Great Thursday.
Great Week. Abstention from meat and foods that contain meat. The Divine Liturgy of St. Basil the Great is celebrated in the late afternoon today. The All-Night Vigil feast of the Death of our Holy Father, Methodius, Teacher of the Slavs, is omitted this year.
Matins – Luke 22:1-39; Vespers with Liturgy – Exodus 19:10-19; Job 38:1-23; 42:1-5; Isaiah 50:4-11; 1 Corinthians 11:23-32; Matthew 26:2-20; John 13:3-17; Matthew 26:21-39; Luke 22:43-45; Matthew 26:40-27:2.
Read 1 Corinthians 11:23-32
Glory to Jesus Christ! Glory forever!
Sometimes, in our preoccupations, we fail to consider the people around us. The problem with being preoccupied is that it can be about legitimate things. Parents have concerns for children, forged in experience; children have worthy goals they strive to pursue, though misunderstood by others. The haves and have-nots of our society have responsibilities and survival needs that can make them myopic, obscuring an accurate perspective on each other. Our social need for reprieve, to connect carefreely with others, can even find us ignoring people right under our nose.
Though we may compartmentalize our lives, all those parts come along with us wherever we go and can manifest themselves unawares. Even in church. That is the grave subject of today’s reading.
The Corinthian Christians were eating “my body… without discerning the body.” Their blind spot – and ours, if we’re not careful – is that there are two different “bodies” that are also one. On one hand they were receiving the Lord in the Eucharist. On the other hand (preceding verses 20-22), they were “despis(ing) the church of God and humiliat(ing) those who have nothing” by how they practiced it. The following chapter is pointedly explicit: “by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body” (12:13); “now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (12:27).
We are prone to severely underestimating the unity of Christ with ourselves and others. We would be repulsed from desecrating the body of Christ in the Eucharist. But we are also warned not to “eat and drink judgment upon (ourselves)” in receiving communion by desecrating the body of Christ, the Church, by how we treat each other: “Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brethren, you did it to me” (Matthew 25:40).