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Office Of Readings | Eastertide Week 2, Wednesday | A Reading From The Sermon Of Pope Saint Leo The Great
‘Jesus Christ lives in his Church.’
‘Christ Lives in His Church’ | Saint Leo The Great
In this sermon, Saint Leo the Great invites us to contemplate one of the deepest mysteries of Christian faith: the living presence of Christ in his Church. Leo’s message is profoundly Eucharistic, ecclesial, and incarnational—rooted in both Scripture and the lived experience of Christian community. Though composed in the fifth century, Leo’s words continue to resonate with clarity and pastoral care.
Jesus Christ And The Church: One Living Body
Leo begins by affirming the inseparability of Christ from his Church. ‘The head cannot be separated from the members, nor the members from the head,’ he writes. Here, Leo draws on the familiar Pauline image of the Church as the Body of Christ (cf. 1 Corinthians 12:12–27; Ephesians 1:22–23). For Leo, this is no mere metaphor. The Church is not simply an institution that represents Christ—it is, in a mystical but real sense, Christ himself living in the world.
This reality is grounded in the Incarnation. Christ, having united himself permanently with human nature, continues to dwell in those who are united to Jesus by grace. This includes all the saints, not just those canonized or famous, but every baptized believer. Even now, Leo says, God dwells ‘whole and undivided’ in His Church. Christ has not abandoned us. Jesus’ promise—’I am with you always, even to the end of the world’ (Matthew 28:20)—is still being fulfilled.
The Church As The Virgin Mother
Saint Leo shifts naturally into describing the Church’s fruitfulness. Just as Christ was born of the Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit, so too he is continually born in the Church through the sacraments, especially baptism. This imagery is rich and poetic: the Church as a virgin mother who, through the action of the Spirit, gives birth to countless children of God. The faithful are ‘born not of blood, nor of the desire of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God’ (cf. John 1:13).
For Leo, baptism is more than a symbolic initiation. It is the real beginning of divine life in the soul. This new birth incorporates the believer into Christ, and through him, into the global family of Abraham’s children. Thus, Leo also highlights the universality of salvation: ‘From every nation on earth, without exception, Christ forms a single flock.’ This vision of the Church as one flock under one shepherd echoes Jesus’ own words in John 10:16 and testifies to the unity of the Church across all cultures and peoples.
Role Of Peter And The Pastors
Although Saint Leo is careful to affirm Peter’s unique role—Christ’s special command to him to ‘feed my sheep’—he also emphasizes that Christ remains the true shepherd. All bishops and pastors serve under Christ’s authority, not above it. They are not the source of grace, but the stewards of it.
This is an important clarification. The unity of the Church, even in its hierarchical structure, is ultimately Christological, not bureaucratic. Christ himself nourishes his flock with ‘abundant love’, and it is Jesus Christ who leads both the shepherds and the sheep to ‘rich and fertile pastures’. In Leo’s time, this was a pastoral encouragement in the face of political and doctrinal unrest, reminding the faithful that the Church’s true anchor is not in any worldly structure but in Christ himself.
All Share In The Passion Of Christ
Saint Leo makes an extraordinary claim: not only martyrs, but all the baptized, ‘share in his passion’. This extends the theology of the cross to every Christian life. By baptism, believers have died and risen with Christ (Romans 6:3–5). Therefore, every Christian is called to imitate Christ’s self-giving love. This is not restricted to moments of heroic martyrdom but is lived daily in faith, patience, humility, and fidelity.
Thus, the Christian life is paschal in nature. It is shaped by Christ’s Passover from death to life, and our own transformation into ‘a new creature’ is a participation in that mystery. Baptism is not the end of the journey but the beginning of a lifelong process of dying to sin and rising to holiness.
The Eucharist | Becoming What We Receive
In one of the most striking passages, Leo teaches:
‘The effect of our sharing in the body and blood of Christ is to change us into what we receive.’
