483. Sunday after Corpus Christi

Meditations no. 226 (unofficial computer-aided translation)

The Eucharist is the memorial of Christ’s Passion.

As often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the Lord’s death until he comes. Christ’s redeeming Death on the Cross still did not satisfy his desire to save. Our Lord knew that his Sacrifice paid off, once and for all, the debt incurred by mankind’s sin. He knew that God’s justice was more than satisfied. But his love went further still. So that we should always have among us a memorial of this surpassing gift, he left his Body as food for the faithful, and his Blood as our drink, so that we could receive him under the appearances of bread and wine.

The Mass, by our Lord’s express command, makes the one Sacrifice of Calvary present to us till the end of time. One and the same is the victim, one and the same is he who is now offered by the ministry of his priests and who then offered himself on the Cross. Only the all-powerful love of God could have found a way for Christ’s redeeming Sacrifice, consummated many centuries ago on Calvary, to be renewed on the altar every day. The Holy Mass transcends the laws of time and space to bring our Lord’s redeeming Death here to us in all its saving strength, and to apply to us its fruits. The august sacrifice of the altar, then, is no mere empty commemoration of the passion and death of Jesus Christ. It is the same redemptive act which is present here and now; the difference is only in the manner of offering. It was offered with the shedding of real blood on Calvary, and it is offered in an unbloody way on the altar. His body and blood are both really present: now the Eucharistic species under which He is present symbolize the actual separation of His body and blood. Thus the commemorative representation of His death, which actually took place on Calvary, is repeated in every sacrifice of the altar.

However, our Father wrote: I will not surprise anyone if I say that some Catholics have a very poor concept of the Holy Mass. For them it is a purely external rite, if not a mere social convention. This is because our poor hearts are capable of treating the greatest gift of God to man as routine. In the Mass, in this Mass that we are now celebrating, the most Holy Trinity intervenes, I repeat, in a very special way. To respond fully to such great love, we must give ourselves completely, in body and in soul. We hear God, we talk to him, we see him, we taste him. And when words are not enough, we sing, urging our tongue -Pange, lingua! - to proclaim God’s greatness to all mankind.

Responding to our Lord’s self-giving, by preparing properly to receive him.

Unfortunately, there are many Catholics who do not even try to respond to God’s gifts, and especially to Christ’s giving of himself in the Holy Mass. There is a repetition of the Gospel parable, where a king gave a marriage feast for his son, and sent his servants to call those who were invited to the marriage feast; but they would not come. The king’s generosity goes for nothing: the invited guests prefer to go off to their farms, their business, their mean and petty affairs, than to come at the king’s invitation. Then the king said to his servants: “Go therefore to the thoroughfares, and invite to the marriage feast as many as you find.” And those servants went out into the streets and gathered all whom they found, both bad and good; so the wedding hall was filled with guests.

The great marriage feast is a parable of the salvation God offers the world. It is also a parable of the Blessed Eucharist, which is the true renewal of the Sacrifice of the Cross and at the same time a memorial of the Last Supper, where Christ consecrated the bread and wine in a sacramental anticipation of his own death. The altar is the table in the Upper Room; our heavenly Father is our host; the guests are the priest and the faithful; and the food is the Body and Blood of Christ. God the Father invites the whole of mankind to the banquet of the Eucharist, because there are no limits to his Son’s self-giving: By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us.

Jesus Christ’s self-giving, perpetuated in the Eucharist, is absolute. But, as in the great feast in the parable, the guests often reject the summons. I have bought a field, and I must go out and see it; I pray you, have me excused. Jesus’ generosity is answered with coldness and indifference, and not uncommonly with treachery, because many people come to Communion without first having sought forgiveness for their mortal sins in the Sacrament of Penance. So the last part of the parable is repeated again: when the king came in to look at the guests, he saw a man who had no wedding garment; and he said to him, “Friend, how did you get in here without a wedding garment?” And he was speechless.

That man was thrown out of the marriage feast for not putting on the white garment which was given to the guests. What is that wedding garment? asks St Augustine. And he answers: It is this. “The aim of the commandment,” says the Apostle, “is love, based on purity of heart, a good conscience and sincere faith.” That is the wedding garment. Not just any love, because you can often find bad men who love one another. But let true charity be born in you, if it has not been born in you yet; and if it is already in you, feed it, nourish it, so that it grows.

My child, tell our Lord that from now on, every time you celebrate or attend Holy Mass, every time you give or receive Holy Communion, you will do so with great faith, with burning love, as if it were going to be the last time in your life.

Our own self-giving finds its meaning in the Holy Mass.

I shall sing to the Lord for his goodness to me; I shall praise the name of the Most High. Our Lord made a holocaust of himself for love, and this total gift of himself should move us to make our own self-giving a more perfect one. What better time for considering this than the Holy Mass? In the Mass, Jesus offers himself to God day by day through the priest’s hands. Do we truly offer our whole self to the Blessed Trinity with him?

I have always taught you, my very dear daughters and sons, that the root and the centre of our spiritual life is the Holy Sacrifice of the Altar, in which Christ the Priest renews the Sacrifice he offered on Calvary, in adoration, honour, praise and thanksgiving to the Blessed Trinity.

In this way, closely united to Jesus in the Eucharist, we will try to be continually in God’s presence in the middle of the ordinary things that occupy each of us. As we journey on this earth, we will be seeking God at all times, in everything. Having in our souls the same sentiments as Christ had on the Cross, we will make our entire life into one ceaseless act of atonement; it will be a constant petition and a permanent sacrifice on behalf of all mankind. Our Lord will make it instinctive for you, supernaturally instinctive, to purify all your actions, raise them up to the order of grace, and turn them into instruments of apostolate.

Have this mind among yourselves, which was in Christ Jesus, St Paul declared to the Christians at Philippi. And in the words of Pope Pius the Twelfth, this requires all Christians, so far as human power allows, to reproduce in themselves the sentiments that Christ had when he was offering himself in sacrifice … It requires them also to become, as it were, victims; cultivating a spirit of self-denial according to the precepts of the Gospel … It requires us all, in a word, to die mystically with Christ on the Cross, so that we may say with the same Apostle, “With Christ I hang upon the Cross.”

In the Mass we can renew our dedication. That is a very definite way of showing our Lord that our desire to give ourselves to him is as great as when we first bound ourselves to the Work in a commitment of love - or rather, it is greater still. And there, before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, we can examine our conscience slowly, in the light of Christ’s own self-giving, to see whether our dedication to God and to souls is like his: unconditional, hidden, humble, persevering in big things and in little; the dedication of a person in love.

We have to give ourselves totally, once and for all, without reserves. Tell our Lord, Ecce ego, quia vocasti me. (Here I am, for you called me. ) We must burn our boats really and truly, so that there’s no going back.

Let us ask ourselves, in words our Father put on our lips: What is my self-giving like? Have I made any gesture of distaste - have I hurt you, O Lord, my Love, in any way? Self-giving is not the work of a day, a week, a month or a year, but takes a whole lifetime. So we make the resolution now, before Jesus who is presiding over our prayer in the tabernacle, to be watchful so that our self-giving remains young and vibrant; and so that it measures up to the model he gives us in the tabernacle, a model his Mother copied so perfectly.