I pray that this brings you into a deeper understanding and union with Christ at the Last Supper, that you may prepare your heart and soul for Good Friday. Many people attended Ash Wednesday services and wandered with Jesus through the desert of Lent. Let us now bring ourselves closer to Him in His final days. Many of his disciples were with Him throughout His ministry, but abandoned Him in His final days. Do not be like those disciples, I pray. Meditate on these events. Fast on Good Friday to empty yourself and make room for Him. I promise you, Easter Sunday will be the most fulfilling if you sacrifice and fast in the final days. There can be no celebration of the Resurrection without the celebration of the Death, and there can be no Easter without a Good Friday.
The Last Supper
Some things in life are too beautiful to be forgotten, but there can also be something in death that is too beautiful to be forgotten. Hence a Memorial Day, to recall the sacrifices of soldiers for the preservation of freedom of their country. Freedom is not an heirloom, but a life. Once received, it does not continue to exist without effort, like an old painting. As life must be nourished, defended, and preserved; so freedom must be repurchased in each generation. Soldiers, however, were not born to die; death on a battlefield was an interruption to their summons to live. But unlike all others, Our Blessed Lord came into this world to die. Even at His birth, His Mother was reminded that He came to die. Never before did any mother in the world see death wrap its skeleton arms so quickly about an Infant Birth.
When he was still only an Infant, the old man Simeon looked into the face of Him Who turned back eternity and was made young, and said that He was destined to be a "sign to be contradicted," or a signal that would call out the opposition of the deliberately imperfect. The mother, on hearing that word "contradicted," could almost see Simeon's arms fade and the arms of the Cross take their place to enfold Him in death. Before two years of His life had been lived, King Herod sent out horsemen pounding like thunderbolts, and with swords flashing like lightning, in an attempt to decapitate His Infant Head, not yet strong enough to bear the weight of a crown!
Since Our Divine Lord came to die, it was fitting that there be a Memorial of His death! Since He was God, as well as man, and since He never spoke of His death without speaking of His Resurrection, should He not Himself institute the precise Memorial of His own death and not leave it to the chance recollection of men? And that is exactly what He did the night of the Last Supper. Our Memorial Day was not instituted by soldiers who foresaw their death. But HIs Memorial was instituted, and this is important, not because He would die like a soldier and be buried, but because He would live again after the Resurrection. His Memorial would be the fulfillment of the Law and the prophets; it would be one in which there would be a Lamb sacrificed, not to commemorate political freedom, but spiritual freedom; above all, it would be a Memorial of a New Covenant.
A Covenant or Testament is an agreement or compact or alliance, and in Scripture it means one between God and man. At the Last Supper, Our Lord would speak of the New Testament or Covenant, which is best understood in relation to the Old. The Covenant that God made with Israel as a nation was done through Moses as the mediator. It was sealed with blood, because blood was considered as a sign of life; those who mixed their blood or plunged their hands into the same blood were thought to have a common spirit. In the Covenants between God and Israel, God promised blessings if Israel remained faithful. Among the principal phases of the Old Covenant were the one with Abraham with a guarantee of progeny, the one with David and the promise of kingship, and the one with Moses in which God showed His power and love to Israel by delivering them from bondage to Egypt and promising that Israel would be for Him a kingdom of priests. When the Hebrews were in bondage in Egypt, Moses received instructions for a new rite.
After the plagues, God struck the Egyptians further to prompt the release of His people by smiting the firstborn in each Egyptian house. The Israelites were to save themselves by offering a lamb, then dipping some hyssop in the blood, and marking their doorways with blood. The angel of God seeing the blood would pass by. The Lamb was therefore the Pesach or the Passover of the destroying angel, that is, a "pass" which secured safety. God then ordered its continuation year after year.
This institution of the slain Paschal Lamb mentioned in Exodus was followed by the implementation of the Covenant with Moses in which God made Israel a nation; it was the birth of the Israelites as the chosen people of God. The Covenant was concluded by various sacrifices. Moses erected an altar with twelve pillars. Taking the blood of the sacrifice, he poured one half of it on the altar, and the other half on the twelve tribes and the people with the words:
Here is the blood of the Covenant which the Lord makes with you. Exodus 24:8
By pouring out blood on the altar, which symbolized God or one party to the Covenant, and by sprinkling blood on the twelve tribes and people, which represented the other party, both were made partakers of the same blood and brought into a kind of sacramental union.
