A Liturgy & A Corpse

Image by Foundry Co from Pixabay

One morning, probably due to a combination of liturgical illiteracy and bad timing, a coffin with a body was casually wheeled into a suburban parish in the middle of the Eucharistic liturgy, in preparation for a funeral which was to come immediately after.

So there it was, a dead body, cutting through the almost boring familiarity of the space between “Let us pray” and “One God forever and ever”.

At first glance, a dead body casually gliding into a non-funerary liturgy might seem to some slightly odd. Other folk might seem irritated at the funeral director’s awkward sense of timing. After the initial awkwardness and rage, however, the presence of the coffin - and the corpse in the coffin - can be seen as not so much an interruption to the mass but a correlation, a visible reminder to those attending the Eucharist at just what the Eucharist is about.

What is striking in this action is the sight of two bodies facing each other. On the one hand there is the dead body of the deceased, while on the other is the paradoxical body of Christ. It is the body of the Lamb that stands as if slain (Rev 5:6). It is a body that is sacrificed yet is brimming with life that is passed onto those who receive it. Thus if this living slain lamb is what is before us, the Eucharistic body is not completely juxtaposed with the dead body.

Indeed, Graham Ward goes further in an essay on the Eucharist in his City of God. Not only is the Eucharistic Body a correlate to the dead body that lies in the coffin. The Eucharistic body is actually the archetype of the human body, and thus the standard that the body in the coffin is called to.

As an aside, it is no accident that St. Augustine, in his sermon on the Eucharist, gave this exhortation to the congregation that at the reception of the Eucharist, we “become what you receive, and receive who you are”.

Set against this backdrop, the body of the deceased is no longer a mere dead piece of flesh. Bodies also prophesy to a future moment. The ancient Church looked to the body as a signal to the last day when these bodies, long waiting for their restoration, are brought back to life as it was on the day of Christ’s death. The dead body, in other words, is a signal to that end of history where the glorified body of Christ is made fully manifest.

In other words, both the Eucharistic Body of Christ and the body of the deceased catapult our imagination to that future moment. At the same time, they also pull as back to another moment in the past, indeed the very first moment in history in the Garden of Eden. This is because, in becoming what we receive, as Augustine said, we enter into communion with who we receive. And it was in that garden when creation enjoyed uninterrupted communion with its Creator. The Eucharistic Body of Christ, in drawing us to Communion with Him, draws us also to a restored Eden. The flowers arranged on top of the coffin offer this little hopeful glimmer of both that first moment and the last, both ever ancient and ever new.

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