323. Eighteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time (B)

Meditations no. 593 (unofficial computer-aided translation)

Seek and love Christ.

YOU ARE who you are: the Supreme Goodness. I am who I am: the last dirty laundry of this rotten world. And yet you look at me …, and you seek me …, and you love me. Lord, may my children look upon you, and seek you, and love you. Lord, may I seek you, may I look at you, may I love you.

These words of our Father, taken from his prayer aloud on the eve of his golden jubilee as a priest, move us and stimulate our faith and humility. They will always lead us to look, seek and love the Lord. Now, at this moment, we reiterate the act of faith that they contain: you look at me … , and you seek me … , and you love me. And we are grateful that Jesus, in a very special way from the Tabernacle, is always attentive to us. Surely, we will be more attentive to him if we truly consider ourselves the last dirty laundry of this rotten world.

Our Father saw himself like this and is a saint raised to the altars. Surely he considered himself that way, precisely because he was a person who refined his love for God every day, while at the same time grasping in a very vivid way the great tenderness with which the Lord looks at us. Let us now pray to St. Josemaría to exercise his prayer on behalf of his children: Lord, may my children look upon you, and seek you, and love you. These considerations may well lead our personal prayer to the central point to which this Sunday’s liturgy leads us, the Most Holy Eucharist.

My God, come and deliver me; Lord, make haste to help me! (… ). You are my help and my Saviour: Lord, do not delay! We ask for this encouragement to live more intensely, like our Father, the love of Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament. We entrust ourselves anew to our Guardian Angel so that the Word of God and the sacramental presence of Jesus Christ may penetrate our souls with force.

The first reading, taken from the Book of Exodus, reminds us of the complaint of the people of Israel in the desert, for a petty reason: forgetting God’s mercies towards them, they regret not having at hand the pots of meat and bread that they ate in Egypt until they were satisfied. This behavior of the chosen people can remind us of our small or great forgetfulness of what God grants us daily, perhaps because of the lack of humility of which we spoke earlier: at the basis of vocation are the knowledge of our misery, the awareness that the lights that illuminate the soul - faith - the love with which we love - charity - and the desire by which we are sustained - hope - are free gifts of God. For this reason, not growing in humility means losing sight of the goal of divine election: ut essemus sancti, personal holiness. Without humility, the wonders of God are not seen. And we desire to treat the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament better, who is prefigured in the manna: thus you will know that I am the Lord, your God, says Yahweh to Moses. We ask the Most Holy Trinity for that humility necessary to know our God better.

Preparation to deal with the Lord in the Blessed Sacrament.

IN THE passage from the Epistle to the Ephesians, St. Paul exhorts us to abandon the old man’s old ways, which are corrupted according to his seductive concupiscence, in order to renew yourselves in the spirit of your minds and to put on the new man, who has been created according to God in righteousness and true holiness. We need this change, which we ask of the Lord, in order to treat Christ well in the Eucharist, as St. Josemaría asked in the words of a holy bishop: “Treat me well, treat me well!” And our Father added: Lord, if only I could have a voice and authority to cry out in this way to the ear and heart of many Christians, of many! Let us examine and with it will come contrition and resolutions, the struggle to put off the old man with the help of grace. We must pray for the lights of the Holy Spirit in order to discover aspects that we must correct in order to truly clothe ourselves with the new man, with the Christ who must be seen in each one of us.

Therefore, I say to you and testify to this in the Lord: that you no longer live like the Gentiles, in their vain thoughts. We have learned from our Father many ways of being with the Lord in the Eucharist: the time of the night, the immediate prayer before Holy Mass whenever possible, spiritual communions, visits to the Blessed Sacrament, the Norms of piety preferably fulfilled next to the Tabernacle, the help of the Virgin, the urbanity of piety to genuflect that is, inside and out, a true act of adoration, of recognition of the majesty of God, of willing submission to his Most Holy Will. All liturgical ceremonies are aimed at having a trusting, warm treatment, full of love for Christ hidden out of love in the sacramental species: to union with God. Do we try to imitate our Father in his love for the Eucharist? Do we go to the angelic spirits who take care of the adorable garment of the Holy Eucharist?

