Ten Thousand Angels

"Do this."

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.

The command that towered above all others during His life on earth: "Do this!" It is a Divine command, unrepealable and from which no exception is granted. It is voiced on a subject that He identified as being the master subject. Speaking of the Last Supper and the Lord's subsequent Crucifixion, the great twentieth-century theologian Henri Cardinal de Lubac observed that the primary sacrifice occurs at the Table Thursday night (my text is the Anglican Missal):

On the night He was betrayed He took bread, and when He had given thanks, He brake it and
gave it to His Disciples saying, "Take, eat. This is my Body given for you. Do this ...."

Likewise, after supper, He took the cup. And when He had given thanks, He gave it to them saying,
"Drink ye, all of this. For this is my Blood of the new Covenant shed for you and for many for
the remission of sins. Do this as oft as ye shall drink it ...."

The Lord does not say, "This symbolizes my Body." He does not say, "This is a metaphor of my Body." He does not say, "This is like my Body." No. In the gravest and most solemn tones ever spoken, He says, "This is my Body," and then issues a Divine command: "Do this!"

What happens the next day on the Cross, de Lubac writes, is a repetition of what has already happened at that Table the night before, not the other way around. He commands us to remember what transpired on that night. He does not issue a similar command from the Cross, but rather invokes Psalm 22, which in a mystery of Hebrew poetry predicts that all the world will worship Him. This is why the Feast of Corpus Christi must be celebrated on a Thursday and not the following Sunday. In Catholic countries such as Haiti (where Franciscans of this Hermitage served for many years) Corpus Christi is a national holiday. In the pre-modern era, all of Europe stopped on this day, and people hung arrases and tapestries lining the streets to decorate the route where the Lord would pass — a priest or the bishop riding on a donkey elevating a monstrance displaying the Blessed Sacrament.

To misunderstand this is to trivialize and miscomprehend the high dignity of what Jesus sets before us at that Table. In His first miracle our Lord Jesus Christ turned water in wine at Cana gracing marriage which is the gateway of life on earth. And in His final miracle, He turned wine into His blood, opening the gateway to eternal life for all who are born into the world. (You will recall that He tells His Disciples, "You will find a man with a jar of water" in His final miracle, making reference thereby to His first.) Yet, His instruction — This is my Body. ... This is my Blood. — and His echoing command — "Do this!" — proved to be, even during His lifetime, the greatest stumbling block for those who wished to follow Him.

The teaching that His Body was the Bread of Life would be the occasion for the greatest rebellion of His three-year ministry as measured by the number of rebels. We do not know the true number of Jesus disciples aside from two explicit facts. First, Twelve constituted an inner circle of His chosen Disciples and, second, that He sent out seventy (or seventy-two) of His followers two-by-two (Luke 10:1). As they were sent, we must deem them apostles. But this group, along with the Twelve, were a remnant. Before that, a multitude followed Him (Jn 6:2). They would go to any length to seek Him out (Jn 6:24). They were present to hear mysteries that did not appear in the public sermons and parables (Jn 6:35-66). How many were there in this group? Hundreds? Thousands? We shall never know. We do know that on the subject of eating His Body,

Many of His disciples, when they heard it, said, "This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?"

Many, the text tells us, rebelled. And the scene for this rebellion is a recapitulation in the Gospels of the rebellion suffered at God's feeding manna to His people in the wilderness. For the day after the Feeding of the Five Thousand, which is a specific repetition of the giving of manna from Heaven, Jesus reveals that He fed that multitude not with bread but with His Body:

Our fathers ate the manna in the wilderness; as it is written, "He gave them bread
from Heaven to eat." Jesus then said to them, "Truly, truly, I say to you, it was
not Moses who gave you the bread from heaven; My Father gives you the true bread from
heaven. For the Bread of God is that which comes down from Heaven, and gives life to
the world." ....

Jesus said to them, "I Am the Bread of Life; he who comes to me shall not hunger, and
he who believes in me shall never thirst.

The Jews then murmured at Him, because He said, "I Am the Bread which came down from Heaven."
They said, "Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does
He now say, 'I have come down from Heaven'?" Jesus answered them, "Do not murmur among yourselves.
... I Am the Bread of Life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died.
This is the Bread which comes down from Heaven, that a man may eat of it and not die. I Am
the Living Bread which came down from Heaven; if any one eats of this Bread, he will live for
ever; and the Bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my Flesh." (Jn 6:31-51)

The next words stand with the most famous among all human rebellions:

"This is a hard saying; who can listen to it?" ... After this many of His disciples drew back
and no longer went about with him. (Jn 6:66)

This greatest rebellion of Jesus' three-year ministry, standing beside the rebellion suffered at God's hands in the wilderness more than a thousand years earlier, continues two thousand years later down to our own time. "Eat His flesh? Who can endure this saying?!" As recently as 2013, reliable polling, carried out by a Roman Catholic university, indicated that more than half of all practicing Roman Catholic reject the notion that the host and wine consecrated during the Canon of the Mass are the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. In the Anglican Communion the case is even more vexed, for only Anglo-Catholics are firmly committed to the Real Presence of Christ at the Eucharist. Indeed, it has long been a defining aspect of Anglo-Catholic belief and practice going back at least as far as the Black Rubric of the 1662 Prayerbook, when Anglo-Protestants forbade Anglo-Catholics to kneel when receiving the Blessed Sacrament.