This Covenant or Testament with Israel was meant to be perfected through a more complete revelation on the part of God. The prophets later on said that the exile of the Israelites was a punishment because they had broken the Covenant; but as they were restored to the Old Covenant, so would there be a New Covenant or Testament which would include all nations. The Lord speaking through Jeremias told the people:
This is the Covenant I will grant the people of Israel, when that time comes. I will implant My law in their innermost thoughts, engrave it in their hearts. Jeremias 31:33
The Last Supper and the Crucifixion took place during the Passover, when the Eternal Son of the Father mediated a New Testament or Covenant, as the Old Testament or Covenant was mediated through Moses. As Moses ratified the Old Testament with the blood of animals, so Christ now ratified the New Testament with His own Blood, He Who is the true Pascal Lamb.
This is My Blood, of the New Testament. Matthew 26:28
The Hour of His exaltation having come, for within less than twenty-four hours He would surrender Himself, He gathered His twelve Apostles about Him. In one sublime act He interpreted the meaning of His death. He declared that He was marking the beginning of the New Testament or Covenant ratified by His sacrificial death. The whole Mosaic and pre-Messianic system of sacrifice was thus superseded and fulfilled. No created fire came down to devour the life that was offered to the Father, as it did in the Old Testament, for the fire would be the glory of His Resurrection and the flames of Pentecost.
Since His death was the reason of His coming, He now instituted for HIs Apostles and posterity a Memorial Action of HIs Redemption, which He promised when He said that He was the Bread of Life.
He took bread and blessed it and broke it, and gave it to them saying, This is My Body, given for you. Luke 22:19
He did not say, "This represents or symbolizes My Body," but He said, "This is My Body"--a Body that would be broken in His passion.
Then taking wine into His Hands, He said:
Drink, all of you, of this; For this is My Blood of the New Testament, shed for many, to the remission of sins. Matthew 26:28
His coming death on the following afternoon was set before them in a symbolic or unbloody manner. On the Cross, He would die by the separation of His Blood from His Body. Hence He did not consecrate the bread and wine together, but separately, to show forth the manner of His death by the separation of Body and Blood. In this act, Our Lord was what He would be on the Cross the next day: both Priest and Victim. In the Old Testament and among pagans, the victim, such as a goat or a sheep, was apart from the priest who offered it. In this Eucharistic action and on the Cross, He, the Priest, offered Himself; therefore He was also the Victim. Thus would be fulfilled the words of the prophet Malachias:
No corner of the world, from sun's rise to sun's setting, where the renown of Me is not heard among the Gentiles, where sacrifice is not done, and pure offering made in My honor; so revered is My name, says the Lord of Hosts, there among the Gentiles. Malachias 1:11
Next came the Divine command to prolong the Memorial of HIs death:
Do this for a commemoration of Me. Luke 22:19
Repeat! Renew! Prolong through the centuries the sacrifice offered for the sins of the world!
Why did Our Blessed Lord use bread and wine as the elements of this Memorial? First of all, because no two substances in nature better symbolize unity than bread and wine. As bread is made from a multiplicity of grains of wheat, and wine is made from a multiplicity of grapes, so the many who believe are one in Christ. Second, no two substances in nature have to suffer more to become what they are than bread and wine. Wheat has to pass through the rigors of winter, be ground beneath the Calvary of a mill, and then subjected to purging fire before it can become bread. Grapes in their turn must be subjected to the Gethsemane of a wine press and have their life crushed from them to become wine. Thus do they symbolize the Passion and Sufferings of Christ, and the condition of Salvation, for Our Lord said unless we die to ourselves we cannot live in Him. A third reason is that there are no two substance s in nature which have more traditionally nourished man than bread and wine. In brining these elements to the altar, men are equivalently bringing themselves. When bread and wine are taken or consumed, they are changed into man's body and blood. But when He took bread and wine, He changed them into Himself.
But because Our Lord's Memorial was not instituted by His disciples but by Him, and because He could not be conquered by death, but would rise again in newness of life, He willed that as He now looked forward to His redemptive death on the Cross, so all the Christian ages, until the consummation of the world, should look back to the Cross. In order that they would not re-enact the Memorial out of whim or fancy, He gave the command to commemorate and announce His redemptive death until He came again! What He asked His Apostles to do was to set forth in the future this Memorial of His Passion, death and Resurrection. What He did looked forward to the Cross; what they did, and which has continued ever since in the Mass, was to look back to His redemptive death. Thus would they, as St. Paul said, "announce the death of the Lord until He came" to judge the world. He broke the bread to set forth the breaking of His own human Body and also to show that He was a Victim by His own free will. He broke it by voluntary surrender, before the executioners would break it by their voluntary cruelty.
