Picture it.  Drops of blood falling on your arms, in your face, and in your hair.  That’s what happened in today’s First Reading as Moses ritualized the sealing of the covenant between the people of Israel and the Lord.  This blood-sealed union between God and the Israelites was messy---in more ways than one as history reveals.  But on that day, in response to the commandments and laws offered by the God who rescued them from slavery in Egypt, the Israelites emphatically said YES!—" All that the Lord has said, we will heed and do.”  This covenant remains valid, despite the demands of covenant living and human failings.

Today’s solemnity, The Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, recalls another blood-sealed covenantal union; the final new and eternal covenant.  In our Gospel, at the Last Supper with words that we hear at each Mass, Jesus offered bread and wine to those seated with Him, blessed the bread and wine, and when He took the cup, He proclaimed This is the blood of the covenant, which will be poured out for many.   With the bread that became His body and the wine that became His blood, Jesus literally gave them, and us, all of Himself forever.  The eternal covenant.  What is YOUR response?

Most of us like and eagerly accept the bread that is offered, the Body of Christ.  Hungry, we need to be fed, to be sustained by God, to meet the challenges we face in our lives, to become, as St. Augustine said, what we eat.  And so, each week we gather together and walk, processional witnesses of the covenant, to receive in our need.

Sprinkled blood is part of the eternal covenant for us also; a part we may be less eager to partake in.  We would prefer to avoid the messy and unwelcome truth, that to fully live and enjoy this gracious covenant, we too must pour out our blood, pour out our lives, acknowledging our sinfulness, by forgiving others, and by living in obedience to Jesus’ commandment to love others as He has loved us.  Elsewhere in scripture (Matt 20:22) Jesus asks James and John “Can you drink the cup?” We must!  It is our joy and our salvation, the most likely place of our transformation, and the way we fully live in the eternal covenant.
 
Our best response, even and especially with our own weakness and limitedness, to the gift of the covenant, to the supreme gift of Christ’s Body and Blood, through which we will never be hungry or thirst again, as we sang in our psalm today is to emphatically say— The cup of salvation I will take up and I will call upon the name of the Lord.  ⁺AMDG⁺ kgm