The Eucharist is a sacrificial meal, “the sacred banquet of communion with the Lord’s body and blood.” Its fundamental pattern is found in the Jewish celebration of the Passover, which involves both a meal and a sacrifice. [Click to read more]
The Sacrifice of Christ 8. To begin to comprehend the tremendous gift offered by Christ through his Incarnation, Death, and Resurrection, that gift that is made present to us in the Eucharist, we must first realize how truly profound is our alienation from the Source of all life as a result of sin. We have abundant experience of evil, yet so many of us deny the cause of much of that evil—our own selfishness, our own sins. As St. John wrote in his first letter, If we say, “we are without sin,” we deceive ourselves, and the truth is not in us (1 Jn 1:8). 9. Sin is an offense against God, a failure to love God and our neighbor that wounds our nature and injures human solidarity.
This weekend’s readings speak about the difficulty associated with prophetic ministry. It is fraught with danger for the prophet. Jeremiah was persecuted and rejected (First Reading), and Our Lord Jesus tells us that rejection comes with following him. Some people might have difficulty reconciling a Jesus who preached peace and reconciliation with the one speaking in this weekend’s gospel. We might wonder why Jesus is saying he has come for war rather than for peace, to stir up strife within families, rather than mend relationships. However, this is not the sense Jesus is communicating to his listeners in the gospel... [Read more here]
This week I thought to share a reflection from Gerald Darring in hopes that you find it helpful as you respond to the Lord’s invitation to discipleship. "We are a people who have been promised inheritance and life; we are 'heirs of the same promise' made to Abraham. We have, therefore, put our hope in God: 'our soul waits for the Lord,' who will come when we least expect him... [Click to read more]
Qoheleth, the protagonist of the book of Ecclesiastes, speaks of the vanity of human existence. All our toils under the sun amount to nothing. At face value, this represents a dark and nihilistic attitude to life. It would be a terrible way to live if one held such an extremely negative view about life. We believe that the world was created good by God, and it is the best world that God could create. The evils we see in the world are largely consequences of human sin... [Click to keep reading]