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When I sat down to gather my thoughts and prepare a homily for this feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, I began, as always by prayerfully reflecting on each of the readings. In the first reading from Genesis, Abraham, returning from battle, is greeted with bread and wine, and a blessing. The point I took from this reading was that, when a person gives a gift and a blessing to his/her friends, the memory of it stays with them forever.

In the second reading from Paul's Letter to the Corinthian's, Paul takes this theme a step further by teaching us to understand the blessing and the gift of Jesus in the Eucharist. And then in our gospel reading from Luke, Jesus invites his disciples to share in his mission to feed the world. I will return to explore this point in a moment. But firstly, let me share with you where I found the essential meaning and theology of this feast most aptly expressed. I found this in these words from the preface to the Eucharistic prayer for today's feast, which you will hear proclaimed a little later in the mass:

In this great sacrament you feed your people and strengthen them in holiness,
so that the human family may come to walk in the light of one faith,
in one communion of love. We come then to this wonderful sacrament
to be fed at your table and grow into the likeness of the risen Christ.

What these words from the preface say to me is this: this feast of the Body and Blood of Christ celebrates the fact that we are the Body of Christ. The gift that we receive, the sacrament that we celebrate in the mass, transforms us from a crowd of people into a family of faith; from separate individuals into sisters and brothers of Christ; from a wandering mass of people into the People of God; from an aimless group into a journeying people. We have a destination and we are journeying together into a Promised Land.

Like the disciples before us, we stand among a great crowd of hungry people; famines, malnutrition, unemployment, poverty, homelessness, are the still the lot of millions of people both in our back yard and around the world. These people are God's children hungry for food and hungry for direction; keen to make the journey, but not knowing which way to go. When Jesus said to his disciples, and now to us "Give them something to eat yourselves," he, in effect, was saying, "You have received a blessing. You have been fed with God's own life in Jesus Christ. Now, in your turn, feed the world!"

But what else was Jesus saying to his disciples, when they confront him with the impossibility of feeding thousands of people with just a few loaves and fishes? Well I think he was saying to them this: do not indulge your personal sense of inadequacy; do not wallow in your feelings of helplessness and hopelessness; if you wish to be my disciples, think big; dare to believe, dare to hope and dare to imagine what I can do, and desire to do, in my loving plan for your life.

The greatest mystery of the Christian faith is that God came to us in the body, suffered with us in the body, rose in the body, and gave us his body and blood as food. No religion takes the body as seriously as the Christian religion. The body is not seen as the enemy or as a prison of the Spirit, but celebrated as the Spirit's temple. Therefore, wherever, we as a Christian people, encounter abuse of the body - whether it be physical through violence, torture, poverty or drugs; economic through exploitation, or sexual through pornography, rape or incest, we must defend the sacred dignity of the human body and the human person from conception to natural death.

Let me conclude by repeating the opening prayer of our mass today, as it also beautifully captures for me the essence of what the feast of the Body and Blood of Christ is all about:

Lord Jesus Christ, we worship you living among us in the sacrament of your body and blood. May we offer to our brothers and sisters a life poured out in loving service of that kingdom where you live with the Father and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.