“So be imitators of God, as beloved children, and live in love, as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us as a sacrificial offering to God for a fragrant aroma.”

          We’ve been reading the Lord’s Bread of Life discourse through the lens of St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians. Last Sunday, we saw that we need to be in a state of grace, free from grave sin, so that receiving the Lord’s Body and Blood can bear fruit in our lives – so that we aren’t the people coming week after week and leaving unchanged.

          Today, we can understand even better the importance of that needed preparation by coming back to what we saw two weeks ago: that the Lord, both here in the Bread of Life discourse, and even more strongly at the Last Supper, will draw a firm connection between the Sacrament of His Body and Blood and the Passover – which is to say, with a sacrifice.

          A sacrifice – in God’s instructions in the Old Testament, and universally throughout the various cultures and religions of the world by a natural human instinct – requires a pure victim to be sacrificed and a pure priest to offer the sacrifice. We should only give to God what is the best (lest we end up like Cain, whose offering was not favored by the Lord), and the one to come into contact with something so important must likewise be pleasing to the Lord.

          Uniquely, Christ is the victim priest – the priest who offers not something else in sacrifice, but offers Himself. And so, we said two weeks ago, we should likewise be ready to offer ourselves to the Lord. Likewise, St. Paul today affirms that “Christ loved us and handed himself over for us as a sacrificial offering to God for a fragrant aroma,” and that we should “be imitators of God, as beloved children,” and do likewise.

          How can St. Paul affirm so confidently that Christ makes Himself a sacrificial offering to His Father when He never says quite that in the Gospels? One key is in a surprising place: the words with which the Lord institutes the Eucharist.

          “This is my body.” This is sacrificial language. Our Lord does not merely indicate what the bread and wine have become. “This is my body, which will be given up for you.” His gift to the Apostles is not of something separate from Himself. It is truly Him – offering not something else, but Himself as victim and priest. He says to them and to you: “This is my Body! I give it to you. I give you all the sufferings I experienced in this body, all the agony of my Passion and death in this same body, and all the glory of my Resurrection in this body. I give myself to you. This is my body!” The “this is my body” of Holy Thursday is inseparable from the “this is my body” of Good Friday – His death on the Cross transforming what would have otherwise been an empty gesture on Holy Thursday, and His act of love on Holy Thursday transforming what would have been merely a brutal act of violence on Friday, into a sacrifice of love “for a fragrant aroma.”

          Two weeks ago, we also emphasized that the Eucharist is Christ’s sacrifice of thanksgiving to His Father, and that when we participate in Holy Mass, we are taking part in this great prayer of thanksgiving that precedes us in a timeless echo through history. Here is the crazy part, then: Because the “this is my body” of the Cross is inseparable from the “this is my body” of the Eucharist, Christ’s sacrificial gift of Himself to the Father passes through you and me. Christ gives Himself back to the Father through frail humanity – both by giving His body to the torturers, and by giving His body to the Christian who receives the Eucharist in a state of grace – it is the same body.

          When sin prevents the Christian from receiving the Body and Blood of the Lord, so often the precise sin is one against the virtue of chastity. On the one hand, there seems to be something wrong with this. Sins against chastity are hardly the most grievous of grave sins. Dante, after all, puts the adulterous in the top-most layer of hell, since their sins are sins of weakness and not of malice. Unlike the fraudulent, whom he places at the bottom of the pit because their sins necessarily involve an intent to harm, the unchaste usually just lack the strength to resist temptation, giving themselves over to a passion that could be good and beautiful when channeled correctly.

          So, it seems wrong that those who sin against chastity should be made to feel themselves the worst of sinners and face the public scorn of exclusion from the sacraments. After all, there are significantly worse grave sins, and there are probably many Catholics who ought to seek absolution for those other sins before approaching the Body and Blood of the Lord. Has the Church been wrong, then, to home in particularly on sins against chastity?

          First, let’s note that we should not presume that someone is struggling with sins against chastity when we see him or her abstain from Holy Communion. There are many reasons why someone might not feel adequately prepared to receive Communion (and, incidentally, this is part of why I would advocate for restoring the stricter fasts before Communion).

          Second, what is happening here is very far from a “purity culture” that equates sins against chastity with the loss of a kind of “purity” that is needed to receive Communion, a “not being good enough.” Again, Christ’s gift of His body to His Father passes through us. The question is: Are we living this mystery of “this is my body”?

          You have probably heard many times that the Mass is the wedding feast of the Lamb: the nuptial banquet between Christ and His Church. “This is my body.” They are sacrificial words, and they are nuptial words. “This is my body,” Christian spouses say, giving themselves wholly to each other, giving away their exclusive rights over their own body: “This is my body, offered for you!”

So, we can see that the mystery of Jesus giving His body for us, of saying to us, “This is my body, which is given for you!” should change our perspective on the human body. The world tells you that your body is for expressing yourself, that you should be able to do whatever you want with your body to express your ideas and emotions. It tells us that whether it is good or bad to use your body in one way or another is determined by whether that use of your body corresponds to the way that you feel. Instead, Jesus’s gift of His body to us, shows us the real meaning of the human body. It is not about self-expression, but about self-gift. What you do with your body is not good or bad because of corresponding to the way you feel, but whether it corresponds to reality, the reality of who you are, and the reality of a relationship with another person (in this case, the relationship of marriage).

God has given us the beautiful mystery of the human body so that Christian spouses might be able to say to one another, “This is my body, which is given for you. It has not been given to anyone else, and will not be given to anyone else. My actions, my words, my thoughts, my looks, I give them to you,” in imitation of Jesus who gave His body for His bride, the Church. “This is my body.” Just as His gift of His body to the Father in the Eucharist passes through us, so does the married man or woman’s gift of his or her body back to the Lord pass through his or her spouse.

Priests and religious living in permanent celibacy, and those who look forward to marriage one day or are living the single life, do this in an even more direct manner by living chastely in the celibate or single life, saying to the Lord by their chaste lives: “This is my body. Before it was mine, it is yours!”, rejecting the difficult temptations to seek disordered pleasure outside of marriage or to use the body for self-expression. To do so is not only tough – sometimes, it is excruciating – but it is your chance to do something truly heroic, to be a real man or woman, to be able to say to the Lord, “This is my body, and just as you give your body to me, I give mine to you.” At times, yes, you will feel like a sacrificial victim. But in being burned up as an offering to the Lord, the sacrificial victim finds its perfection, its meaning – and so do we.

We can see, then, that there is something to this beautiful, even it at times sorrowful, back and forth of the struggle to grow in chastity – to appreciate the gift of the human body and be a proper custodian of its mystery – and the mystery of Christ’s Body and Blood in the Eucharist. Far from wanting those who struggle to live chastely to think themselves the worst of sinners and unworthy of communion with the Lord, the Church’s unique insistence on chaste living – with oneself and with others, before and after marriage – is essential to entering the mystery of Christ’s gift of His body to His Church – in the Eucharist and from the Cross.

If struggling to grow in chastity is frequently keeping you from receiving Christ in the Eucharist, do not despair. It is God’s great delight to take what seems to be the ugliest parts of hearts and make them into the most beautiful through the workings of His grace. In fact, I will make so bold as to claim that it is only those who have climbed the arduous path of chastity, who have struggled heroically against self and the world’s empty promises, who can appreciate the full import of the Lord’s words: “THIS IS MY BODY” – this is “my flesh for the life of the world.”

The Rev. Royce V. Gregerson

Parish Church of Our Lady of Good Hope, Fort Wayne

XIX Sunday through the Year, A.D. MMXXIV