Dear Brothers and Sisters,
God works through history leading mankind to a deeper spirituality, century after century, purifying our natural religious attitudes and leading us to the truth, which is Jesus Christ. On the feast of Corpus Christi, we live again the wonderful action that God has done for us. He did not remain in the temple. He has done something much greater in showing his love for us by leaving us himself, his body and his blood. This is the good news that we announce today. This is why we can be happy today.
We see in this gospel of the multiplication of the loaves and fish, Jesus Christ is saying I love you. Jesus is amazing when he says to his disciples who want to get rid of the crowd and relax, “Give them some food yourselves.” They say how are we going to feed them; it is impossible. The Lord says the same thing to you. Give your spouse something to eat or your children or your boss or your neighbor of your brother who stole the inheritance or the one who sued you. But how am I going to give them something to eat? It is the Lord who will fully gratify them and quench their thirst. I cannot since I have five loaves and two fish; I cannot feed anyone.
The Lord says tell them to sit in groups of fifty. Then he takes the loaves and the fish and breaks them and gives them to the disciples to distribute. It only multiplies when the disciples start to distribute it. Thanks to Jesus Christ the loaves and fish multiply. The same will happen to us when you go home, you will be able to feed the other because you received Jesus Christ today and with him you can easily fill the others. What do the others need? They need to be loved. We can’t give love because we have so little, only five loaves and two fish. This is all we have; we can’t give more. We cannot forgive, we cannot love, we cannot take away that bitterness inside of us, we cannot get out of that particular slavery, we cannot live chastity. We find it impossible to love and cannot die for the other or even understand him. However, the Lord says I will help you to love as I love. I have loved you first and I will give you this love again today. I have already multiplied it so that you can give it to others.
I love the end of this gospel because the disciples were starving at this point since so much time has passed and Jesus was keeping a fast pace and the disciples, like us, are selfish and want to get rid of this crowd of probably more than twenty thousand people. They are saying we are hungry, and we want to eat, dismiss them. Tell them to go away, but Jesus says to give them something to eat. How many baskets of leftovers do they have in the end? Twelve baskets, one for each of them. Each one of you will have a great amount of food, a huge amount. You and I have a very, very, very long way to go and the Lord wants us to be satisfied, to be happy. He is not doing this to give you goosebumps or good feelings. He wants you to experience so that you can have enough for the others and a very large portion left over for yourself. He does this so that you may feel loved by him. This is what we often miss; we lack the experience of God’s love or the memory of it.
Hopefully with this feast and the Easter season that just ended you will experience this love or affection from the Lord for your life. You can imagine that if tomorrow you die, you can be blessed today with this encounter with the Lord that he loves you, forgives you, has mercy with you, accepts you as you are. He also needs you as you are, he counts on you, as he does with these men today. Let us live this celebration with joy today, knowing that God is near and gives us what we need in abundance.
The parishes usually make a procession with the Blessed Sacrament on this Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ. In one sense, you don’t need to do that because when you leave here, you are the body of Christ. How can the world eat the body of Christ and drink his blood? It can be done only by eating a Christian. Let yourself be eaten by the other whenever you go. Let your spouse eat you and your children and your co-worker who is unfair to you. If you have Christ in you, you can allow yourself to be eaten, little by little.
A Christian is called to be a monstrance that leads others to Christ. What is the most important thing, the monstrance or what it carries? Of course, what it carries is the most important thing. The monstrance can be made of tin or wood or gold or jewels; it doesn’t matter; it is not important. The important thing is that it shows Jesus Christ. But Christ needs a monstrance to bring him around to others and that monstrance is you. This is your mission as a Christian. Don’t look at this vessel of clay that we are but look at the treasure that we carry within us, which is the love of the Lord that we received in his body and his blood. He has filled us to the brim out of love for you and so that we will bring him to others.