Today, kneeling upon receipt of the Sacrament in any parish is rare and is seen to mark one as being fanatical or unnecessarily melodramatic. One parish priest I knew in the Roman Communion warned me that genuflecting before the Tabernacle where the Blessed Sacrament is reserved would raise eyebrows among other clergy and religious. The religious sisters who ran a college where I taught fired their chaplain for elevating the host at the Canon of the Mass. In every Mass celebrated at parishes throughout that diocese, priests would set their hands down on the Altar and then drop the host to the Table in place of the Elevation. It was a kind of theological code or "high sign" concerning their "vision of the Church." And a Benedictine monk I knew (of a more conservative temper) referred to Holy Communion as "the chow line."

In sympathy with my evident horror at these things, a Roman Catholic bishop I served lamented the casual and irreverent manner in which the Blessed Sacrament was handled. Standing with this bishop alone while vesting for Mass, he cast his mind back many years to his first day as an Altar server. He had been recommended by his cousin, a well respected acolyte, and then granted the honor of entering the Sacristy himself, where he would be shown his duties. "And when the Tabernacle door was opened," he told me, "everyone immediately fell to both his knees. My cousin reached over and squeezed my hand and later whispered, 'Richie, when that door opened, ten thousand angels appeared.'" I still feel godly chills sweeping over my body whenever I recall that moment of sacred recollection. And then I think of that bishop's dilemma then, today, and going forward, for few Catholic clergy today even know what a "double genuflection" is. And nearly all of them would scoff at a young man's belief in thousands of angels. Thousands? I would have thought that count too low so close to the superabundance of Heaven's holiness and the Most Sacred dignity of the Body of our Lord Jesus Christ! Why, humans presently on earth number 7.4 billion. Think of the trillions of angels in a Heaven unbounded by space and time! A few thousand to adore and honor the Lord Jesus Christ? Is that not nothing by comparison?

But scoffers, you see, do not believe. And not believing, they do not wish to appear foolish. A Roman priest told me in an air of irony and wit that he didn't genuflect, because "I'd get down there and then wonder what I was kneeling for." Needless to say, this arch attitude carries over to the priest's distaste for people who do genuflect and who insist on genuflecting when receiving the Sacrament. A definite antagonism has arisen along this fault line. But how did these fault lines form in the first place? How did we get here? In our own time, we could point to a perfect storm of several powerful factors including the Scientific Revolution and the Liturgical Movement, which sought to move the Tabernacle out of the Sanctuary, which inevitably led to its sacred character being trivialized. I once overheard two men trading off-color jokes while leaning on just such a displaced Tabernacle. Before moving all of these most holy Tabernacles out of the Sanctuary, did not these bishops and liturgiologists bother to read what happens to beautiful things when they are made the possession of everyone? Just look at public parks or public baseball diamonds and dugouts or public pools. If specific caretakers are not paid and supervised, these places quickly decline and fall into ruin. For the "owners" of these magnificent properties, the public, do not count the blessings of these gifts as being their own. In fact, the opposite occurs. Perhaps you have heard the proverb, What belongs to everyone belongs to no one. And then watching their parents and grandparents ignore or disrespect the Tabernacle, watching their families receive the Blessed Sacrament like indifferent soldiers in a chow line, they are taught to disrespect the Lord Jesus Christ as a matter of deeply formed habit. When later asked in a poll as adults whether this wafer is in fact God, they balk. "This! This snack my grandfather used to pop in his mouth without so much as a bowed head?! God?! This is not God! How could it be?!" And I think it goes without saying that the our polls today undercount the number of disbelievers, who are embarrassed to admit they reject their own Church's teachings. But this crisis of faith goes back nearly to man's first encounter with God. And Eden itself was underestimated and then lost. "What?! Has someone closed the park?"

May I conclude by consulting the heart of a child? A little girl I knew (her name is Grace) was formed in her faith at the Anglo-Catholic Church of the Advent in Boston. It was there where she gave her first Confession, received her First Holy Communion, was trained by a devout CCD staff, and had impressed upon her little interior the sounds and sights and smells of devout Catholic worship. Earlier on, she would sit with her parents during Mass upon a kneeler coloring her book of Biblical scenes using the pew as her work table. But you could always see in her face the intent expression of one listening. And the Eucharists at The Advent were greatly moving and glorious, to be sure. One day, she said to her father in her most serious voice, "What is happening at the end? Something important is happening. The people become so quiet. They pray and mumble so seriously with their eyes closed. And then they all leave. It is so silent. And then they come back. And they pray again but this time everything has changed. You can feel it." What does a father say at a moment like this? How does one explain the mystery of the Most Holy Sacrifice of the Mass to a child? He said, "The people prepare themselves for a most awesome thing. They are about to go forward and present themselves to the living God. They approach with a sense of dread but also love. They kneel before Him and pray. Then the priest comes accompanying God and places a particle of God inside each of them. And they pray again. And then they return." She listening carefully with her eyes off to a distance and then nodded. "Yes," she thought, "that must be it."

My brothers and sisters, the Eucharist is a crisis in the human heart and seems always to have been so. It is not a matter for debate. It is not subject to scientific investigation. It is not properly in the province of human reason. It is a Divine command: Do this! Let us get down on both knees, then. Let us approach Him once more with the heart of a child. The air is electric with the presence of ten thousand angels. Feel a particle of God radiating out into every part of your being. We rely entirely on Him, and He is making us His own, even with the Most Precious Gift of His own Body and Blood.

In the Name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.