By faith in the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, we Christians are “happier than the saints of the Old Testament; not only do we possess God by the greatness of his immensity, by virtue of which he is everywhere, but we have him with us as he was in Mary’s womb for nine months, as he was on the Cross.” “More fortunate,” said the holy Curé of Ars, “than those who lived while he was in this world, when he dwelt only in one place, when they had to walk a few hours to have the joy of seeing him. Today we have him with us in every place on earth, and so it will be as he promised us-until the end of the world.”

Since the theme of our prayer is the theme of our life - as our holy Founder taught us –, this is a good time to ask ourselves how we take advantage of the means at our disposal to put on Christ, so that our Father will not have to address to us that affectionate reproach: Son, where is the Christ whom souls seek in you? We reiterate our request to the Holy Spirit to enlighten our consciences, in order to rectify and improve our Eucharistic life, which undoubtedly relates to our entire existence.

Transformative capacity of the Mass.

ONCE AGAIN, we find multitudes following Jesus. Each one of us is there. Christ takes the opportunity of the recent multiplication of the loaves and fishes to urge them to work not for the food that is consumed, but for the food that endures to eternal life, that which the Son of God will give you.

Man. This is how the discourse of the Bread of Life begins. Little by little, the Lord leads them to the ground he desires, until he makes them feel the need to ask for that Bread forever. Undoubtedly, they were still thinking about the multiplication of the loaves with which they were satisfied. But Jesus answered them: I am the Bread of Life: whoever comes to me will not hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst. It is clear that they did not understand why, from that moment on, many abandoned him. We give thanks, because in those words he left us clear proof of the true nature of the Eucharist. Jesus Christ, perfect God and perfect Man, does not leave a symbol, but reality: he remains himself. He will go to the Father, but he will remain with men.

Christ works a marvel for us. In the Sacrifice of Calvary, the Lord offered to God the Father, at the promptings of the Holy Spirit, the sacrifice of his body and blood, sacramentally anticipated at the Last Supper: “What is happening?” asked Benedict XVI in the first moments of his pontificate, expounding this doctrine. And he continued: “How can Jesus share his Body and Blood? Making bread his Body and wine his Blood, he anticipates his death, accepts it in his innermost depths and transforms it into an act of love. What from the outside is brutal violence - the crucifixion - from the inside is transformed into an act of love that gives itself totally. This is the substantial transformation that he brought about in the Upper Room and which was destined to bring about a process of transformations, the ultimate goal of which is the transformation of the world until God is all in all (cf. 1 Cor 15:28)”.

We understand these words very well, which are an explanation of what our Father engraved on our hearts: the Mass is the center and root of the spiritual life of the Christian. The whole Trinity is present in the sacrifice of the altar. By the will of the Father, with the cooperation of the Holy Spirit, the Son offers himself in redemptive oblation. Let us learn to treat the Most Blessed Trinity, the Triune God: three divine Persons in the unity of their substance, of their love, of their efficacious sanctifying action.

With the Holy Trinity, we must change indifference into love, resentment into peace, pride into humility. … In the Mass we become consanguineous with Christ, we participate in his supernatural power to change people and the world, to place everything at the feet of the Crucified One, who draws everyone to himself. It is very clear what our Father preached: all the works of men are done as on an altar, and each one of you, in that union of contemplative souls that is your day, says in some way submissively, that it lasts twenty-four hours, waiting for the next Mass, which will last another twenty-four hours, and so on until the end of our lives.

If we want to treat the Lord much and better, let us turn to the Virgin, the Eucharistic Woman, as John Paul II called her. In this way, we will open ourselves more to grace, and the effectiveness of the Sacrifice of the Mass will change us from within. And in this way, well into the circulatory stream of society, we will be able to build a better, more human, more God-like world. It is an enormous task, but we have the help of those who, at the foot of the Cross, “suffering deeply with her Only-Begotten Son and associating herself with his sacrifice with the wombs of a mother”, collaborated like no other creature in the redemption of the human race.

“She acted with complete attention to the gestures and words of her Son, without losing any detail of his gaze full of peace and overflowing with sadness; of his laborious but devoted breathing; of his eagerness to suffer as only He Who is God and Man can fulfill it; of his thirst for souls. This attitude must inspire our behavior during the Eucharistic celebration, and not only at the Consecration: everything in the Mass refers to the Sacrifice of Calvary. Let us ask Mary, Eucharistic Woman, to make us women and men full of love for the Holy Sacrifice of the Altar.”