This is both mystical and profoundly Eucharistic. In receiving the Body of Christ, we do not simply take Christ into ourselves. Rather, we are taken up into Jesus. The Eucharist is not merely a ritual act or an object of devotion; it is a sacrament that reshapes the one who receives it. We become Christ-like—not just metaphorically, but really and spiritually—by grace. This doctrine of transformation is echoed later in the Eastern idea of theosis, and in the Western emphasis on sanctifying grace.
Feast Of Sincerity And Truth
Leo closes by connecting this sacramental participation to moral and spiritual renewal. The paschal mystery is not a moment in history to be remembered; it is a living reality to be celebrated ‘with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth’. He is paraphrasing 1 Corinthians 5:8, where Saint Paul encourages the faithful to live the new life of Christ with purity and authenticity.
For Leo, this means casting aside the ‘leaven of malice’, that is, the habits and sins of the old self. The Christian is a ‘new creature’, filled and ‘inebriated with the Lord Himself’. The joy of Easter, then, is not simply about what Christ did—but about what He is still doing, in us and through us.
A Reading From The Sermon Of Pope Saint Leo The Great
My dear brethren, there is no doubt that the Son of God took our human nature into so close a union with himself that one and the same Christ is present, not only in the firstborn of all creation, but in all his saints as well. The head cannot be separated from the members, nor the members from the head. Not in this life, it is true, but only in eternity will God be all in all, yet even now he dwells, whole and undivided, in his temple the Church. Such was his promise to us when he said: See, I am with you always, even to the end of the world.
And so all that the Son of God did and taught for the world’s reconciliation is not for us simply a matter of past history. Here and now we experience his power at work among us. Born of a virgin mother by the action of the Holy Spirit, Christ keeps his Church spotless and makes her fruitful by the inspiration of the same Spirit. In baptismal regeneration she brings forth children for God beyond all numbering. These are the sons of whom it is written: They are born not of blood, nor of the desire of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God.
In Christ Abraham’s posterity is blessed, because in him the whole world receives the adoption of sons, and in him the patriarch becomes the father of all nations through the birth, not from human stock but by faith, of the descendants that were promised to him. From every nation on earth, without exception, Christ forms a single flock of those he has sanctified, daily fulfilling the promise he once made: I have other sheep, not of this fold, whom it is also ordained that I shall lead; and there shall be one flock and one shepherd.
Although it was primarily to Peter that he said: Feed my sheep, yet the one Lord guides all the pastors in the discharge of their office and leads to rich and fertile pastures all those who come to the rock. There is no counting the sheep who are nourished with his abundant love, and who are prepared to lay down their lives for the sake of the good shepherd who died for them.
But it is not only the martyrs who share in his passion by their glorious courage; the same is true, by faith, of all who are reborn through baptism. That is why we are to celebrate the Lord’s paschal sacrifice with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth. The leaven of our former malice is thrown out, and a new creature is filled and inebriated with the Lord himself. For the effect of our sharing in the body and blood of Christ is to change us into what we receive. As we have died with him, and have been buried and raised to life with him, so we bear him within us, both in body and in spirit, in everything we do.
