Corpus christi sunday : a matter of life and death

Abstract

“Disciples of Jesus must learn to perceive the suffering of their master as unavoidable.” This is what Franz Jägerstätter wrote to his wife in one of his letters from prison. Here we have someone who deeply understood that communing at the Eucharist is embracing death: death in Christ; death with Christ. And no, this is not some morbid obsessive fascination with death; instead, it is a profound realisation of Jesus’s understanding in sharing his body and blood given to us as bread and wine in the Last Supper: “Do this in remembrance of me.”