OMELIE / Omelie EN

07 giu 2026

7 June 2026 – Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ – Year A

7 June 2026 – Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ – Year A

1st reading: Deut 8:2–3, 14–16; Psalm 147; 2nd reading: 1 Cor 10:16–17; Gospel: Jn 6:51–58

Today’s feast is a gift for every Christian. It helps us to express publicly and forcefully that gratitude, that joy, that certainty which we would like to convey to everyone every Sunday, indeed, every day of our lives. For we have a Bread and a Cup which are the secret of our joy, of our living as brothers and sisters, true brothers and sisters both at home and everywhere.

St Paul calls that bread and that cup the ‘cup of blessing’ and the ‘bread that we break’. And he affirms that they are communion with the Body and Blood of Christ. They are gifts from God that make us one with our Lord, with that Jesus whom the Father sent into the world to be God with us. By eating that Body and drinking that Blood, our life is no longer what it was before: we become part of God.

Jesus tried to explain this to the Jews. They did not understand, just as we too struggle to grasp what Jesus wishes to convey to us. There is a life that is not merely biological. Biological life manifests itself as such when it is able to enter into relationship. The dead do not respond or speak; they have no relationship with anyone. But the life of which Jesus speaks—and which he is so keen should become our own—places us in relationship with God, with his Fatherly love: we may call it spiritual life, or inner life, or eternal life, or simply ‘life’.

Perhaps we can grasp that this life is Jesus himself: us in relationship with him. He, within us, enables us to receive everything from his Father and to respond to him: he is one with him. This is the life we need to nurture and sustain. It is this life that Jesus has in mind when, in Capernaum, he speaks, seeking to help the Jews understand the difference between his spiritual understanding and theirs, which remains ever material. For them, it is impossible to understand or accept that they could drink the blood and eat the flesh of a man. We are not surprised: for us too, it would be impossible to accept these words. But the Lord has already spoken of Bread that comes down from heaven, and that Bread will be his Flesh, which we can and must eat.

But what does ‘eat’ and ‘drink’ mean? Is it not to take into ourselves a reality that gives us life, that remains within us and transforms us, and is itself transformed? If we eat his flesh and drink his blood, we shall become one with him, and he with us. This is what Jesus aims to achieve: to raise us, through reason, to another plane. He will also express this through other images, such as that of the vine and the branches: we in him and he in us, so that our life becomes divine, that is, eternal, and we shall be bearers in the world of God’s life, which is love.

The love of the Father and the Son will become the leaven of the world; it will be the seed that bears fruit, all with a view to the transformation of the world, which will become the kingdom of heaven. Today’s feast is a contemplation of inner, divine realities that transform the world in which we live, from a dwelling place of hatred, selfishness and oppression, into a place of communion, celebration, peace and harmony among all.

The Bread that we eat, we adore; we place it in plain view so that, as well as entering our mouths, it may occupy our eyes, our thoughts and our reflections, and transform the way we see all people and all things into a contemplation of God’s love. For the bread reminds us of the collaborative labour of many, indeed, of everyone. To see that Bread is not merely to contemplate the Body of Christ; rather, in it we see the unity and commitment of all people, the love and joy of many, their toil and hidden sufferings. That Bread is not merely the fruit of the earth, but of the labour of an endless succession of people, labour blessed by God. We shall contemplate it as it passes through the streets of towns and cities, and we shall hold in our hearts the prayer that, as it passes, it may enter the lives of many, even if they do not know what it is.

So it was with the Israelites who walked behind Moses in the desert, nourished by the manna, which they did not know what it was or where it came from. Yet it kept them alive and gave them the strength to continue their journey, so that they might ‘understand that man does not live by bread alone, but that man lives by whatever comes from the mouth of the Lord’. So we eat and contemplate the Bread of Jesus, knowing that it comes from the Lord, and that the life it gives us is his own: we become partakers of the God who is love and faithful mercy!