The Eucharist, Heart Of The Church: Part Seven

07-08-2016 NIGETEENTH SUNDAY OF THE YEAR (C)

SCRIPTURAL READING:

Wis. 18:6-9
Ps 33:1.12.18-19.20.22 (R. 12b).
2 Heb. 11:1-2.8-19 or Heb. 11:1-2.8-12; Accl. Mt. 24:42a.44.
Gospel Lk 12:32-48

Preamble:

Dear friends please repeat these words after me;
Stay with me Lord Jesus as I give you my mind; help me understand your word.
Stay with me Lord Jesus as I give you my ears; help me hear your voice.
Stay with me Lord Jesus as I give you my heart; help me welcome you.
Holy Spirit, rekindle in me the fire of your love. Amen.

THE EUCHARIST THE HEART OF THE CHURCH-PART SEVEN.
THEME: THE LORD’S PRESENCE CARRIED INTO DAILY ACTIVITIES-MEDITATION FOUR.

Last Sunday we discussed about the presence of the Lord brings the desired transformation into the life of an individual who has become increasingly aggressive for the possession of worldly things. I told us last Sunday that the solution to a lack of satisfaction, bitterness in the soul cannot be solved in wishful thinking but in rediscovering the presence of the Lord anew because as he said “this is my body which is given up for you.” “This is my Blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant which is poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.”

To experience the beauty of this, you must seek to respond to the Lord in bodily attitudes for he has given you his body and blood for your transformation. The bodily attitudes we are talking about are “sitting,” “standing,” and “kneeling.” To “sit” means to quietly concentrate on listening to the word of God which is also a part of our liturgy, “to stand” before the Lord means having a gesture of readiness to follow the lord’s instruction just as Israel ate the paschal lamb standing to manifest readiness to depart and be led by the word of God.

Besides that, standing is the expression of the victory of Christ: at the end of every battle, it is victor who remains standing. That is what it means when Stephen, before his martyrdom, sees Christ standing at the right hand of God (Acts 7:56). Thus standing for the Gospel is, over and beyond the Exodus attitude, which we share with Israel, standing in the presence of the Risen one is recognition of the victorious one.

“Kneeling” before the lord is not an introduction of something new within the celebration of the liturgy, it has existed long in history, it is not a sign of the church humiliating us, or asking us to do something entirely different but is a bodily expression of adoration, in which we remain upright, ready, available, but at the same time bow before the greatness of the living God and of his Name. Jesus Christ himself, according to Saint Luke’s account, in the last hours before his passion, prayed on his knees on the Mount of Olives (Lk 22:41).

Stephen fell on his knees when just before his martyrdom he saw the heavens open and Christ standing there (Acts 7:60). Before him who was standing, he knelt. Peter prayed kneeling to beseech God to raise up Tabitha (Acts 9:40). After his great farewell speech before the elders of Ephesus (before he went off to Jerusalem and to his captivity), Paul knelt and prayed with them (Acts 20:36).

The most profound teaching is in the hymn to Christ in the letter to the Philippians (Phil. 2:6-11), which refers to the promise in Isaiah, of people paying homage on their knees to the God of Israel, to Jesus Christ: He is the “name, that at the name…every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth” (Phil. 2:10). When we kneel, we express our affirmation of the divinity of Jesus.

We kneel with Jesus; we kneel with his witnesses-from Stephen, Peter, and Paul onward-before Jesus, and this is an expression of faith, which was from the beginning the requisite visible witness of the relationship of faith to God and to Christ in this world. Kneeling in this way is the bodily expression of our positive response to the real presence of Jesus Christ, who as God and man, with body and soul, flesh and blood is present among us.

Beloved in Christ there is no better place of finding perfect peace and joy, self-contentment and self-satisfaction, self-transformation except in the presence of the Lord; for he is the author and finisher of your faith. He is the great force that can help you put away disordered passion, lust, anger, bitterness, immorality, impurities, evil desire and covetousness, deception and lies which the second reading of last Sunday taken from Col. 3:1-5.9-11. To walk into the doors of blessedness which also is the abode of peace, there must a total surrender to the Lord of course there would be the struggle of letting go but with the lord it will be easy.

The joy we receive and the inner transformation we receive from the presence of the Lord can be carried into every day’s activity. To make this happen we must seek to rediscover the beauty of “Eucharistic Adoration” where we are able to enrich ourselves with a treasure that never fails as the gospel passage today instructs us.

