Mar 26 Thu
What is the Communion Rite of the Mass?
We all stand even as the Great Amen, uniting us to the sacred action, still echoes in the church.
The ancient sacrificial custom required that part of the victim be given back to the person offering the sacrifice. Thus, he became, symbolically, God’s guest. That which was merely a symbol in the pagan rites and a figure in the Jewish offerings is a reality in the Holy Mass. After we have offered to God his Son Jesus Christ in sacrifice, God offers him to us as spiritual food.
Once they were set free from the oppression of the Egyptians, the Jews had to travel across the desert. Their confidence in God began to dwindle. They began to complain against Moses. But God’s patience was greater than the nasty complaints of the Israelites. He sent them manna, “bread from heavens.” Each morning for forty years, until they entered the Promised Land, the people went out and gathered the day’s portion of manna.
Jesus himself pointed out the manna as a prefiguration of the Eucharist, “Your fathers ate the manna in the desert, and they are dead; but this is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that a man may eat it and not die.”
The Christians are strengthened by the body of Christ, the true “Bread from heaven.” If the manna was a token of God’s tender care for the chosen people whom He delivered from slavery, more so does the Eucharist reveal God’s paternal love for us. Those who nourish their soul with the Eucharist, the body and blood of Christ, can be sure of reaching the end of the road that leads to eternal life.
In the synagogue of Capernaum, Jesus said,
I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the desert, and they are dead...I am the living bread that has come down from heaven. Anyone who eats this bread will live forever; and the bread that I shall give is my flesh, for the life of the world.
These words perplexed those who heard Christ. The Lord did not take back his assertions; He even went further on:
I tell you most solemnly, if you do not eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you will not have life in you.
After this, St John notes, many left him and stopped going with him.
During the Last Supper, Jesus redeemed his promise, making it a reality, to the amazement of the apostles. “What we cannot do, our Lord can do. Jesus Christ, perfect God and perfect man, leaves us not a symbol, but a reality. He himself stays with us. He will go to the Father, but He will also remain among men. He will leave us, not simply a gift that will make us remember him, not an image that becomes blurred with time, like a photograph that soon fades and yellows, and has no meaning except for those who were contemporaries. Under the appearances of bread and wine, He is really present, with his body and blood, with his soul and divinity.”