After the Easter season, the Church celebrates a series of “theme” feasts, highlighting diverse aspects of our Catholic identity.  At Pentecost, we proclaimed our identity as a Spirit-filled people, empowered to bear witness to a diversity of gifts in the one Spirit.  Last Sunday, as we celebrated the gift of Consecrated Life in our church, we recalled our creation in the image of the Trinity: in our lives, loves, and relationships, we reflect a God who is mutual, self-giving, overflowing communion of love.   

Today, we commemorate the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ.  We are a Eucharistic people.  In receiving the Body and Blood of Christ, we are transformed from within: we become Christ’s Body and Blood, our lives broken for others, poured out in loving service of all humanity.  This is what Jesus calls the “new covenant in his blood.”  God does not enter into a contract with us: a legally binding agreement in which non-performance renders the agreement null and void.  God invites us to a covenant of faithful love.  No matter how often we fall short of our side of the bargain, God always remains faithful. Why? Because that is who God is: faithful love. So Jesus says to us: “I am with you always, until the end of time.” 

This weekend, we also celebrate this love reflected in those who have embraced covenant love with a partner through the sacrament of marriage. Without forgetting those who, whether through choice or circumstance, remain single, or those whose marriages have broken down, let us give thanks for the couples in our parish who bear witness to Christ through a love that is faithful, committed, and life-giving.  We honour especially the newly-married, those celebrating special anniversaries, and those who have just completed the 7-week ALPHA “Marriage Course”, led by John and Nathalie Bondyra.  One of my favourite wedding songs, How Beautiful The Body of Christ, shows the link between Marriage and Eucharist: