404. Twenty-seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time (B)

Meditations no. 611 (unofficial computer-aided translation)

The Sacrifice of the Cross is the greatest manifestation of God’s love for men.

IN THIS Sunday’s second reading, it is proclaimed that we see Jesus crowned with glory and honor because of his death. Our Savior had announced: I must be baptized with baptism, and how anxious I am until it takes place! His whole existence on earth revolves around this hour, my hour, as he liked to call it. This fire, this desire to fulfill the saving decree of God the Father, fills the whole life of Christ, from his very birth in Bethlehem. Throughout the three years that the disciples lived with him, they heard him tirelessly repeat that his food is to do the will of the One who sends him (cf. Jn 4:34). Until, in the middle of the afternoon of the first Good Friday, his immolation was concluded. Bowing his head, he gave up his spirit (Jn 19:30). With these words the Apostle John describes the death of Christ: Jesus, under the weight of the Cross with all the faults of men, dies by the force and vileness of our sins.

The Sacrifice of Calvary is the greatest manifestation of Christ’s love for the Father. “Jesus, though subjected to a terrible trial, does not flee before his hour.” What shall I say? Father, deliver me from this hour! But I have come to this hour for this!” (Jn 12:27). He wants the disciples to accompany him, and yet he must experience loneliness and abandonment. The agony of Gethsemane was the introduction to the agony of the Cross on Good Friday. The holy hour, the hour of the redemption of the world.”

Christ’s Sacrifice is also the most eloquent and moving expression of his love for men. “When Jesus speaks in his parables of the shepherd who goes after the lost sheep, of the woman who seeks the drachma, of the father who goes out to meet the prodigal son and embraces him, it is not just a matter of mere words, but is the explanation of his own being and action. In his death on the Cross this turning of God against himself is realized, in giving himself to give new life to man and to save him: this is love in its most radical form. To look at the pierced side of Christ, of which John speaks (cf. 19:37), helps us to understand (…) [that]”God is love” (1 Jn 4:8). It is there, on the Cross, that this truth can be contemplated. And from there, Benedict XVI writes, we must now define what love is. And from this gaze, the Christian finds the orientation of his life and his love.”

Our faith and hope are based on this extraordinary manifestation of love. Even if we sometimes fall short of the mission that God has entrusted to us, even if we offend him, we can and must always look confidently to the Cross, which is the clearest sign of God’s unconditional love for all men.

Thinking of Christ’s death translates into an invitation to place ourselves with absolute sincerity before our ordinary work, to take seriously the faith we profess. … It must be an opportunity to deepen the depth of God’s Love, so that we can show it to men by word and deed.

Let us draw near, in short, to the dead Jesus, to that Cross that stands on the summit of Golgotha. But let us approach it with sincerity, knowing how to find that interior recollection which is a sign of Christian maturity. The divine and human events of the Passion will thus penetrate the soul, as the word that God addresses to us, to reveal the secrets of our hearts and reveal to us what He expects of our lives.

The Eucharistic celebration, because it is a sacramental actualization of Christ’s Sacrifice, gives God the glory that is due to him.

“MYSTERIUM fidei! - Mystery of faith! When the priest pronounces or sings these words, those present acclaim:”We proclaim your death, we proclaim your resurrection, come, Lord Jesus!” With these or similar words, the Church, while referring to Christ in the mystery of his Passion, also reveals her own mystery: “Ecclesia de Eucharist”. If with the gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost the Church is born and sets out on the roads of the world, a decisive moment in her formation is certainly the institution of the Eucharist in the Upper Room. Its foundation and its depth is the whole Triduum Paschale, but this is as it were included, anticipated and “concentrated” forever in the Eucharistic gift. In this gift, Jesus Christ gave the Church the perennial actualization of the paschal mystery. With it he instituted a mysterious ‘contemporaneity’ between that Triduum and the passage of all the centuries.”

The Sacrifice of the altar and that of the Cross are the same and only sacrifice. Although they may seem to be moments separated in time, in the Holy Mass the Lord’s loving gift to the Father is present, actual, in an unbloody way. The ordained minister represents Christ the Priest, acts in persona Christi; and the faithful, thanks to the common priesthood, join in the celebration.

But it is Christ himself, at every Mass, who offers himself by manifesting his loving gift to the heavenly Father, now expressed by the twofold consecration of bread and wine. This is the culminating moment-the nucleus-of the Holy Mass.

“What is happening? Pope Benedict XVI asked in a homily.”How can Jesus distribute 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 a love that gives itself totally. This is the substantial transformation that took place in the Upper Room and that was destined to bring about a process of transformations whose ultimate goal is the transformation of the world until God is all in all (cf. 1 Cor 15:28). All men have always hoped in their hearts, in some way, for a change, a transformation of the world. This is now the central act of transformation capable of truly renewing the world: violence is transformed into love and, therefore, death into life. And since this act turns death into love, death as such is already, from within, overcome; in it the resurrection is already present. Death has been, so to speak, deeply wounded, so much so that, from now on, it cannot be the last word.

“This is, to use an image well known to us, nuclear fission carried out in the innermost depths of being; the victory of love over hate, the victory of love over death. Only this intimate explosion of good that conquers evil can then bring about the chain of transformations that will gradually change the world. All other changes are superficial and do not save. This is why we speak of redemption: what was necessary from the depths of our hearts has happened, and we can enter into this dynamism. Jesus can distribute his Body, because he truly gives himself.

“This first fundamental transformation of violence into love, of death into life, brings with it the other transformations. Bread and wine become his Body and Blood. At this point the transformation cannot stop, but it is here that it must begin fully. The Body and Blood of Christ are given to us so that we too may be transformed. We ourselves must become the Body of Christ, his blood relatives. We all eat the one bread, and this means that among us we become one. Adoration, as we have said, thus becomes union. God is not only in front of us, as the totally Other. He is within us, and we are in him. His dynamic penetrates us and from us he wants to spread to others and to spread to the whole world, so that his love may truly be the dominant measure of the world.”

The celebration of the sacramental sacrifice of the Body and Blood of the Lord is, in the words of our Father, the most sacred and transcendent action that men, by the grace of God, can carry out in this life: to receive communion with the Body and Blood of the Lord is, in a certain sense, like detaching ourselves from our bonds of earth and time, in order to be with God in Heaven, where Christ himself will wipe the tears from our eyes and where there will be no death, no weeping, no crying of fatigue, because the old world will have already ended (cf. Rev 21:4).

Only in the Eucharist do we give to God the Father the glory that Christ gives him and that men cannot, do not know, do not want to give him. This is expressed liturgically when the priest, taking the paten with the Body of the Lord and the chalice with his Blood, lifts them up, as Christ was lifted up on the Cross, and says: Through Christ, with Him and in Him, to you, God the Father Almighty, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all honor and all glory forever and ever.

Infinite reparation is also offered to God in Holy Mass.

THE SACRIFICE of the Altar also has an expiatory dimension, because in it is offered to the Father the Victim by whose immolation you wished to restore your friendship to us. This does not mean that it is not necessary to do penance and offer sacrifices in reparation for sins, but that this expiation is pleasing to God united to the Holy Mass, for only through Him, with Him, and in Him, is an unblemished sacrifice offered to the Father from which the sun rises until sunset.

The Holy Mass is the praise and perfect reparation that Christ, with and through the Holy Spirit, makes to God the Father in the name of all humanity, even for those who do not love him. When the spectacle of the presence of evil in society, the family, business, politics … can cause discouragement and sadness, let us remember that a Mass gives God the glory that many deny Him and superabundantly repairs the damage that sin does to the Mystical Body of Christ. He is the scapegoat for our sins; and not only for ours, but for those of the whole world. The Holy Mass makes up for our deficiencies and those of others.

Our Father wanted us to make our day and our life a Mass, and this implies a sustained effort to forget selfish comfort and give ourselves like Christ to others. Strive to make the Holy Sacrifice of the Altar the center and root of your interior life, so that the whole day becomes an act of worship-an extension of the Mass you have heard and preparation for the next-that overflows into ejaculations, visits to the Blessed Sacrament, the offering of your professional work and your family life… .

With Holy Communion, the Christian lives the most important moment of the day: God close to his heart, alone with Jesus Christ! My children, the Lord is now going to come to your hearts. Already in the morning I like to make - and you do - an act of clear, explicit faith: Lord, I believe that it is You, hidden in the bread. I believe that you are Jesus of Nazareth, the one at the wedding feast at Cana, the one who healed lepers, the one who raised the dead, the one who suffered the Passion and died on the cross, the one who rose on the third day. I know that you are there, really, truly and substantially present, with your Body, with your Blood, with your Soul and with your Divinity.

It is good that we begin like this. Then each one of you will give his thanksgiving. I tell him that I do not know how he came to this dunghill of my heart. Once again he wanted to humble himself. It was a great humiliation to take the flesh of a servant, but to come here (…). Treat him as you wish, but treat him well! (… ).

Invoke Our Lady, his Mother and our Mother. Invoke the Patriarch St. Joseph. We are already in the family; we are already in the intimacy of the home; we can now talk about what we want: each one of us, about our own; we are all about what is ours, because we are an immense family, with so many spiritual and material needs, all directed - those needs and those efforts - to give him glory, to extend his reign in the world.