When the Apostles and the Church later on would repeat that Memorial, the Christ, who was born of Mary and suffered under Pontius Pilate, would be glorified in heaven. That Holy Thursday Our Lord had given to them not another sacrifice than His unique Redemptive Act on the Cross; but He gave a new manner of Presence. It would not be a new sacrifice, for there is only one; He gave a new presence of that unique sacrifice. In the Last Supper, Our Lord acted independently of His Apostles in presenting His sacrifice under the appearances of bread and wine. After His Resurrection and Ascension and in obedience to the Divine command, Christ would offer His sacrifice to His Heavenly Father through them or depending on them. Whenever that sacrifice of Christ is memorialized in the Church, there is an application to a new moment in time and a new presence in space of the unique sacrifice of Christ Who is now in glory. In obeying His mandate, His followers would be representing in an unbloody manner that which He presented to His Father in the bloody sacrifice of Calvary.
After changing the bread into His Body and the wine into His Blood:
He gave it to them. Mark 14:22
By that communion they were made one with Crist, to be offered with Him, in Him, and by Him. All love craves unity. As the highest peak of love in the human order is the unity of husband and wife in the flesh, so the highest unity in the Divine order is the unity of the soul and Christ in communion. When the Apostles, and the Church later on, would obey Our Lord's words to renew the Memorial and to eat and drink of Him, the Body and Blood would not be that of the Physical Christ then before them, but that of the glorified Christ in heaven Who continually makes intercession for sinners. The Salvation of the Cross, being sovereign and eternal, is thus applied and actualized in the course of time by the heavenly Christ.
When our Lord, after He changed the bread and wine to His Body and Blood, told His Apostles to eat and drink, He was doing for the soul of man what food and drink do for the body. Unless the plants sacrifice themselves to being plucked up from the roots, they cannot nourish or commune with man. The sacrifice of what is lowest must precede communion with what is higher. First His death was mystically represented; then communion followed. The lower is transformed into the higher; chemicals into plants; plants into animals; chemicals, plants, and animals into man; and man into Christ by communion. The followers of Buddha derive no strength from his life but only from his writings. The writings of Christianity are nota s important as the life of Christ, Who living in glory, now pours forth on His followers the benefits of His sacrifice.
The one note that kept ringing through His life was His death and glory. It was for that that He came primarily. Hence the night before HIs death, He gave to His Apostles something which on dying no one else could ever give, namely, Himself. Only Divine wisdom could have conceived such a Memorial! Humans, left to themselves, might have spoiled the drama of His Redemption. They might have done two things with His death which would have fallen so short of the Way of Divinity. They might have regarded His redemptive death as a drama presented once in history like the assassination of Lincoln. In that case, it would have been only an incident, not a Redemption--the tragic end of a man, not the Salvation of humanity. Regrettably, this is the way so many look upon the Cross of Christ, forgetting His Resurrection and the pouring-out of the merits of His Cross in the Memorial Action He ordered and commanded. In such a case, His death would be only like a national Memorial Day and nothing more.
Or they might have regarded it as a drama which was played only once, but one which ought so often to be recalled only through meditating on its details. In this case, they would go back and read the accounts of the drama critics who lived at the time, namely, Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. This would be only a literary recall of His death, as Plato records the death of Socrates, and would have made the death of Our Lord no different from the death of any man.
Our Lord never told anyone to write about His Redemption, but He did tell His Apostles to renew it, apply it, commemorate it, prolong it by obeying His orders given at the Last Supper. He wanted the great drama of Calvary to be played not once, but for every age of His own choosing. He wanted men not to be readers about His Redemption, but actors in it, offering up their body and blood with HIs in the re-enactment of Calvary, saying with Him, "This is my body and this is my blood"; dying to their lower natures to live to grace; saying that they cared not for the appearance or species of their lives such as their family relationships, jobs, duties, physical appearance, or talents, but that their intellects, their wills, their substance--all that they truly were--would be changed into Christ; that the Heavenly Father looking down on them would see them in His Son, see their sacrifices massed in His sacrifice, their mortifications incorporated with His death, so that eventually they might share in His glory.
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