of foods needed to stay healthy. Constantly through the media we receive information of foods’ effects on the quality of health. Foods can cause and prevent disease. We know more about emotional food, and how the lack of emotional support and affection affects emotional health.
People get sick physically and emotionally without the right kinds and amount of food. People become disheartened from destructive human words and energized by good words. People get sick from a lack of spiritual food as well. Physical hungers are easier to sense than emotional ones.
The Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ directs our attention to spiritual food. Some, if not many, live on spiritual starvation diets. They seldom feed on the best of the spiritual foods. Just as we have increased our consciousness of the importance of the right kind of physical and emotional foods, we need to grow in our understanding of the right kind of spiritual foods. There are many spiritually malnourished and undernourished and starving people.
There are different kinds of spiritual diets, just as there are different physical and emotional diets. Some are healthy, some unhealthy, some incomplete and insufficient. Some live off of a few pious sayings or watered down versions of the Word of God. Some receive a few general moral teachings to live by, such as “do good and avoid evil” or “be good people” or “don’t smoke or drink and say no to drugs”. While good in themselves, it’s a spiritual starvation diet!
Many who are starving spiritually are not too aware. They may know they are hungry, but may not identify the spiritual food they need. If we had a vision of the starvation of souls, they would look like the bony bodies of starving people we can’t bear to look at. Physically hungry and starving people are more subject to diseases. Spiritually hungry and starving people are more open to the spiritual diseases of the soul, mind and spirit.
The Lord told us about spiritual foods. The words of God are spiritual food. The scene in Exodus is one of Moses feeding the people on the words of God. “When Moses…related…the words…of the Lord”, the people said “We will do everything the Lord has told us”. Consuming the words of the Lord brings us spiritual health. Food has to be consumed to nourish us. When we allow ourselves to receive the Word of God, to take it into our hearts, minds and lives, we are feeding on the Word of God. We have to chew on the Word of God, digest it, think it through, remember it, and put it into practice in the different circumstances of our life. If we think of the Scriptures as being the food only of the people of thousands of years ago, instead of a present food for us, we will not consume the words of the Scriptures.
The finest of all spiritual foods is the Body and Blood of Christ we receive in the Eucharist. The finest restaurants can’t serve this kind of food. It is the Living Bread come down from heaven and given to us through the Church, by the Holy Spirit. “I am the Living Bread from heaven says the Lord; whoever eats this bread will live forever.” It is the finest spiritual food and drink for our baptismal life in Christ. The finest of the spiritual foods comes to us because of the New Covenant our Eternal High Priest Jesus Christ instituted. “He entered not with the blood of goat…but with His own blood and achieved eternal redemption…He is mediator of a new covenant.”
The Eucharistic Meal was instituted by Jesus at the Last Supper, and is to be celebrated until His return in glory. “During the meal He took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them, ‘Take this’, He said, ‘This is my body’.” He did the same with the cup. “This is my blood, the blood of the covenant, to be poured out…”
What the finest foods do for the body and mind, the Eucharistic food does for the soul and spirit. The soul that feeds on the Bread of Life in Holy Communion becomes spiritually healthy and less open to the spiritual diseases. If we could see souls, we could tell which ones are eating well spiritually and which aren’t!
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