As we celebrate the great Solemnity of Corpus Christi this Sunday, we are also beginning the three-year Eucharistic Revival, a national effort to invite, inspire, catechize, and renew our people in our love for the Lord in the Eucharist, to understand and believe more profoundly in the meaning and purpose of the Mass, to realize anew the depths of Christ’s love for us in the Blessed Sacrament.
You will be hearing and seeing much about the Eucharist in these ensuing years.
What Mass is
The Mass is truly God’s way of being with us, whereby we enter into the death and resurrection of Christ, hear His Word, and receive the Body of the Lord.
There is no greater intimacy between us and God than when we are drawn into the Eucharistic life, than when we are in absolute spiritual communion with our Savior and Redeemer.
We can never forget that, on the last night of His earthly life, hours before He was betrayed, arrested, tortured, and killed, Jesus was not thinking of Himself; He was thinking of us!
The Lord wanted to provide all believers until the end of the world, the most intimate, efficacious, and personal way that He could remain in a loving and absolute union with us. The Eucharist was born from the Sacred Heart of the Lord on that Holy Thursday night as the highest and greatest expression of His overwhelming desire to love, heal, and save us through the abiding Real Presence we encounter in the Mass.
The Mass is our foretaste and participation in the life of Heaven!
When people ask me what I think Heaven will be like, I reply that it will be a lot like going to Mass.
If they are not enthused about the Eucharist, they are also not enthused with my answer, but the moment gives me a chance to explain.
What do we do at Mass? We worship and praise the Lord in thanksgiving for the inestimable gift of salvation in Christ Jesus; we are bound in a communion of love with each other and the saints; the Lord feeds us at the Paschal Feast of the Lamb.
What will we do perpetually and perfectly in Heaven? We will worship and praise God; we will enjoy the Communion of the Saints; we will be seated at the banquet of the Lamb in the Kingdom of God.
Mass prepares us in a disciplined way to embrace the life of Heaven so that we will be ready to enter the wedding feast, dressed in our Baptismal garment and ready to love the Lord for eternity because we have already loved and worshiped Him here on earth in the Eucharist.
Despite every accusation of cannibalism, idolatry, and superstition, the Catholic Church has clung tenaciously to the faith conviction that Jesus meant what He said in John Chapter 6 when He proclaimed that we must eat His Flesh and drink His Blood if we desired to have His divine life within us.
Jesus is the Bread of Life, who feeds us on our pilgrim way to the Father’s house, as assuredly as God fed the Israelites in the desert on their journey to the Promised Land.
The beauty of our churches, the mystical pull of the liturgy, the statues of saints, the prayerfulness of the music, the pungency of incense, and the colorful power of vestments all point us to the mystery of God made present in the fullness of the Mass and the Eucharist.
The Eucharist as sacrifice
A fundamental aspect of the Eucharist is sacrifice; we share in the complete self-giving of the Son to the Father through His death on the cross and His resurrection from the tomb every time we prayerfully participate in the Mass. We continually thank God for this precious gift of salvation offered to us in Christ.
Another component of this sacrifice is our contribution. We spiritually bring to the altar our gifts — our work, suffering, prayer, love, forgiveness, and even our failings symbolized in the bread and wine, and unite our efforts to love and serve God with the Eucharistic sacrifice of Jesus.
This truth is clarified in the prayer of the priest after the Preparation of the Gifts, “Pray, brothers and sisters, that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God, the Almighty Father.”
The offering of the gifts is not only the priest’s sacrifice; it comes from all of us and the priest offers it on our behalf.
Most Catholics do not seem aware of their important role in the offering of the sacrifice of the Mass.
When someone complains that they get nothing out of going to church, I always ask them what did they bring?
The Eucharist, of course, is profoundly about receiving — accepting the Lord’s mercy, listening to the Word of God, and consuming the Body of Christ, but it is also about us offering ourselves to the Lord — acknowledging our sins, making our petitions, placing our gifts on the altar, lifting up our hearts.
If I simply view the Mass as spiritual entertainment or a weekly morale boost, I will be left wanting many times.
If I properly understand the meaning of the Eucharistic sacrifice, I will always have something to bring to the Lord, and therefore, will always receive an abundance in return from the Lord of the feast.
These years of the national Eucharistic Revival represent a precious and opportune time of grace to renew our love for the Lord in the Mass and in His Real Presence, and to invite others to the great feast of our salvation in Christ.