THE EUCHARIST AND EVANGELISATION
We know that
the Eucharist is the fulfilment of Jesus’ promise in Matthew 28 that He would
be with us “until the end of the world.” And certainly, the presence of Jesus
by itself is consoling beyond measure to those who believe in Him. The
Eucharist, however, is not
only about Our Lord’s presence but also
about His action. As St. John Paul II wrote in his encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia:
The Church has received the Eucharist from Christ
her Lord not as one gift – however precious – among so many others, but
as the gift par excellence, for it is the gift of himself, of his
person in his sacred humanity, as well as the gift of his saving work.
Jesus makes
Himself present in the Eucharist, and He continues His
saving and life-giving work in the Eucharist. His sacrifice
becomes sacramentally present at every Mass. He allows Himself to be
handled and distributed by the Church’s priests and other ministers so that His
faithful might receive Him. Once received, He works on us from
within, transforming us and drawing us into closer intimacy with Himself. And
even as we adore Him, when He seems most passive, He is silently active,
drawing our hearts to Himself and teaching us the wisdom of God.
The work of
Jesus—His self-giving for the life of the world—is to become our work as
well. The French Bishop Dominique Rey once wrote in a book about the
Eucharist and evangelization, “Prayer commits us to radicalizing our
relationship with Christ.” Bishop Rey added, “Eucharistic Adoration is a school
of fervour. In contemplating the Eucharistic Jesus, given so that the
world might have life, we are invited to give our own life in return, to Christ
and to our brothers.”
Jesus gives His
flesh for the life of the world, and we are to give our flesh for the life of
the world. We can trace the saying “a pound of flesh” back
to Shakespeare’s The Merchant of
Venice (4:1), in which the lender Shylock insists
upon receiving the pound of flesh promised him in payment for a
loan made to Antonio. Portia, advocating for Antonio, responds
that Shylock may have it but without an ounce of blood, since
blood had not been promised. So Portia outwits
Shylock by making the payment impossible. In this story, the
demands of a sinful world meet with a correspondingly shrewd
response. In the story of our salvation, Jesus pays the price of our redemption
with both His flesh and His blood, and He calls us to imitate
His self-emptying love.
It goes without
saying that our imitation is not easy. And we are all-too-aware these days
of the destruction wrought by our failure to love. The sex abuse crisis is very
much rooted in a self-centred distortion of love, one which is so extreme
that those who give in to it would even destroy another person’s
life in order to satisfy the corrupt desires of the flesh. That is
the very opposite of Christ’s sacrifice of His flesh “for the life of the
world.”
Yes, living
Christ’s love is difficult. It requires that we suffer with
perseverance. There are many crosses to bear in this life, many situations
we find especially trying, whether we are tried spiritually,
psychologically, physically, or in any other way. But one lesson we can all
draw from this shameful chapter in the history of the Church here in the United
States is that the love of Christ is the only true love, the only love that can
save us.
Also,
our moments of suffering in love are times when the Eucharistic
Jesus can reveal to us, if we let Him, that His “yoke is easy and (His) burden
light” (Matthew 11:30). Jesus comes to us every time
we celebrate Holy Mass and gives us strength through our union
with Him. We also draw close to each other every day,
the distances between us melting away in the mystical nearness
that happens when we all draw close to the Eucharistic Lord. In the
Eucharist we are equipped by God to do the saving work of Jesus, to love
what frail nature often loathes, and to lay down our
lives in sacrifice not in some hypothetical future, but in whatever “here and
now” we find ourselves.
We may feel
alone during difficult times, but every time we see the Blessed Sacrament, we
remember that we are never alone. In the Incarnation God has come to live with
us, and He is never going away. By making His flesh and blood
sacramentally present to us, Jesus makes good on His promise to remain with us
always.
The fulfilment
of Christ’s promise is a tremendous consolation to us, but
here we also have a challenge. “Without cost you have received;
without cost you are to give,” Jesus says in Matthew 10:8. In Luke 6:38, He
says, “Give and gifts will be given to you; a good measure, packed together,
shaken down, and overflowing, will be poured into your lap. For the measure
with which you measure will in return be measured out to you.” We are not mere
consumers at a kind of heavenly Walmart. We receive the consolation of Jesus in
large part so that we will be ready to share His consolation, to
bring the presence and love of Christ to everyone we meet.
There was a
spate of ecclesiastical documents on the Holy Eucharist in the
early-to-middle years of the last decade, which in some ways culminated in
the 2007 Post-Synodal Apostolic Exhortation of Pope Benedict XVI,
entitled Sacramentum Caritatis, the
“Sacrament of Charity.” The special focus of several of these writings was
on the link between the Eucharist and the mission of the Church, which is to
share Christ and His saving Gospel.
The Eucharist
reveals God’s existence and presence among us. The Eucharist continues the work
of redemption in Jesus Christ. The Eucharist is a model of humility. The
Eucharist is our food for the journey from earth to heaven. The Eucharist is
the fuel of evangelization and the reception of the Eucharist by new members of
the faithful is the summit of that to which evangelization aspires. In all
of this, the Eucharist is the Sacrament of Charity, because “God is love” (1
John 4:8), Jesus is God, and the Eucharist is Jesus here with us. And the
Eucharist is also the Sacrament of Charity because the Sacrament
strengthens us in charity, calling us to join Jesus in giving our flesh,
making a sacrifice of our lives, for the life of the world.
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