|
| Dear Parishioners: On Holy Thursday, Pope John Paul II issued an encyclical letter entitled CHURCH OF THE EUCHARIST. During the summer months, we will print sections of it in the bulletin to help all of us grow in appreciation of this great Sacrament. The church draws her life from the eucharist. This truth does not simply express a daily experience of faith, but recapitulates the heart of the mystery of the church. In a variety of ways she joyfully experiences the constant fulfillment of the promise: "Lo, I am with you always, to the close of the age" (Mt.28:20), but in the holy Eucharist, through the changing of bread and wine into the body and blood of the Lord, she rejoices in this presence with unique intensity. Ever since Pentecost, when the church, the people of the new covenant, began her pilgrim journey toward her heavenly homeland, the divine sacrament has continued to mark the passing of her days, filling them with confident hope. The Second Vatican Council rightly proclaimed that the Eucharist sacrifice is "the source and summit of the Christian life." "For the most Holy Eucharist contains the church's entire spiritual wealth: Christ himself, our Passover and living bread. Through his own flesh, now made living and life-giving by the Holy Spirit, he offers life to men." Consequently the gaze of the church is constantly turned to her Lord, present in the sacrament of the altar, in which she discovers the full manifestation of his boundless love. During the Great Jubilee of the Year 2000. I had an opportunity to celebrate the Eucharist in the Cenacle of Jerusalem where, according to tradition, it was first celebrated by Jesus himself. The Upper Room was where this most holy sacrament was instituted. It is there that Christ took bread, broke it and gave it to his disciples, saying:"Take this, all of you, and eat it: This is my body which will be given up for you" (cf. MK. 26:26: Lk.22:20; 1 Cor.11:25). I am grateful to the Lord Jesus for allowing me to repeat in that same place, in obedience to his command: "Do this in memory of me" (Lk.22:19), the words which he spoke 2,000 years ago. Did the apostles who took part in the Last Supper understand the meaning of the words spoken by Christ? Perhaps not. Those words would only be fully clear at the end of the triduum sacrum, the time from Thursday evening not Sunday morning. Those days embrace the mysterium paschale; they also embrace the mysterium eucharisticum. The church was born of the the paschal mystery. For this very reason the Eucharist, which is in an outstanding way the sacrament of the paschal mystery, stands at the center of the church's life. This is already clear from the earliest images of the church found in the Acts of the Apostles: "They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers" (2:42). The breaking of the bread refers to the Eucharist. Two thousand years later we continue to relive that primordial image of the church. At every celebration of the Eucharist, we are spiritually brought back to the paschal triduum: to the events of the evening of Holy Thursday, to the Last Supper and to what followed it. The institution of he Eucharist sacramentally anticipated the events which were about to take place, beginning with the agony in Gethsemane. Once again we see Jesus as he leaves the Upper Room, descends with his disciples to the Kidron Valley and goes to the Garden of Olives. Even today that garden shelters come very ancient olive trees. Perhaps they witnessed what happened beneath their shade that evening, when Christ in prayer was filled with anguish "and his sweat became like drops of blood falling down upon the ground" (cf. Lk.22:44). The blood, which shortly before he had given to the church as the drink of salvation in the sacrament of the Eucharist, began to be shed: its outpouring would then be completed on Golgotha to become the means of our redemption: "Christ...as high priest of the good things to come...entered once for all into the holy place, taking not the blood of goats and calves but his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption" (Heb. 9:11-12). |
