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19 giu 2022
19/06/2022 – Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ - year C

19/06/2022 – Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ - year C

Reading 1 GEN 14,18-20 Psalm 109 Reading 2 1 COR 11,23-26 Gospel LK 9, 11-17

To feed our life of believers in Jesus Christ, the Father has given us some food. Without it our faith is sick, charity is weakened, hope starts to falter, the communion with the brethren is gone. This food is the true nourishment even if it is not just food. The bread broken during every Mass is the food which feeds in us unending spiritual realities. To welcome it we need great humility, the type God and men both like. We continue to have faith in God, not in His bread: faith in Him makes us certain that the bread He is giving us is the nourishment for our life, for our unity with other men, for our journey towards eternity. This bread is so precious then, that God Himself thought about giving it to us a long time ago: He was already thinking about it when He had called Abraham to begin the journey of faith which would eventually make him closer to the Jewish people first and then to every other people. Abraham was approached by one of God’s priests, a mysterious priest, never seen again, who offered to God the Highest a mysterious sacrifice: bread and wine! Everyone was used to offer violent sacrifices to God using animals, he instead offers bread and wine, the fruits of men’s labour, the sustenance of their life and their joy.

This story, recorded in the first book of the Sacred Scriptures, has been etched in all believers' memory. We offer bread and wine to God, so He can give us back bread and wine. That bread and that wine, offered by Melchizedek for Abraham to bless, God has treasured them up to the point in which His Son has offered Himself as sacrifice. Then, from the very hands of the Son, those offerings have been given back to us. They are God’s gift which has become a Body given and the Blood spilled: these are the gifts which are giving us life and joy, these are the bread and wine we need and can transform our life of sinful men into a life of loved and holy children!

This mystery is big and impossible to understand for our mind blinded by selfishness. Jesus has performed a symbolic action to help us desire the bread coming from His hands and understand its meaning in order to continue, afterwards, in the Church, to offer it to men. Not everyone can eat it, only those people who have been with Him until the last hour, who then stick to Him notwithstanding the temptations to put distance between them and His presence. And it can be eaten only by those who let it be given to them from Jesus’s disciples, disciples who are still poor in faith and always rich in sins. They still have nowadays a basket each full of leftovers: if today we want Jesus' bread we need to approach them and extend our hands towards them.

Today we say our thanks to God for this bread, and we say it in particular in a significant way: we go out in the streets holding it in our midst, like we want to show the world our secret, the secret of our unity, of the strength of our mutual love and of the our care for the little and the suffering. We receive energy and motivation for every labour and faithfulness from that bread, which we eat and never runs out, because it comes from the Word coming from Jesus through His servants' mouth, the priests.

Blessed are you, Lord our God, for the bread and the wine which bring us the life of your Son Jesus! Blessed are you who, with that bread, feed us and keep us United to you and one another!