Readings: Deuteronomy 8:2-3, 14b-16a; 1 Corinthians 10:16-17; John 6:51-58
When Paul asks the Christians of Corinth
the rhetorical question,
“The bread that we break,
is it not a participation in the body of Christ?”
the word translated as “participation”
—koinonia—
is the same word Paul later uses
when he wishes for the Corinthians
“the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ,
the love of God,
and the communion”
—koinonia—
“of the Holy Spirit.”
I mention this not simply
to make a pedantic point about the Greek text
(though I will rarely pass up a pedantic point
when one can be made),
but because I think that this helps us
to see the fundamental truth
that for us life as disciples of Jesus
is both our life with God through Christ’s Spirit
and our life with each other in Christ’s body.
Our communion in the Spirit
is inseparable from our communion in the body:
“unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man
and drink his blood,
you do not have life within you.”
The mystery that we celebrated last week
in the feast of the most holy Trinity—
the mystery of our inclusion
in the timeless communion
of Father, Son, and Spirit—
is the same mystery we celebrate
on this great feast of Corpus Christ,
for our spiritual koinonia in God
is signified and caused
by our bodily koinonia with one another
through Christ’s gift to us
of his own body and blood
become our food and drink.
This feast underscores for us the truth
that Christianity is not simply a spirituality
but also, we might say, a corporeality.
Christian corporeality means that
entering into communion with God
does not involve us leaving behind our bodies,
but, in a sense, living in them in a deeper way.
For many of us the importance of bodies
has already been brought home
by the strange experience of pandemic shutdown
that we have experienced these past months.
We ache for embodied contact
with friends and families.
And while pastors and parishioners
have made heroic efforts
to make liturgies available virtually,
few, I suspect, see such virtual koinonia
as an adequate substitute
for the bodily koinonia the happens
when the body of Christ gathers
to receive the body of Christ sacramentally.
Bodies matter:
Christ’s body and our bodies,
drawn together in ways
that we not only see and hear
but smell and touch and taste.
Our koinonia in the Spirit
is our koinonia in the body,
which is celebrated and brought about
in the sacramental life of the Church.
The disheartening news is that,
while churches in many places
have begun to reopen,
we should not presume
that this will necessarily last.
We simply don’t know
what the effects of re-opening will be
and when, or if, we will have a vaccine.
If nothing else, this pandemic
should have brought home to us
how fragile our bodily koinonia is,
how hostage to fortune,
how beset by risk and danger.
But this is nothing new to Christians.
For our sacramental life together
is founded on God’s great act
of bodily koinonia with us:
the taking-flesh of the eternal Son
who came to dwell among us,
to share our risk and danger,
to be broken on the cross.
It is not an accident that it is broken bread
that is our koinnia in the body of Christ.
Our hope is for resurrection
beyond that breaking,
but for the time being
we live still in a broken place,
in broken communion.
We see this not only
in the way that the pandemic
has fractured our families,
our friendships,
our sacramental life,
but also in the way that sin
has fractured our unity as a human race.
This too has, in recent weeks,
been brought home forcefully to us
as we face hard question about race
and the just and unjust pursuit of public order.
Here too, bodies matter.
There is no shortcut to spiritual koinonia
that will allow us to ignore
the legacy of black bodies bought and sold,
segregated and incarcerated,
lynched, and shot.
These bodies matter
not because we are trying
to “mix religion and politics,”
not because we desire to be “woke,”
not because we have some “leftist agenda,”
but because we desire to be Christian.
Our communion in the Spirit
is inseparable from our communion in the body,
and our communion in the body
means that we cannot ignore the bodily suffering
of those who are members or potential members
of Christ’s own body.
The past few months have been
some of the most difficult and trying
that many of us have lived through.
The ordinary trials of life
have been exacerbated and magnified
by the corona virus pandemic.
Most of us have been unable to receive
the sacramental food that we have counted on
to sustain us in past trials.
The brokenness of the human race
has been put on violent display.
But we cannot forget
that the promised koinonia of God’s kingdom
is something that not even death can defeat,
We cannot forget
that we have been promised in Christ
that broken bodies can be made whole,
We cannot forget
that hope that has died can be raised again,
that Christ is with us even to the end of the ages.
May the God of hope deepen our communion
with God and each other
and may God have mercy on us all.
