Corpus Christi is an odd feast. Almost all of the other feasts celebrate an event in the life of Jesus or the life of a saint. Corpus Christi is focused on the doctrine and devotion to the Eucharist. Only the Feast of the Trinity has a similar focus insofar as it celebrates a doctrine fundamental to Christianity. The trouble with celebrating either feast as primarily doctrinal is that doctrines in themselves seem lifeless. Who besides mathematicians can get excited about the paradoxes of one and three, and who but scholastic theologians can get excited about what the Real Presence in bread and wine is all about?

The Trinity, of course is not a doctrine, and it isn’t really a mathematical puzzle for that matter. The Trinity is a story of creation and redemption and sanctification. Not that each person of the Trinity is confined to one of those roles. All three Persons do all three and much, much more. The sacrament of the Eucharist also celebrates a story, the same story that is told about the Trinity. (See Trinity as Story and Song.) The Institution of the Eucharist, Jesus’ Last Supper with his disciples, is one important incident in the story of Jesus coming to earth as a helpless child, living a life of a human vulnerable to whatever other humans choose to do to him, dying on a cross when that is what humans chose to do, rising from the dead, and being seated at the right hand of the Father in the heavenly places. We have celebrated this story one step at a time, starting with the expectations of Advent all the way through to the coming of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. Trinity Sunday puts the whole story together in one big celebration and then Corpus Christ does the same from a different angle.

St. Thomas Aquinas said that God relates to God’s creatures according to their mode of reality. In the case of humans, this means that God relates to us, material creatures that we are, through the material world in time and in history. The Eucharistic rite takes place in time. It incorporates past times, most particularly the times when Jesus suffered and died and then rose again, but also the time when the Israelites were delivered from the Egyptians at the Red Sea, an event recalled at the Passover for the Jews. The Eucharistic rite also takes place in the present moment when it is celebrated. Whatever events on both local and world fronts are incorporated into the celebration and offered to God. Moreover, God’s promises for the future when all will be made one in Christ are present as well. That’s a lot of time and history to be contained in a piece of bread and a sip of wine.

Discussions of real presence and dolling the sacrament up in a monstrance for Benediction both have some danger of reifying the Body and Blood of Christ. However, use of one’s intelligence to perceive some intelligibility in the holy Mysteries is part of what it means to be an embodied human being. This is salutary as long as one is willing to allow what intelligibility that emerges to remain surrounded by mystery. Dressing up to celebrate is another facet of our embodied way of living. It is the kind of celebration we engage in to honor people we love and respect. The important thing to realize is that we are eating and drinking some powerful stories when we partake of the bread and wine, and we are celebrating these same stories deep in our hearts as we pray before the dressed-up sacrament. These stories of deliverance from slavery and the suffering of the Prince of Peace inform the way we prayerfully incorporate contemporary events and they prepare us for how we should live out our stories as parts of the greater stories embodied in the sacrament. These same stories have prompted many liturgical theologians to stress the importance of social concerns and outreach as necessary outcomes of the Eucharistic celebration.

There is a human expression about eating our words. The implication is that our words come back to haunt us in some way. It is perhaps worth thinking about whether or not what we say is worth consuming for others, let alone ourselves. In any case, eating the words of Jesus is profound nourishment, nourishment to eternal life. When we receive the bread and wine at the altar and consume it, we are swallowing the story of Christ hook, line, and sinker. By swallowing this story, we live our own life stories within the life story given us by the Word made Flesh.