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22 giu 2025

22/06/2025 - Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ - Year C

22/06/2025 - Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ - Year C

1st reading Gen 14:18-20 from Psalm 109 2nd reading 1 Cor 11:23-26 Gospel Lk 9:11-17

To nourish our lives as believers in Jesus Christ, the Father has given us food. Without it, our faith becomes sick, charity weakens, hope begins to doubt, communion with our brothers and sisters fades.

The food with which he wants to nourish us is real food, even if it is not just food. The bread broken during every Eucharistic celebration is this nourishment that nourishes perennial spiritual realities in us. To receive it, we need great humility, the kind that pleases God and man.

We continue to have faith in God the Father, not in his bread: faith in him leads us to be sure that the Bread he gives us is the support of our life, of our unity with other men, of our journey towards eternity. This bread is precious, so much so that God himself had long thought of giving it to us: he was already thinking of it when he called Abraham to begin that journey of faith that was to bring first the Jewish people and then all peoples closer to him. Abraham was met by a priest of God, a mysterious priest, never to be met again, who presented to the “Most High God” an equally mysterious sacrifice for him: bread and wine! Everyone was used to offering God bloody sacrifices of animals, he instead offered bread and wine, the fruits of men's labour, the sustainer of their life, of their joy.

This fact, recounted in the first book of sacred Scripture, is engraved in the memory of all believers. Bread and wine are offered to God, so that he can give us bread and wine. That bread and wine, offered by Melchizedek for the blessing of Abraham, God kept with him until the moment when his Son offered himself as a sacrifice. Then, by the very hands of the Son, those offerings were given back to us. They are the gift of God, out of his love transformed by him into the Body given and Blood shed by his Son: these are the gifts that give us life and joy, these are the Bread and Wine that we need and that can transform our life as sinful men into the life of beloved and sanctified sons!

This mystery is great and impossible to comprehend for our minds that move only with earthly reasoning, that is, obscured by selfishness. Jesus has offered us a sign to help us desire the bread from his hands and understand its meaning so that we can then, in the Church, continue to offer it to all men. Not everyone, however, can eat it, but only those people who stay with him until late in the day, that is, who remain with him despite the urges and temptations to leave his presence. And they can only eat it those who let themselves be given it by the hands of Jesus' apostles, disciples still poor in faith and still rich in sin. They each have a basket full of that leftover bread: if we want Jesus' bread today, we must draw near and stretch out our empty hands to their generous hands.

Today we say our thanks to God for this bread, and we say it in a particularly meaningful way: we go out on the road holding it in our midst, as if to show the world our secret, the secret of our unity, of the strength of our love for one another and of our care for the little ones and the suffering.

We receive energy and motivation for every effort and fidelity from that bread, which we eat and which never runs out, because it comes from the Word spoken by Jesus through the mouths of his servants, the successors of the apostles and those with whom they associated, the priests.

Blessed art Thou, O Lord our God, for the bread and wine that bring in us the life of Thy Son Jesus! Blessed are you, who with that bread nourish us and keep us united to you, and give us and strengthen joyful unity among us!