The heart of the Eucharistic sacrament is the celebration of the Holy mystery in which the Lord assembles his people, unites them, and builds them up by taking them into his sacrifice and giving himself to them, letting himself be received by us. The Eucharist is an assembly in which the Lord acts upon us and brings us together.

Beloved the emeritus pontiff Pope Benedict XVI in his book “God is Near us” has observed that what we notice in our present times is that the idea of assembly had become flattened and separated from the idea of sacrifice, and thus the Eucharist has shrunk to a mere sign of brotherly fellowship. At the same time the concentration on the Eucharistic celebration is causing faith and sacrament to lose something of their place among us.

This is very clear in most of our churches today such that the place of adoration is been treated as a thing of the past. Our hearts are somewhere else even as we gather to celebrate the Eucharistic sacrifice. What is quite striking is the way the Eucharist itself is shrinking to the space of a brief half-hour-we want to celebrate it hurriedly and leave the scene to do something else and this of course causes the Eucharist not to breathe life into the building or the people because of the pulse of time. The celebration is now confined to the space of the sacred rite; and now it is becoming a tiny island of time on the edge of the day, which as a whole is given over to the profane and hectic busyness of our worldly activity.

If today, we look back on this development we discover that the place of adoration has become secondary or non-existent because it is been swallowed by the business and rush of our present day. It is only within the breathing space of adoration can the Eucharistic celebration indeed be alive; only if the church and thus the whole congregation is constantly attuned with the waiting presence of the lord, and with our silent readiness to respond, can the invitation to come together bring us into the hospitality of Jesus Christ and of the church, which is the precondition of the invitation. Everything we do in the church must spring from adoration and end in adoration. Communion and adoration do not stand side by side, or even in opposition, but are indivisibly one.

For communicating means entering into fellowship with him. Communicating with Christ means having fellowship with him. That is why communion and contemplation belong together: a person cannot communicate with another person without knowing him. He must be open for him, see him, and hear him. Love or friendship always carries within it an impulse of reverence, of adoration. Communicating with Christ therefore demands that we gaze on him, allow him to gaze on us, listen to him, get to know him. Adoration is simply the personal aspect of communion.

We cannot communicate sacramentally without doing it personally. Sacramental communion becomes empty, and finally a judgement for us, unless it is repeatedly completed by us personally. The saying of the lord in the Book of Revelation 3:20 is valid not only for the end times but always: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if any one hears my voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with me.”

True communion can happen only if we learn to wait on Lord, hear the voice of the Lord, if we answer and open the door. The gospel passage of today calls such persons Blessed if the Lords finds them awake when he comes for he will put on his apron and have them sit at table and he will come and serve them.

So we must at all times be generous with our time in going to meet him in adoration and let our adoration never cease. For it shows readiness of heart and sense of purpose and this of course builds that personal relationship with Christ as the heart of the Eucharistic piety. In the death of Jesus Christ, says the Pope, each one of us has been loved to the end. He knows us and suffered for each and every one of us. Little wonder we acclaim at the stations of the cross-“we adore you oh Christ and we praise you for by your holy cross you have redeemed the world.”

Beloved in Christ, the adoration of the Lord in the sacrament is also an education in sensitizing our conscience. “Christ comes into the hearts of our brothers and sisters and visits our consciences.” He teaches us to grow in faith like Abraham which the second reading of today’s liturgy speaks of. By faith he sojourned in the land of promise, as in a foreign land, living in tents with Isaac and Jacob, heirs with him of the same promise. For he looked forward to the city which had foundations, whose builder and maker is God.

Beloved, when the conscience becomes dulled, this lets in the violence that lays waste the world today. Anyone who gazes upon the face of the Lord, which the servants of the Sanhedrin and Pilate’s servants have spat upon, which they have slapped and covered with spittle, will see in his face the mirror of our violence, a reflection of what sin is, and their conscience will be purified in the way that is the precondition for every social reform, for every improvement in human affairs. For the reform of human relationships rests in the first place on a reinforcement of moral strength. Only morality can set limits to violence and selfishness, and wherever it becomes insignificant it is man who is the loser every time, and weak first of all.

The pope tells us again that Eucharistic adoration “is an education in active love of one’s neighbour.” It is not just God whom we venerate in Eucharistic adoration: but of Jesus Christ’s sacrifice of his life which meets us here and, within this, love itself. But we can only understand love by sharing in it, by loving as he has loved us first. For to experience this love we must always be nourished by the Eucharistic presence of the Lord.

It is only when we are nourished daily by the presence of the lord can our lives be transformed and thought pattern be purified and the things we do change for the better to what gives life to others around us. Our clumsiness can be removed when we are seek him constantly.