Solemnity of the Body and Blood of the Lord / Corpus Christi (Year A)

Homily

Most Rev Timothy Costelloe SDB
Archbishop of Perth

Sunday 7 June, 2026
St Mary's Cathedral, Perth

Download the PDF

In the account of the Last Supper as we read it in St John's gospel, we find Jesus opening His heart to His disciples as He shares a last meal with them before He enters into His passion and death.

In many ways, we might think of Jesus’s words as His Last Will and Testament, His final farewell gift to those who have been His closest disciples for the last three years of His life. In that sense, His words take on a special meeting for the disciples and, therefore, also for us. He speaks to the disciples as His friends, assures them of His love, promises that although He is leaving them now He will not leave them forever, and then invites them to make their home in Him as He makes His home in them.

These are powerful and intimate expressions of His love and they are a reminder to us that Jesus, our Lord and our God as Thomas will proclaim Him after the resurrection, does not wish to stand aloof from us, or keep His distance from us. Rather, He is inviting us into a relationship of affection, of trusting faith and of love.

This is the remarkable, even overwhelming, truth of our Christian faith. We sometimes hear it said that the Catholic Church is a church of rules and regulations rather than a church built on love and acceptance. If this is true in the experience of some people then this is a tragedy for them, and indeed for all of us who belong to the Church. It means that the very heart of the Church, Jesus Himself, has somehow been obscured and we must be brave enough to acknowledge that perhaps for many people we have failed to be the living sign of the presence of Jesus which we as the Church, as the community of disciples of Jesus, are called to be.

At the same time, we must not be discouraged. Because of our baptism we are already disciples of Jesus; we already have the gift of His Spirit; we already are the bearers of His grace. No matter how often we fail to be all that He has called us to be, our failing of Him will never lead to Him abandoning or failing us. He is always with us, even and perhaps especially, in those moments when we cannot find Him, when we think we have lost Him, or when in our carelessness we have pushed Him to the margins of our life. “I am with you always”, He said to His disciples before He returned to His Father in heaven. As He draws us together this morning to celebrate Mass in this cathedral He says the same to us: “I am with you; Do not be afraid”.

It is this presence of Jesus to us, both as individuals and as members of the Christian family, that we celebrate in a very particular way on this feast of the Body and Blood of the Lord. As we receive Him in the Eucharist, as we eat His body and drink His blood as He invites us to do in this morning’s gospel, He comes to live in us, and we come to live in Him. As Jesus also says in John’s gospel, just as a branch cannot live if it is cut off from the parent stock, from the vine, so we, if we remain united to Jesus the vine, will live and grow, will flourish and bear good fruit, will grow in that peace that only the Lord can give.

It is this unity with the Lord Jesus which brings about in us, if we allow it to, exactly what Saint Paul once said about himself: “I no longer live, for it is Christ who lives in me”. This is why our Catholic belief in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist is so important. Far from being a symbol in the weaker sense of that word, the bread and wine of the Eucharist really are the living Christ who comes to us, dwells with us, strengthens us and lifts us to a new and deeper life which is a sharing in His own life.

This is why, when we approach the altar to receive the Eucharist, the priest or minister does not hold the host before us and say “Here is a sign that Christ stays with us”. Rather the priest or minister says, simply but truly, “the Body of Christ”.

The central meaning of the Eucharist is that it is the sacrament which transforms us into members, together, of the Body of Christ which is the Church. We say Amen as we receive the Eucharist, and many of us will walk in procession with the Blessed Sacrament after Mass today. But unless these actions lead us to be the living, powerful, unmistakable and faithful presence of Christ among all people in the daily reality of our lives, these actions will ultimately be empty or fruitless gestures rather than powerful signs that our faith is real and active, as the Lord wishes it to be.

May our faith in the Eucharist, in the living presence of Christ, be a living faith which transforms our own lives and the lives of all those we encounter.