Sunday Within Octave of Corpus Christi – June 26, 2011
(2nd Sunday after Pentecost)
(Luke 14: 16-24)
Last Thursday was the Feast of Corpus Christi. The term means Body of Christ. This feast was first urged by St. Juliana of Belgium who had a great love of the Eucharist and wanted a feast day for It. The feast was first established by the Bishop of Liége in 1247 and made a universal feast throughout the Church by Pope Urban IV in 1264. In the Gospel reading for that day Jesus says that He is “the bread that came down from Heaven.” and “He that eateth this bread, shall live for ever.” (John 6: 56-59) Jesus, in His life and death, has united all mankind in Himself. He is God and Man and High Priest in the order of Melchizedek. Jesus is the glue of that holy religion that fastens all things to the Creator in the unity of one same act of homage to God, and that is the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. Jesus gave us the miracle of the Eucharist so that we may continue His sacrifice of Himself to his Father forever. Let’s talk about that sacrifice so we can better understand how it is continued in the Church.
God has a right to His creature’s homage – our homage. A king on earth can demand from his subjects that they recognize his sovereignty, that is, his right to rule over everything. The homage that we as subjects give our Lord God implies that whatever rights or property we have come from our Lord. So when we subject ourselves to the Creator we acknowledge Him as the Lord of all things and the author of life. Moreover, if we violate His rules and we deserve death as a punishment, yet we continue to live, then we must acknowledge our guilt and the justice of his punishment because it is only through His mercy that we continue to live.
This is the true notion of sacrifice and it can only be offered to the one true God. It is the acknowledgement of the Creator’s sovereign dominion and of the glory that belongs to Him. It is essential to religion, because religion, whose object is the worship due to God, demands sacrifice. How do we know this? Jesus, Who was without sin, carried on His shoulders all the sins of the world and then offered Himself on our behalf to God His Father. In the Garden of Eden the sacrifice would have been adoration and thanksgiving, and the physical part would have been the fruits of the garden. When man fell, then sacrifice became the only means of making God favorably disposed towards us. Luther and the false reformers excluded sacrifice from religion and took away its very basis.
“It is by sacrifice that God attains the end He had in view by creation, that is, His own glory.” But in order that the universe might offer a homage in keeping with the magnificence of its Creator, what was needed was one leader who would represent all creation in his person, and then offer all of creation along with himself to the Lord God. And this is what God has done for us. He gave us His Son. The homage of the inferior nature of mankind takes to itself the dignity of God in the Person of Jesus Christ, who is both God and Man. He makes the offering, and the honor He pays to His Father then becomes truly worthy of the supreme Majesty of God. From a universe made out of nothing God has joined His Son Jesus with human nature and produced a fruit of infinite worth. Without the Eucharist at the altar our homage is too poor to be offered to God’s Majesty, but when we join it with the sacrifice of His Son, Jesus, it puts on the dignity of Christ Himself.
Many today say that there is no need to attend Mass. They tell us they pray every day privately and that is sufficient. They eventually ignore the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass which contains the very essence of religion. It is by the Sacrifice of the Mass that we understand that our true social life, our family, our jobs, our politics, our economy, is founded upon God. What brings all the parts of society together by bringing them back to their Creator? It is religion. And Sacrifice is the fundamental act of religion. It is Jesus, the God-Man who offered to His Father the perfect sacrifice on Calvary, and just before He did this, He showed us how to continue offering this perfect sacrifice in every true Mass. This is so important to our personal salvation that the Church has ordered us to attend Mass every Sunday.
I want to read a description of the Mass given by St. Justin Martyr. He was born in 100 A.D. At 30 years of age he converted, and died a Martyr at age 65. He writes: “And on the day called Sunday all . . . come together at one place, and the Memories (Gospels) of the Apostles, or the writings of the Prophets, are read. Then when the Reader has ceased he who presides instructs us by word and exhorts us to the imitation of these beautiful things. Then we rise together and pray, and when our prayer is ended, bread and wine mingled with water is brought, and he who presides, with all fervour, offers up prayers and thanksgiving, and the people present say, Amen. And then there is a distribution to each one . . . For not as common bread and common drink do we receive these: but . . . we have been taught, that the food which is consecrated by the prayer of His words, and by which our own flesh and blood . . . is nourished, is the Flesh and Blood of that Jesus Who became Flesh and Blood.” That was the Mass 2,000 years ago. It is the same Mass we have here today in this little chapel, the unbloody re-creation of the sacrifice of our Lord. It is heartbreaking that with the false mass of Paul VI, Rome has thrown away the Body of Christ and the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass and replaced them with a community meal and a plain piece of bread.
How can the piece of bread and cup of wine on the altar become the Body and Blood of Christ?
Doesn’t human reason have a right to find fault with what looks like the wishes of our hearts causing us to fool ourselves? Let us see. Every living being thirsts for happiness and this thirst causes creatures to reach out for all the good that they are capable of. We can be fully happy only if we have all the good we are capable of. We are the only creature on Earth which can conceive of God, and we want to possess Him in His own substance. We want to see His Face, to enjoy life with Him Who alone can satisfy all our desires.
If human reason alone judges this talk of seeing God, of living with God, of a Divine Banquet at Mass at which God Himself is the food we eat, reason says this is our fanciful imagination because there is a deep separation between God and man. What is there in man, who was once nothing, that would induce God to stoop so low as to allow a union between man and God? That is the language of human reason.
But Who was it that made the heart of man so ambitious that no creature on Earth can fill it? A dog can realize all the happiness it is capable of, and a bird and a fish, too. Is man to be the only creature destined to failure because he cannot fulfill his highest ambition? That is not reasonable. “God is love,” St. John tells us, and love is a knot that human reason cannot untie. Human reason cannot solve the problem of man’s desire for the Infinite. The wonder in all this is not our longing for God, but that God should have loved us first, for we at one time were nothing. At the Eucharist here this morning we join Christ in His continuing perfect sacrifice to God, and He makes His abode in us. God is love and love must have union. It is union that makes the one like the other. That is our happiness. +++
We Celebrate the Tridentine Latin Mass
No comments:
Post a Comment