In this meditation, Baldwin of Canterbury reflects on the enduring biblical phrase ‘Love is as strong as death’ (Song of Songs 8:6), drawing a sharp and deliberate contrast between two forces — one that ends life, and one that restores it. Death, in Baldwin’s view, is not simply the end of physical existence, but the boundary that love refuses to accept. The passage reveals a deep confidence in Christ’s power not only to endure death but to reverse its finality [ … ]
Pope Saint Gregory the Great reflects on the moment in the Gospels when Jesus looks out upon the crowds and says: ‘The harvest is great, but the labourers are few.’ The image is simple but searching. It describes a field full of life and possibility, waiting for workers to gather its fruit. For Gregory, this scene becomes a picture of the Church itself — abundant in potential, yet in need of those who will tend, teach and draw others toward faith [ … ]
‘Death,’ says His Grace, ‘throws it all apart. For we are not as we should be. Faith requires our adjustment to God’s truth. God’s triumph in a very real sense requires in us the loss of our everything. Which, as with Mary at the other end of Jesus’s life, is God’s truth.’ The Gospel reading is of John 11: 1-45, which is a long passage, and His Grace’s homiletic theme commences in textual wilderness. Our brokenness – in this place – a family home. Our faith, our doubt, our death… The irruption – death, doubt, fear – within our precious scenes and our most intimate places. Our domesticity. His Grace speaks from the chair, as is a bishop’s prerogative, and says: ‘So much is obscure in the Gospels. We’re always reaching through them. We’re never there. Really, we never are. Our knowledge, our understanding, of the Gospels is never complete, and with each reading comes a new revelation. There are always new riches there. Just as there are between all of us, between myself and you. The Gospels are living texts. This is a part of the conversation we have with our own Christianity. It is a part of who we are in our relationship with Jesus. We are in this sense always on the brink. ‘So yes, there is plenty that doesn’t seem to make sense. As one of the order of bishops, we would be lying if we said that weren’t the case. They are not easy texts to encounter, if by that word we may signify something more than a superficial glancing off against, but rather a profound search for the word of God. The Gospels are written by people who had their own ideas, and often didn’t know what had really happened. Luke is quite explicit on this point. His is an investigation, from the explicitly claimed point of view of an historian, rather than that of a first-hand witness, who attempts, so he says, to set out an orderly account, out of the chaos, the sheer muddle, that has been handed down to him. It is possible to imagine Luke researching and composing his account after many years, when there has arisen a desire to know what exactly happened, and this implies a certain call to faith and certain demands of historicity, to historical exactitude. So in these different ways, the people of the first years of Christian faith are in the dark. There is also a decisive need to define the life of Jesus. And people didn’t get Jesus. The whole meaning of Christianity is only now beginning to take root throughout the composition. So much needs to be evangelized. The light shines almost in tentative fashion like that first star, which drew the wise men from the east to our Lord’s cradle. ‘John’s is widely held to be a very late Gospel. There are others who say that John’s Gospel might have been the first to acquire its true shape, because it most fully expresses Jesus, as we know him to be, as members of the Catholic Church. We don’t really know when any of this is being written, but we get a feel in John of a Gospel refined over many years, through a community. So there’s a lot going on there that I’d like you to think about. ‘What I would like to suggest to you is that, while within the Gospels we are often confronted with clues, guesswork, stories that have been handed down through so many people, and so in this sense we might find ourselves to be in the wilderness, this is the very desolate space itself to which we must give ourselves in order to experience Christ’s full redemption in our lives. I suggest it is for God’s glory that we do so. ‘As we become aware of ourselves, in this seminary, we find ourselves in a very secure, comfortable setting, and there are signs of Easter everywhere. Within the very fabric of these buildings, our Lord is risen; our Lord lives. But now this is our Lenten journey, where death enters, where death breaks us. We are to ride into Jerusalem in triumph, and then we are to be utterly broken, all hope gone, our hope extinguished. And really, I suggest to you, it is only by inhabiting this thought, as if we don’t know Easter is there, that our new life can follow, just when we have given up all hope, when every promise that Jesus made to us seems to have been cancelled. ‘And here now we have the story of Lazarus. I should like to suggest to you that we have a very powerful call now. In our very comfortable space, our domesticity, with all this comfort, where so very little might seem to happen each day, so it might seem to you, there is a disturbance within all of this comfort, and that is a disturbance within ourselves, and that is our call to Jesus. I think it is correct to say that our most comfortable places break in the light of Jesus from the inside, in order that we may take the necessary steps to be with Jesus. ‘Faith is not comfortable. I think that we can all receive the message of the rolling away of the rock from the tomb of Lazarus to say something of vital importance to ourselves concerning our openness to God’s love. The rock we roll away can come in all sorts of guises, but we know when we are blocked, and I firmly believe if we are truthful then we know where those blocks might be. ‘Next Sunday, which will be Palm Sunday, we process as it were to Jerusalem, to begin our Holy Week. Now as I speak to you we are on the brink. Even now, I suggest it might be very good for all of us to lay aside what we think we know, to fall apart a little, and so […]
