Sunday Homily

Fr. Matt Yim, S.J. 

June 22, 2025

Last week Fr. Tom said that the Feast of the Holy Trinity is his least favorite mass to preach on, because the Trinity is beyond our limited human understanding. Our words fail. 

This feast, this Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ, is the one where I balk because it’s so much more than a feast about bread and wine. It is as much about the elements and their transformation from simple bread and wine as it is about our transformation, too. And, speaking about the way that people are transformed by God’s love is hard. But—like it or not, in Christ, we are daily being transformed into a people of hope and of promise, into a people of loving kindness and abundant mercy, into the creations that God envisioned at the very beginning when he first put the breath of life into lifeless clay. 

So, as people of hope and of the promise, we are called to be in communion together, to share and exchange our thoughts and feelings about who our God is for us and how we might together walk the ways of faith and so accomplish the mission that Christ gave to the Church at the Last Supper. That mission is to love one another. 

We are called to be like Melchizedek, called to welcome the stranger at our door, called to give them food and drink and called to praise and bless them through one Lord, our God, at whose banquet we are imbued with our mission to love. That’s the shared vision we acknowledge

when we gather together in prayer and especially when we share the Eucharist. In communion with each other and with the whole Church we remember how much Christ loves us. 

But our shared meal is not just a memorial.  By partaking of the body and blood of Christ, we receive food for the journey of life. It gives us strength to pass through the good times and bad.  It lifts up our flagging spirits when we feel pressed down. Christ freely gives himself to us all. His love is for everybody. 

Make no mistake then, the Eucharist is not the reward of the righteous. We should set such notions aside because at the Last Supper Jesus never imposed that definition. He didn’t arbitrarily restrict who could receive it or when or how much or how little, he simply proffered a gift—the gift of himself and invited everyone to partake. 

The invitation has been made and continues to be made each time we participate here.  We join together as the Church, as the body of Christ acting in the union of God’s mysterious love. 

As one Church we bring forward not just the elements of bread and wine, but we lay down at the foot of the altar our joys and hopes and dreams, our sufferings and disappointments, so that Christ can transform them and transform us in the process. And no amount of mistakes on our part, or sins committed, or things that we haven’t been able to fix, can stop the process of God’s love acting in our hearts. 

I balk at preaching on the Feast of the Body and Blood of Christ because there’s too much to say and yet not enough ways to say it. Because the way God’s love touches our lives and the lives of our loved ones are private and profound, those experiences can only be shared obliquely and imperfectly. Maybe it’s for me to remember, for us all to remember that this Feast calls us to see that God’s love is too much to be confined within the host or within the wine or within the four walls of this building or within the hearts of every believer. And, yet not one heart, not one individual in this world, is left out of God’s thought or his love. All of creation is being transformed. All of us are being transformed. 

When all words fail, remember God’s love.