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A sermon preached in Salisbury Cathedral by Canon Edward Probert Chancellor on 3rd June 2010
"CORPUS CHRISTI"
Today is described by the Church of England as a ‘Day of Thanksgiving for the Institution of Holy Communion’; more briefly and by tradition it is called the Feast of Corpus Christi. This is a festival which, like this building in which we are meeting for worship, dates from the 13th century. It was the brainchild (not really the appropriate word) of an Augustinian nun from the Low Countries, Juliana of Liege, who as a young woman had a vision in 1208 telling her to establish a day in honour of the sacrament of the eucharist. This took some time, but she persuaded her local bishop to introduce this in 1246; and then, within another two decades, in 1264 the Pope made it a universal feast day in the Church. It is held on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday – Thursday is of course by association with Maundy Thursday, when, just before Good Friday, Jesus gave the bread and wine to his disciples, telling them these were his body and blood.
This celebration became a popular movement in the Middle Ages. In many places guilds in its honour were established; for example in Cambridge in 1349, where the guild soon founded a college with this title (Oxford’s college of the same name came much later, in 1517).
The feast day developed against a background of increasing veneration of the physical elements of the sacrament. By the late-medieval period these elements were often thought of and even seen by the lay people, but came to be regarded as so holy that they were rarely experienced. Once per year on Easter Day they might consume (but not handle) the host – but not the consecrated wine, lest they spill any; only priests might regularly handle or eat and drink. The physical elements were seen to be so actually the body and blood of the eternal Son of God that it was inappropriate for ordinary people to have any contact except rarely. An indication of the concreteness of this sense of the sacramental presence of Christ is the Miracle of Bolsena, a town in Italy where in 1263 a priest who doubted the relatively newly-formulated doctrine of transubstantiation found the bread oozing blood when he broke it. This account was so powerful that it apparently affected the Pope’s decision the next year to establish Corpus Christi as a universal feast.
So, here we are honouring part of the Church’s medieval inheritance. But today at this eucharist we will also be offering the laying-on of hands, and sacramental anointing, in prayer for healing. You may well be asking why we are having these two things together. Well, on one level it’s a matter of simple practicality: on the first Thursday of every month we hold a eucharist with healing ministry at 6.30; but, since today we in any case are holding this eucharist at 5.30 it would be ridiculous to hold two in succession. But this does not mean that by combining these two foci we are involved in a false union, a marriage of convenience. In fact these two things (the honouring of the sacrament of the eucharist, and the ministry of healing) are a truly natural pair.
Let me explain. The medieval feast of Corpus Christi comes from a culture where the sacraments were taken very literally: their physical reality was crucially important, and this was sometimes taken to extremes. But the Church has, and always has had, another tendency which can go to even worse extremes – the tendency to downplay or even deny the importance of the physical, and to think that faith in God is only concerned with the spiritual.
Sacraments exist because physical things matter – you might say that ‘matter matters’. Physical things like the bread and wine of the eucharist, the water of baptism, the oil of anointing, are the means of God’s self-communication; and supremely of course he communicated himself by becoming flesh himself in his son Jesus Christ. The incarnation shows just how much bodies, physical nature, matter in God.
This sacramental healing ministry – physical touch of hands, rubbing on of consecrated oils – is because our bodies matter to God just as much as do our eternal souls. All of us needs to be lived and used for God; we rightly care for and pray and work for the health of ourselves and others. And how could we come nearer than in this wonderful sacrament in which we take into ourselves these physical gifts as the body and blood of eternal Son of God?
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This celebration became a popular movement in the Middle Ages. In many places guilds in its honour were established; for example in Cambridge in 1349, where the guild soon founded a college with this title (Oxford’s college of the same name came much later, in 1517).
The feast day developed against a background of increasing veneration of the physical elements of the sacrament. By the late-medieval period these elements were often thought of and even seen by the lay people, but came to be regarded as so holy that they were rarely experienced. Once per year on Easter Day they might consume (but not handle) the host – but not the consecrated wine, lest they spill any; only priests might regularly handle or eat and drink. The physical elements were seen to be so actually the body and blood of the eternal Son of God that it was inappropriate for ordinary people to have any contact except rarely. An indication of the concreteness of this sense of the sacramental presence of Christ is the Miracle of Bolsena, a town in Italy where in 1263 a priest who doubted the relatively newly-formulated doctrine of transubstantiation found the bread oozing blood when he broke it. This account was so powerful that it apparently affected the Pope’s decision the next year to establish Corpus Christi as a universal feast.
So, here we are honouring part of the Church’s medieval inheritance. But today at this eucharist we will also be offering the laying-on of hands, and sacramental anointing, in prayer for healing. You may well be asking why we are having these two things together. Well, on one level it’s a matter of simple practicality: on the first Thursday of every month we hold a eucharist with healing ministry at 6.30; but, since today we in any case are holding this eucharist at 5.30 it would be ridiculous to hold two in succession. But this does not mean that by combining these two foci we are involved in a false union, a marriage of convenience. In fact these two things (the honouring of the sacrament of the eucharist, and the ministry of healing) are a truly natural pair.
Let me explain. The medieval feast of Corpus Christi comes from a culture where the sacraments were taken very literally: their physical reality was crucially important, and this was sometimes taken to extremes. But the Church has, and always has had, another tendency which can go to even worse extremes – the tendency to downplay or even deny the importance of the physical, and to think that faith in God is only concerned with the spiritual.
Sacraments exist because physical things matter – you might say that ‘matter matters’. Physical things like the bread and wine of the eucharist, the water of baptism, the oil of anointing, are the means of God’s self-communication; and supremely of course he communicated himself by becoming flesh himself in his son Jesus Christ. The incarnation shows just how much bodies, physical nature, matter in God.
This sacramental healing ministry – physical touch of hands, rubbing on of consecrated oils – is because our bodies matter to God just as much as do our eternal souls. All of us needs to be lived and used for God; we rightly care for and pray and work for the health of ourselves and others. And how could we come nearer than in this wonderful sacrament in which we take into ourselves these physical gifts as the body and blood of eternal Son of God?