TRINITY · THURSDAY AFTER TRINITY SUNDAY
Corpus Christi
The Feast of the Body & Blood of Christ · The Lammas Eucharist Named · Aquinas’s Pange Lingua
Corpus Christi — KOR-pus KRIS-tee · Pange Lingua — PAN-jay LING-gwah · Tantum Ergo — TAN-tum ER-goh · Lauda Sion — LAW-dah SEE-on · Benediction — ben-eh-DIK-shun · transubstantiation — tran-sub-stan-shee-AY-shun
O God, who in this wonderful Sacrament hast left unto us a memorial of thy Passion; Grant us so to venerate the sacred mysteries of thy Body and Blood, that we may ever perceive within ourselves the fruit of thy redemption; through Jesus Christ our Lord.
Corpus Christi (KOR-pus KRIS-tee) — the Body of Christ — is the feast that gives the Lammas Day meditation its explicit Eucharistic completion and the Order for Holy Communion its annual celebration in the summer. It falls on the Thursday after Trinity Sunday, the first Thursday of the Trinitarian season, and it is the feast that says: the God confessed on Trinity Sunday as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost is present now, bodily, on this altar, in this bread and this wine. It was established by Urban IV in 1264 at the instigation of Thomas Aquinas, who composed the Office for the feast — including the Pange Lingua (PAN-jay LING-gwah), whose last two verses, known as the Tantum Ergo (TAN-tum ER-goh), are sung at Benediction in every Catholic and Anglo-Catholic church: Down in adoration falling, Lo! the sacred host we hail. The Lauda Sion, also by Aquinas, is the Sequence for the Mass — perhaps the most theologically dense liturgical poem in the Latin tradition, packing the whole of eucharistic theology into measured verse with the rigour of the Summa Theologiae compressed into song.
The People’s Anglican Missal restores Corpus Christi to the Anglo-Catholic Calendar, and the theological instinct is sound: there must be a feast that celebrates not the institution of the Eucharist (which is Holy Thursday, in the shadow of the Passion) but the Eucharist itself in its full glory, without the shadow, in the light of the Resurrection and in the warmth of the Trinity season. Corpus Christi is the feast that links the Lammas loaf and the Last Supper and the Mass of every Sunday, that says the wheat in the August fields and the bread on the altar and the Body of Christ are not three separate realities but one continuous act of the God who took on flesh, broke his body for us, and feeds us with that body until the day when we feed on it in the Kingdom. The feast is the Eucharistic theology of the whole archive stated in a single act of annual worship.
Thomas Aquinas’s eucharistic theology, drawn on for the Office of Corpus Christi, insists on the real and substantial presence of Christ in the Sacrament: not a merely memorial or symbolic presence but the true, real, and substantial body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, present under the forms of bread and wine. The Anglican tradition navigates this carefully — the 1662 Articles deny transubstantiation (tran-sub-stan-shee-AY-shun) as a technical philosophical account while affirming the real presence, and the People’s Anglican Missal occupies the high end of that tradition, celebrating Benediction (ben-eh-DIK-shun) and reserving the Sacrament with the full Anglo-Catholic ceremonial. What Corpus Christi affirms, across all the theological disputes about the mode of Christ’s presence, is the fact of it: the risen and ascended Lord is present in the Eucharist, genuinely and not merely symbolically, and the devotion appropriate to his presence is the devotion of the whole person before the whole God.
Corpus Christi falls in the early summer, in the warmth of the Trinity season, twelve days after Pentecost. Its timing is exact: the Spirit has come, the Trinity has been confessed, and now the Church gathers to celebrate the form in which the Trinity’s gift is most concretely given to the faithful — the Body and Blood of the Son, offered by the Father, consecrated by the Spirit, received by the baptised in the one act that makes them what they claim to be: members of the Body of Christ. The Eucharist does not merely represent the Church’s unity; it creates it. The Body of Christ received in the Sacrament makes the body of Christ that is the Church. Corpus Christi is the feast of that making: the day the Church holds up what it receives and says this is what we are, because this is what we eat, because this is who fed us, and will feed us, until the day we eat and drink at the table in the Kingdom.
O God, who dost feed us with the Body and Blood of thy Son and dost remain present with us under the forms of bread and wine until the Kingdom comes; Grant that we may receive the Eucharist with the faith and love it deserves, and may find in every breaking of the bread the same Lord who broke bread in the upper room and on the road to Emmaus and who will break it again at the marriage supper of the Lamb; through the same Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Ghost, one God, world without end.
Amen.