Feast of Corpus Christi – 25 May 2008

Today we celebrate the great feast of Corpus Christi, the Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ. According to the date, 25th May, it also happens to be the feast of Bede the Venerable who was born, lived out his life and died not too far from this place. The cause of our gathering here is to commemorate the founding of this College, St Cuthbert’s Ushaw College, and to celebrate two hundred years of fruitful apostolate.
Deus providebit, God will provide, was an expression I heard frequently when I was a student at this College many years ago. It was a phrase that I sometimes found frustrating and annoying because it could be used as a catch-all, a cover-all in order to stop any further discussion; the sort of pronouncement at which you were expected to bow your head in reverent acquiescence. Thank God, however, that it went deeper into my psyche than that!
In the readings of today’s Mass we hear so many words indicating God’s providential love for us:

Do not forget the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery: who guided you through vast and dreadful wilderness, a land of fiery serpents, scorpions, thirst; who in this wilderness fed you with manna that your fathers had not known.
O praise the Lord, Jerusalem….
He has blessed the children within you…
He established peace on your borders…
He feeds you with finest wheat….
He has not dealt thus with other nations;
he has not taught them his decrees.

God’s all embracing care for his people washes over us as we listen to the scriptures today. He looks to and cares for his people like a Father tenderly cradling a beloved child in his arms.
We know that this profligate love of the Father found its ultimate realisation in the unique sacrifice of his only begotten Son who, in the words of St Thomas Aquinas, wishing to enable us to share in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that by becoming man he might make men gods.
Moreover, he turned the whole of our nature, which he assumed, to our salvation. For he offered his body to God the Father on the altar of the cross as a sacrifice for our reconciliation; and he shed his blood for our ransom and our cleansing, so that we might be redeemed from wretched captivity and cleansed from our sins.
And lest we should forget this ineffable demonstration of his love he gave us a memorial in the Sacrament of the Eucharist: In this great sacrament you feed your people and strengthen them in holiness so that the human family may come to walk in the light of one faith, in one communion of love. We come then to this wonderful sacrament to be fed at your table and grow into the likeness of the risen Christ.
Deus providebit, God provides indeed! A gift daily at our disposal, never to be taken for granted; non mittendus canibus, the bread for God’s true children meant, which may not unto dogs be given, as we have just sung in the Sequence.
And Bede? He too was a man who trusted himself throughout his whole life to the providential love of God. Sustained by the Eucharist, he knew that God was always with him, guiding, directing, accompanying him, and that knowledge translated itself into a way of living, and more impressively, into a way of dying.

It is time, if it so please my Maker, that I should be released from the body, and return to him who formed me out of nothing, when as yet I was not. I have lived a long life, and the righteous Judge has well provided for me all my life long. …and my soul longs to see Christ my king, in all his beauty.

Bede gave his life to the Lord and rested in his providential care, content to become an instrument in God’s hands, to proclaim to all who would listen the wonderful works of our God and Father.
Two hundred years ago the Catholic Church in this country was just emerging from a time of turbulence which stretched back to the origins of the Reformation. It was beginning to stand on its own two feet again, though not necessarily very tall or strong. Here in the North it recognised, among many other things, the need for locally trained clergy and an educated laity. At a time when no one could have predicted a sound and secure future for Catholics in this country, they put their money and resources where their hope and trust in God’s providence was directing them. They built this College, they staffed it and supported it in every way they could.
With the blessed gift of hindsight we could all have done things better, every one of us. But would that we had a share in their hope and trust in God’s providential plan, his all-embracing love and care for us! If we are to have confidence to face today and tomorrow, then it has to be founded in that same hope, that same trust in God’s providential plan for us his people, his Church, his body.
There are moments in our lives when we feel lost and floundering, lacking in confidence and trust. Perhaps a little like those disciples on the road to Emmaus, ruminating and over-focused on all that has recently happened, we too are unable to see the risen Lord walking at our side. It was in the “breaking of bread” that the disciples recognised him. Well, on this the feast of Corpus Christi, let us readjust our focus and in witnessing once again the “breaking of the bread” may we recognise the one who stands among us and accompanies us on our journey.
Today we give thanks for the gift of the Eucharist, the sign of God’s continued love and care for us. As we eat his body which he gave for us, we grow in strength. As we drink his blood which he poured out for us, we are washed clean.
We give thanks for the example of those who have lived their lives nourished by the Eucharist and who trusted and hoped in God’s providential plan; saints like Bede, and courageous men and women like our forebears who founded, built and supported this place. We give thanks also for all those who have been connected with this College in any way throughout the years.

The fact that there is only one loaf means that though there are many of us, we form a single body because we all share in this one loaf.

United in the Eucharist then, and proclaiming our faith and trust in God’s providential love for us, we can give joyful praise using again the words of the Sequence of this Mass:

Bone pastor, panis vere,
Iesu, nostri miserere:
Come then, good shepherd, bread divine,
Still show to us thy mercy sign;
Oh, feed us still, still keep us thine;
So may we see thy glories shine
In fields of immortality.
O thou, the wisest, mightiest, best,
Our present food, our future rest,
Come, make us each thy chosen guest,
Co-heirs of thine, and comrades blest
With saints whose dwelling is with thee.
Amen! Alleluia!