For most of the folk who would appear on my website, today is just a Thursday. But for our Catholic siblings it is a feast day: the Feast of Corpus Christi (or, in its longer form, the “Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ”). For Protestants, who on the whole do not take a more literalist interpretation of Jesus’s presence in Holy Communion, it’s a feast day that just isn’t on our radar to remember. But maybe we should, because it’s also a day to rememeber one of the most important aspects of Christianity: the new community we are in Christ.

A Feast for a Feast

The Feast of Corpus Christi has its origins in the 13^th Century, a product of the tireless work of St. Juliana of Liège. This feast’s celebration began in Germany, and became an official feast of the church in 1264 by the decree of Pope Urban IV.

In the Roman church the feast celebrates the elements of Holy Communions: the bread that is Jesus’s body and the cup that is Jesus’s blood. For Protestants who, with the notable exceptions of Christians from the Anglican and Lutheran traditions, do not acknowledge a real, physical presence of Jesus in the meal at the Lord’s Table, the day is mostly unrecognized. What use for Protestants is a day to recognize the presence of Jesus in the bread and wine of the Eucharist?

Celebrating Community

One of the odd things about Christianity is that Jesus didn’t leave behind a book for us to know how to live and follow God: he left behind a community. I think too often we forget this. The Bible was not written by Jesus; it was written by the church he left behind.

When you think about the rituals Christianity has, they all have to do with community. The two rituals which have special place and are considered sacraments by Protestants exemplify this. Baptism is the initiation into Christian community, either as a new convert or as an infant. Holy Communion is a communal meal, in which the whole of the church—the body of Christ—gathers together to symbolically and ritualistically be with one another in the shared meal that Jesus instituted.

Recovering “with”

The American Protestant church has, in many ways, lost its connection to the community as an essential characteristic of Christianity. There’s a lot of reasons for this: an increased focus on an individual through modernity and capitalism, a shift in the identity of the church to that of a “spiritual club” one joins, a focus on individual conversion and personal experiences of faith, or the rise of the professional clergy class to whom many of the community’s duties are delegated. But the shift to an individualized form of Christianity is real.

Feast days like Corpus Christi are a reminder that Christianity is really about community. Belief and behavior oughtn’t hold the importance we’ve given them in the church, belonging should. Early Christian critic Celsus described Christians as “the silly, and the mean, and the stupid, with women and children”¹—not the kind of people Celsus’s Roman society would welcome; but early Christians did. They were a community made up of the folk who didn’t find belonging anywhere else.

I think it’s long since time Christianity started acting like that again. While the lingering powers of Christendom continue their quest for doctrinal and behavioral uniformity, the feast which celebrates the body of Christ offers an invitation to experience the full diversity of those whom the Holy Spirit is gathering together into Christ: a place of belonging for all.

1. Origen, Against Celsus = Contra Celsum: The Complete English Translation from the Fourth Volume of the Ante-Nicene Fathers, New edition with introduction and notes revised, ed. A. Cleveland Coxe, trans. Frederick Crombie (Ex Fontibus Co., 2013), III.44, 228. ↩︎