Readings:
• Ex 24:3-8
• Psa 116:12-13, 15-16, 17-18
• Heb 9:11-15
• Mk 14:12-16, 22-26
Over the years I’ve written several times about the centrality of the Eucharist in the decision made by my wife and I when we decided to become Catholic. Our recognition, by God’s grace, of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ in the Blessed Sacrament was not sudden; I would be hard-pressed to think of an exact moment when I realized, “The Eucharist really is Jesus!”
Rather, it was a long and rather steady process.
Reflecting on it these many years later—we entered the Church in 1997—I liken it to the gradual and mysterious recognition of my love for the woman who has now been my wife for 21 years this week. There was, of course, the initial spark of attraction, followed by the sort of relational dance—awkward, exciting, confusing—that many couples go through as they embark on a courtship. There were conversations, questions, and time spent thinking about each other. And when it finally dawned on us that we did, in fact, love each other, it was as though the wonderful fact had been staring us in the face for many weeks and months before we “got it”!
My recognition of the Eucharist was set in motion when I was a young boy, a Fundamentalist who knew nothing about the Eucharist or the Catholic Church. But I was taught to love Jesus and the Bible. And who better to bring me to the Catholic Church than the Incarnate Word who founded the Church and the written Word of God gifted to the Church by the Holy Spirit? While growing up I read and heard many of the key stories in the Old Testament, including that of Moses leading the people out of Egypt and being given the Law at Mount Sinai. I was familiar with the “blood of the covenant”, and the establishment of animal sacrifices for the forgiveness of sins.
Later, while in Bible college as a young Evangelical, I came to see more clearly how Jesus is the new Moses, sent by God to save his people from slavery to sin, and that as author of the Law, Jesus was able to perfectly fulfill the Law (see Mt 5:17-18). One of my final classes (bearing the clinical-sounding name “Bible Synthesis”) explored both the continuity and differences between the Old and New Covenants. We learned that while Moses was the direct mediator between God and the people, able to speak directly to God and to relay “all the words and ordinances of the LORD,” Jesus is the perfect, final and everlasting mediator between God and all men. Moses was able, as God’s mediator and prophet, to play a vital role in God’s plan of salvation, overseeing the establishment of the covenant at Sinai. But it was only Christ, fully divine and fully human, who could establish a new and eternal covenant through his life, Passion, death, and Resurrection.
As the Epistle to the Hebrews relates with profound theological insight, Christ’s priesthood does not involve the sacrifice of animals in the Temple, but offering himself—the new Temple—as the perfect, unblemished sacrifice. He is the Lamb of God whose body was broken and whose blood was shed on the Cross. Risen from the grave and seated in glory, he now offers his flesh and blood, soul, and divinity, in the Eucharist.
Scripture, then, was essential in my education in the Eucharist. But I also had to sit at the feet of the Church, listening to her supernatural wisdom. If the Church is the mystical body of Christ, as I was also seeing, then the Church is able to instruct about the Body and Blood of her head, Jesus Christ. The saints, doctors, and teaching office of the Church gave witness.
“For in the figure of bread His Body is given to you,” stated St. Cyril of Jerusalem, “and in the figure of wine His Blood, that by partaking of the Body and Blood of Christ you may become the same body and blood with him.”
(This “Opening the Word” column originally appeared in the June 10, 2012 edition of Our Sunday Visitor newspaper.)
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Thank you for coming home. A witness and good story to share. God bless
The story of a wonderful journey in grace. Thank you.
Christians need to be given a greater understanding of the meaning of the New Covenant, that was introduced by Jeremiah at Jer 31.31-34. And the egregious mistranslation of the Greek word “naos,” that means “sanctuary,” (and not “temple”), needs to be clarified and corrected in modern Bibles. Christ was sanctified. His body is a sanctuary. Hid blood represents the New Covenant (Lk 22.20).
For me, one of the greatest foundations of the Eucharist as the true presence of the body and blood of Christ is Chapter 6 of John’s Gospel, ‘the bread of life discourse.’ In this chapter Jesus repeats five times that “unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood, you have no life in you.” We also read in this same chapter that many of his disciples, after hearing this, “returned to their former way of life and no longer accompanied him”. If Jesus only meant this symbolically, as a prophet and minister of the truth, he would have had to call them back by indicating the symbolic nature of his declaration. Note that Jesus even asked the Apostles “do you also want to leave.” Peter, in all his wisdom, answered, “Master to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”
Moses took half of the blood and put it in large bowls; the other half he splashed on the altar. Then he took the blood and sprinkled it on the people, saying this is the blood of the covenant. Today this excerpt from the breviary for the office of readings was repeated in the first reading during the Mass of Corpus Christi. This occurs only in the B cycle every three years.
Blood, the pouring out of the blood of young bulls as a peace offering we know prefigured the pouring out of Christ’s blood from the cross as a peace offering on our behalf. Christ, the unmarred victim offered as a fragrant oblation to the Father. All the blood sacrifices of the old testament are fulfilled in the pouring out of the divine victim’s life’s blood that we might be forgiven. The condition in the reading by Moses from the book of the covenant, to which the people answered, Everything that the Lord has said, we will heed and do. That is to say, to follow the prescription as prescribed by the divine doctor for our recovery from the deadly disease of sin.
Sin can only be redeemed by the shedding of blood because it is in deadly opposition to life itself, who is Christ as revealed to Martha at the death of Lazarus. Blood in this greatest of all miracles is life in the fullest sense. Saint Thomas Aquinas in the second breviary office of readings today speaks first of the blood that achieves our reconciliation with the Father, and that “so great a gift would abide with us forever, he left his body as food and his blood as drink for the faithful to consume. O precious and wonderful banquet, that brings us salvation and contains all sweetness! No one can fully express the sweetness of this sacrament, in which spiritual delight is tasted at its very source” (excerpted from Opusculum 57 in festo Corporis Christi in the breviary).
Aquinas teaches us of the permanence of our sensual nature perfected spiritually through this greatest of sacraments, the foretaste of our seeing God face to face in the beatific vision. When our human nature will be transformed into the likeness of the very source in which we find the most exstatic love.
On “the continuity and differences between the Old and New Covenants”…
While there is a kind of continuity, to help us begin to “get” the reality of the Holy Eucharist, there is also (the discontinuity of) something entirely new… Yes, the Old Testament covenant was a bit more than a standard contract, as between God and the Chosen People. The spilling of the blood on both the altar and on the people established a kind of kinship with God. Splashed with the very same blood. Not only a contract, but a chosen family…
But the New Covenant is more than the most recent and final update. By the Eucharist we are actually incorporated into the divine life of Jesus Christ as the Second Person of the Triune One. So, more than the Old Testament kinship even, but instead, to be actually gifted sacramentally into the very divine life. No longer only an annual cleansing or, today, only a shared memorial, but the very continuation and extension (!) of the once-and-for-all-time self-donation by Christ on Calvary.
Benedict/Ratzinger notes this difference:
“…the Old Testament is described, not by the word ‘communion,’ but by the word covenant (berith). This terminology guarantees that God, who alone can establish the relation of his creature to himself, remains exalted; this term includes the distance that is maintained in the relationship. Some exegetes, on account of this, hold it to be wrong to translate berith with ‘covenant,’ because this word presupposes a certain equality between the partners in the ‘covenant’ that can never be, according to the Old Testament view, in the relationship between God and man [….] the Old Testament knows nothing of any ‘communion’ (chaburah) between God and man; the New Testament is this communion, in and through the person of the incarnate Jesus Christ” (Ratzinger, Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith, San Francisco, 2005, p. 74.)