A fundamental belief of Christianity is that God created us for union with Him. This union is what He intended and effected from the moment man was created into this harmonious state in the Garden of Eden. All that God has done for us since the moment of the fall, when that harmony was violently ruptured by sin, has been designed to lead us back into this union. Throughout salvation history, God has continued to approach us, make Himself and His Will more fully known to us, all so that we might return back to Him.[1] The Church and its sacraments were instituted by Christ as the means by which we can be returned to Him, to be united with Him even while we remain in the midst of the broken and fallen world in which we live.
The Catechism teaches us that sacraments are “efficacious signs of grace, instituted by Christ and entrusted to the Church, by which divine life is dispensed to us.”[2] The foundational Sacrament, the ultimate sign of God’s grace which dispensed divine life to man, is the body of Jesus Christ.[3] Before the Incarnation, could man have even conceived of such a possibility? That God would take on the nature of a human, one with whom man could share a meal, a deep conversation, an embrace, grief and despair, must have been unimaginable. And yet, through the mystery of the Incarnation, the inconceivable became reality. In Jesus, we received the supreme visible manifestation of the love of the Blessed Trinity for men.[4] Through that same body, crucified and glorified, salvific grace was given to humanity. Before Jesus ascended back to the Father, He instituted the Church and its sacraments so that His material, human body sacrificed for our redemption could continue to be physically accessible to us even after He had ascended back to the Father and continue to sanctify us.[5]
By offering His one unique bodily sacrifice upon Calvary for our salvation, Jesus became the High Priest for us all. In His risen and glorified body, seated at the right hand of the Father, He continues to act as our High Priest, but now enables us to share in the heavenly liturgy with Him “in spirit and in truth.”[6] He continues to offer His once-for-all perfect self-offering in worship to and glorification of the Father. This ongoing offering not only reflects the harmonious union of love that is our Triune God, but also serves as an open invitation to us to share in His sacrifice, join His worship, and enter more fully into this perfect union of love. While all seven of the Church’s sacraments invite us into this union, the invitation is perhaps most evident in the Eucharist.
Just as the mystery of the Incarnation was inconceivable before Jesus made it a reality, so too the mystery of the Eucharist, whereby the True Presence of Christ is provided as nourishment for the faithful under the appearance of bread and wine, can only be known through God’s Revelation. Through the Eucharist, Jesus’ body and blood, now restored and glorified, continue to serve as the instrument of His redemptive love.[7] The Eucharist is the means by which Jesus fulfills his promise to feed His People with his very Body and Blood under the appearance of staples found at almost every celebratory meal- bread and wine- in order to provide us with spiritual nourishment that unites us to Him. If we believe in Jesus, in His salvation and His teaching, then we also believe in His Word and His Promises. And He taught us:
I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is my flesh… For my flesh is food indeed and my blood is drink indeed. He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me, and I in him. John 6:50-51, 55-56.
Through the Eucharist, Christ transforms man’s daily bread.[8] While continuing to act as High Priest, He also serves as the Victim in sacramental form, that we might be fed by the very Body that was offered for us.[9]
Through the sacrifice of the Mass, the perfect offering of Christ at Calvary is sacramentally made present and offered to God the Father through Christ, with the ordained priest acting in subordination to Christ, designating the Victim as a sacrificial sign of the community’s self-offering.[10] Through Christ’s offer and the priest’s designation, we, the visible Church, as members of Christ’s Mystical Body, are invited to offer our personal worship, our praise, prayer, reparation and thanksgiving, and thereby enter into this unique sacrifice.[11]
By acknowledging that the divine mystery revealed on the cross is made present on the altar, and by desiring to share in the Mass, we are able to adopt the sacramental Victim through the hands of the priest as an expression of our own worship, as a symbol of our own interior union with Christ. In this sense, we are permitted the incredible gift of being able to offer Christ’s own sacrifice of Himself with Him.[12] By joining in the sacrificial offering, we are also able to share in the gifts merited by Christ through His perfect offering on Calvary, and thereby be individually sanctified.[13] Through this act of worship, we receive the graces to make a personal response to God’s invitation to union with Him in our own lives, allowing His grace to transform us to enter more fully in union with Him.[14] As Fr. O’Neill explains:
From this body flows the Holy Spirit sent by the Father and the Son into Christians, drawing them into the life of the Blessed Trinity by grace. [15]
When received worthily, with the desire to grow in union with Him, the Eucharist grants us the grace to love. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, it is this love flowing from the physical body of Christ in the Eucharist which unites His mystical body of the visible Church.[16] Empowered by His grace to love, we leave the Mass better equipped to be obedient to the Church’s call to “go forth and serve the Lord with your lives.” More perfectly united to Him, we can more effectively bring forth into the world His love as well as the grace to conquer sin.[17]
As we learn to respond to the love we receive in the Eucharist by sharing it, we advance towards final union with God.[18] As we dispose ourselves to greater intimacy with Him and deepen our desire to grow in personal relationship with Him, God grants us the grace to unite our will to His and thereby grow in likeness to Him.[19]
Through the sanctifying grace received through ongoing reception of these sacraments, we can learn to offer our own lives as Jesus did, without reservation in obedience to God’s will. Not by our own merit, but relying entirely upon the grace of God, we can be transformed and sanctified, so that we might offer ourselves and our entire lives back to Him, thereby fully uniting ourselves to Him in accordance with His Plan of Salvation.
[1] It is this pattern of exitus– reditus recognized by St. Thomas Aquinas in the Summa Theologica.
[2] CCC 1131.
[3] O’Neill, Colman E. Meeting Christ in the Sacraments. Mercier Press, 1966, p.163.
[4] Id, p.163, citing Jn 3:16, “God so loved the world as to give his only-begotten son.”
[5] Id, p.16-19
[6] Id, p.19, citing Jn. 4:23.
[7] Id, p.163.
[8] Id, p. 166
[9] Id, p. 198.
[10] Id, pp.212-213.
[11] O’Neill, pp.192, 194, 198, 213.
[12] Id, pp.195, 211, 215.
[13] Id, pp. 169, 199, 209.
[14] Id, pp. 195,207.
[15] Id, p. 163.
[16] Id, p.173.
[17] Id, p.167, 195.
[18] Id, p.188.
[19] Id, p.188-189.