At the Corpus Christi ceremony, we do not celebrate a memory of the past, but the living presence of Jesus. Before leaving, at the Last Supper, on His farewell, He had a unique creativity of love. A creativity that must have slowly matured in His conscience as Son of Man and Son of God, when he must also have thought, with some anguish, in the question – I will be crucified, killed, and I return to the Father. What will I leave to my disciples as a permanent and secure presence of my love?
It is true that he had already given some hint of what he wanted to do, but they had not understood it, in fact, they had misinterpreted it: “How can you give us your flesh as a real food, and your blood as a real drink?” Which is what we hear the most. But, at the Last Supper, Jesus saw that the time had come, the opportune time to do this, and he celebrated the first living Eucharist being present among His disciples. We will never have the ability to understand this gesture of love and faith that encloses all of our hope and nourishes us on the path of life.
There is a logic to all of this. A communion of life. Life has many facets and, therefore, we speak of intellectual, psychic, human, spiritual life and so on. Finally, all these lives need to have a balanced and quality existence, they need to be well-fed. What is the food of intellectual life? Overcoming ignorance, illiteracy. Just like human life, it consists of having a good diet, a healthy climate, etc. And what is the food to have a quality spiritual life? This is not a rhetorical or useless question, but a fundamental one. Our soul, our spirit, needs to feed in order to live in communion with God. It does this by reading the Word, the example of good servants, the biographies of saints, feeding daily on prayer. However, there is no doubt that the most precious food for a quality spiritual life is the Eucharist.
We must turn our full attention to this mystery, to this living presence of Jesus among us, and to feed on Him, which is what He tells us – whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life and this is eternal life, so that they may know you, the true and living God, and the one you sent – we now live, through the Eucharist, life to the full.
In our Brazil, this party is very celebrated, through eternal manifestations of processions, colorful carpets, music. All of this is undoubtedly very good and does good to us, but we cannot and should not stay with only these external manifestations, we must enter the mystery and live this full and total love of mutual gift.
Jesus gives himself to each of us and we must give ourselves to Him. In this donation that fulfills love in its fullness and totality, may Mary, mother of the Eucharist, who celebrated the first in the mystery of the Incarnation, help us to have Jesus not only in our thoughts, but through the Eucharist to make Him the life of our life.
Offering God the best we have. The person of Melquisedec has always aroused a great interest in me, with the curiosity to know who it was and why it has such importance in the priestly liturgy. I consulted Mr. Google, as well as books and encyclopedias, but I didn’t get there.
The big conclusion I came to, was actually none. Everyone says they know a little about him, however, what we do know is that he was a pagan and that he went to visit Abraham; who offered bread and, above all, he offered everything he had. However, if we reflect a little better on this person, we will discover two important realities: One of the points is that he was a priest and, by God’s design, he became, although a pagan, a friend of Abraham, offering a peaceful sacrifice for the good of all . And then, we can see a harbinger of what the same Eucharist will be: no longer a bloody sacrifice, but, rather, peace, forgiveness and love.
Another point is that Melquisedec is a priest forever. It opens the door not to a temporary priesthood, but to a priesthood forever, and we know that, for Jesus, the priesthood is not due to a caste, a family, a tribe, but it is a gift from God and it is eternal. May the holy and peaceful priest Melquisedec help us in these moments when dark clouds are over the priests, knowing that his light, even at night, always shines.
Do this in remembrance of me
Paul does not speak much of the Eucharist, but he says what matters most: what is most important is its content, even more than the word Eucharist itself, a word that is neither used by the evangelists nor by the Apostle Paul. –
We know that the Eucharist means thanksgiving, and Paul, in a nutshell, tells us how the first Eucharistic celebration happened: Jesus takes the bread and gives it, drinks the wine and gives it transformed into His flesh and blood, sending the disciples to celebrate His memory. This is what the Church has never failed to do since then. Whenever we come together to celebrate this mystery, it is Jesus who brings us together and we have the beauty of the Church, of the community. Without the Eucharist we do not have the Church and, worse, we do not have the living presence of Jesus.
Bread descended from heaven
My intention is to invite all readers to take an afternoon of silence and face the exposed Blessed Sacrament. To look at Jesus for an hour, deeply in the monstrance, in stillness, without song and without words, and then, read carefully, calmly and with love the Gospel concerning that day (Lk 9,11b-17), which talks about the multiplication of the breads. Closing the book of Luke, spend another hour asking Jesus to speak to the heart about His love.
The Eucharist is not something that science, chemistry, study have much to say about. It is a mystery of love that can only be understood to the extent that we love. The Bread descended from heaven is not to return to heaven, but to make us return, through the lift of love and faith. It is worth every day, rain or shine, to have an appointment with Jesus in the Eucharist.
School of Prayer
Only in communion with God do we feed our souls. Let us be new Christs to share bread, being like Him: priests, kings and prophets. “This mission has its full meaning in Christ and can only be understood out of Him. Basically, holiness is living in union with Him the mysteries of His life; it consists in associating in a unique and personal way with the Lord’s death and resurrection, in dying and continually resurrecting with Him. But it can also involve the reproduction in the very existence of different aspects of Jesus’ earthly life: hidden life, community life, closeness to the least, poverty and other manifestations of his giving out of love. The contemplation of these mysteries, as proposed by Saint Ignatius of Loyola, leads us to incarnate them in our options and attitudes. Because ‘everything in the life of Jesus is a sign of his mystery’, ‘the whole life of Christ is the revelation of the Father’, ‘the whole life of Christ is a mystery of redemption’, ‘the whole life of Christ is a mystery of recapitulation ‘, and’ all that Christ lived, He Himself makes it possible for us to live in Him and for Him to live in us’.” (Gaudete et Exsultate, 20).