As we continue our reflection on our Lord’s profound and mystical discourse on the Eucharist, we would do well to consider how important blood was to the contemporary Jewish mind, as some of his more provocative words will be centered around it.
It was seen as the source of life, and not as something unclean in and of itself. Jesus makes the profound, yet shocking declaration that we must partake of his body, and of his blood. For the Jews this was even more shocking because they had the greatest reverence for, even a fear of, blood. It was the source of life and should never be touched. To come in contact with blood was immediately to become ritually unclean. If blood was considered the source of life, then the blood of the Son of God would be acknowledged as the source of everlasting life for all those who would partake of it with faith and Jesus will make this really and actually available to us in such a simple yet ingenious way.
In fact, Jesus is so insistent on having us overcome not only the fear of contact with blood, but the fear of approaching the all-holy God who is making himself tangible for our sakes, that he tells his hearers that if they do not eat his flesh and drink his blood, they will not have life within them. The irony here, in that again, to them blood was the source of life which they dared not touch or consume. Jesus is reversing it in saying that they need to consume his blood to have life… everlasting life …whoever eats me will live because of me. What are we to make of all this?
An elaboration which would do justice to the theological and historical nature of transubstantiation would need to examine and propose everything written in the many books on the subject, but God likes to keep things simple for us and that is why he has even ordained that Eucharistic miracles take place where the transformed host becomes endocardium, flesh (and blood) you only find in the heart. The heavenly message becomes extremely simple and clear: God is giving us his total, unconditional and complete love by giving us his heart in the Eucharist.
When someone says they are giving us their heart… not just sharing it with us, but giving it to us, what does that mean? It means they’re giving us their all—their everything! The total and unconditional love he gives us needs to be experienced, lived and extended to others. It needs to grow and keep growing. In other words, essential to a worthy reception of holy communion is how we conduct our lives before and after Holy Mass. More specifically, what we make happen, more than just what happens to us. How are we proactively living the Eucharist?
This fundamental prerequisite to a worthy reception of the Eucharist is on ample display through the examples of the lives of the two men that make an appearance in the first reading. Both Saul and Ananias are on a spiritual journey of intimacy with the Lord. Saul doesn’t know it yet, but God has seen his heart and his passion however misguided they were, and chose to extend compassion to a staunch persecutor of the early Church. This persecutor however would make such leaps and bounds in his relationship with the Christ he had once thought false, that he gets to a point where he declared very poignantly: “My old self has been crucified with Christ. It is no longer I who live, but Christ lives in me. So I live in this earthly body by trusting in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” Galatians 2:20.
Can you imagine if we were all in this state of mind and at this spiritual level when receiving the preciousness of his presence in the Eucharist? It’s incumbent on each of us to try to get there. Describing the Eucharist, not as the reward of saints, but as the Bread of sinners, the Pope has said that each time we receive the Bread of Life, the Lord comes to give new meaning to our fragilities. Urging the faithful never to refrain from sharing their fragilities with the Lord, he reminds us that His mercy is not afraid of our miseries.
Again, he is veiling himself for a reason, beneath such humble and lowly means… and that is so we can all the more easily approach him without fear, and with great trust in our hearts.
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