Father Kleppner - March 27th 2005
This week we celebrated the Mass of the Lord’s Supper on Holy Thursday. It was on the night before he died that Our Lord shared himself with us in the Holy Eucharist. In the Eucharist we experience the enduring presence of the Risen Lord. The following reflection by Msgr. Richard Antall from Our Sunday Visitor will help us appreciate more deeply this profound mystery.
A mystery of heavenly unionWhen we receive Jesus in the Eucharist, we become members of the body of Christ and are transformed into who we were created to be. French author Michel Tournier wrote an interesting novel about the Epiphany called The Four Wise Men. In the story, the three wise men are still kings, like the Gospel story, and journey from different lands to find Jesus. But Tournier adds a twist: a fourth wise man who is delayed on the way to Bethlehem. He arrives in time for the death of the Holy Innocents and then is captured. The king passes a whole lifetime working in the salt mines. When he is finally set free as a broken man, he seeks the adult Jesus who he has heard of from other prisoners. He ends up arriving at the Upper Room just after Jesus and the apostles had left. Another writer might have left the king with that frustration, but Tournier was Catholic. Although the King “missed” the Lord, whose miracles of feeding thousands he had heard so much about, he is nevertheless able to encounter Jesus when he looks down at the table of the Last Supper and sees that the cup still has a little bit of wine. He drinks that last drop and experiences the grace of God. His epiphany is eucharistic. What if you or I were given such an experience? Of course, we are offered it every time we are invited to the mystery of Communion at Mass. But do we know how to understand what is happening to us? The king obtained understanding through long years of suffering, his heart burning every time he heard of the preacher from Galilee who said He was the Bread of Life. Tournier’s character made me think much of the presence of the Lord in the Eucharist. We are like the king, late for the Last Supper, but there is still the New Wine.
Eucharistic experience We must take the eucharistic year personally, however. It should make a difference in our own devotion. What is your experience of the Lord in the Eucharist? On my desk I have an old, out-of-print book of spiritual theology called The Compendium of Ascetical and Mystical Theology by Father Adolph Tanqueray. In the book, Father Tanqueray talks about the physical and spiritual presence of Christ in this sacrament. It mentioned something I had never thought about. When we receive the true body and blood, soul and divinity of Christ, He is really present within our bodies. Father Tanqueray says that angels worship the Lord present within us. I am aware of an old prayer for after Communion that reads, “I adore You, Christ within me,” but I hadn’t thought about the angels. Christ is infinitely adorable and the angels worship Him present in the sacrament because it is His real presence. Thus, we become tabernacles of the Lord and angels worship Him visiting our poor flesh, much like how bodyguards accompany a world leader who is taken to see the sufferings of the miserable. The image appeals to me because it makes me think of the reality of the Lord’s presence in the sacrament. Something really happens on the deepest level of reality when you receive the Eucharist, something far beyond the power of our imagination or understanding. There is another part. We assimilate the Lord’s body into our own. “You are what you eat,” says one of the most popular truisms of our food-obsessed culture. The Fathers of the Church said something similar of the Eucharist, which was echoed at the Second Vatican Council. We receive the body of Christ and we become the body of Christ. |
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