Aug 28 Thu
What is more important in the Mass, the Readings or the Eucharistic liturgy?
The importance we give to the word of God should not obscure the value of the Eucharistic liturgy. Neither should we fall into the opposite error, because the Church has always venerated the Sacred Scriptures just as she venerates the body of the Lord.
Thus, everything is continually directed to the sacrifice that Christ accomplished by dying on the cross, and to the new life He gives us with his resurrection.
For the celebration of the Eucharist, the first Christians gathered together and began to listen to the Sacred Scriptures with veneration. For “the force and power in the word of God is so great that it stands as the support and energy of the Church, the strength of faith for her sons, the food of the soul, the pure and everlasting source of spiritual life.” Through this word, “the voice of the Holy Spirit sounds again and again in the words of the prophets and apostles.”
Sacred Scriptures are the way to know God.
In them, the invisible God addresses us as his friends, and stays among us to invite and receive us into his company. This is how, without seeking it or deserving it, we get to know the intimate truth, both about God and our salvation.
This truth is made known to us through the Sacred Scriptures, which, together with the sacred Tradition, “are like a mirror, in which the Church, during her pilgrim journey here on earth, contemplates God, from whom she receives everything, until she is brought to see him face to face as He is.”
What we hear during the liturgy of the word is the truth about God and the narrative of the marvels God performed among men. Its culmination is the paschal mystery of the death and resurrection of Christ, which is made present in the Eucharist.
Therefore, the central theme of the readings is always Christ.
All the readings, both of the Old and the New Testaments, are oriented toward Christ. In his wisdom, God has so brought it about that the New Testament should be hidden in the Old Testament, and that the Old Testament should be made manifest in the New. Hence, the New Testament sheds light on and explains what was earlier announced and signified with different figures in the Old Testament.
We will get to know Christ better by listening to the readings of the Holy Scriptures with pious attention. Our lives are linked to his life because we must transform ourselves into him to be pleasing to God the Father. By carefully listening to the word of God and reflecting on it, we will realize who and how Christ was, what He said and did, what He expects of us, and how we are to go about accomplishing the task He entrusted to us. Gradually, we will enter into the intimacy of God and discover the meaning of our own existence and our mission in life. And, as a consequence, we will get to know how to do—always and in everything—the will of God.