(For the audio version of this blog, please visit: https://brothersinchristcmf.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Mass-Blog-for-the-Solemnity-of-the-Most-Holy-Body-and-Blood-of-Christ-2026.mp3)
Earthly food tends to support a secular system of feelings, giving us reasons to desire life or death, depending on whether our bellies are full or starving. Food from God supports a Judeo Christian value system sustaining an irrational spirit saying “I AM FULL,” no matter what happens on this earth.
The readings for the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ dramatize why the Judeo-Christian system of spiritual values overpowers our world’s secular system of gut feelings every time. Both the Old and New Testaments feed us the Word of God.
In this Sunday’s first reading (Deuteronomy 8:2-3, 14b-16a), Moses represents the Judeo section of that value system well, as we hear him tell his hangry (hungry and angry) followers why God let them feel hunger’s pain before giving them manna from heaven …
“… to show you that not by bread alone does one live, but by every word that comes forth from the mouth of the LORD.”
Jesus represents the Christian section of that value system in our gospel reading, saying:
“I am the living bread that came down from heaven; whoever eats this bread will live forever … Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died.” (John 6:51-58)
Although the Judeo word-of-God in Mosaic Law and the Christian word-of-God fed to us by His Holy Spirit represent different preparations of our spiritual food, Paul puts the onus on us to source them both from Christ’s value chain—a chain in which there is no weak link in its feeding power. Remember, Paul started out as Saul, zealous defender of the Torah with its restrictions on certain earthly foods. But as Paul, he learned that it was spiritual food that counts—food that nourishes not only you, but your neighbor.
“Because the loaf of bread is one, we, though many, are one body, for we all partake of the one loaf,” Paul teaches us this Sunday (1 Corinthians 10:16-17). A few verses later, he adds:
“No one should seek his own advantage, but that of his neighbor. Eat anything sold in the market, without raising questions on grounds of conscience, for ‘the earth and its fullness are the Lord’s.’”
Those solid Judeo Christian “Love Thy Neighbor” values seem to have been overshadowed by a world that feeds on a constantly changing diet of secular feelings shaping a rationalism disguised as a value system. Jewish Author and Scholar Dennis Prager offers an example in his book “If There Is No God.”
“Reason is very important when used in accord with God and the Bible,” he writes, “but when God and the Bible are abandoned, reason alone doesn’t make good societies. Remember, if there is no God, good and evil are merely opinions.”
Prager challenges his reader to judge a case pitting reason against values. Let’s see what you think. Which of these people acted more rationally:
A German non-Jew who risked his life during the Nazi Holocaust to save a Jewish family or a German who did nothing?
“It should be obvious that the German who did nothing acted more reasonably than the German who risked his or her life,” Prager observes. “Why risk your life to hide a stranger, let alone a Jew—a member of another ethnic and religious group? ‘Killing Jews is wrong,’ one might observe, ‘but I don’t want to risk getting imprisoned or killed by the Gestapo for helping them hide or escape.’
“That’s reasonable, but it’s not good,” he concludes, and fed on our society’s ever changing diet of feelings, every type of behavior is justifiable.
Even abortion. That illustration is mine, not Prager’s, as is this conclusion:
The German who was willing to sacrifice his life to save someone else was acting as Christ did, and his act would more than likely have yielded generations of human crops offering similar life-saving qualities—just as each fertilized embryo allowed to sprout and grow into our world’s population is bound to. Christ died to grow humanity’s spiritual and corporal value chains of mercy. As he is quoted by his beloved disciple,
“Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat, but if it dies, it produces much fruit.” (John 12:24)
–Tom Andel