February
3, 2017
Friday, Week Four, Year I
Hebrews 13:1-8; Psalm 27; Mark 6:14-29.
Think Body
Eucharist is a celebration — and
should be an experience — of unity. The key to this is the earlier text (10:5):
“Sacrifices and offerings you have not
desired, but a body you have prepared for me.”
We saw that Jesus “has abolished
the law” with its repeated human rituals, that he might create in himself one new humanity... and might reconcile [the
human race] to God in one body
through the cross….”[1]
We continue to pray, to keep the
Commandments, to join in the offering of Christ at Mass and participate in
sacramental rituals. But these are no longer something we do to achieve salvation, hoping God will hear
our prayers, forgive our sins and purify us through our rituals, as if there
were any doubt of it. Our salvation, purification and sanctification was
achieved once and for all when we were sacrificed with and in Christ on the
cross. We just have to persevere in living out what we have received, and grow
into the “full stature” of what we have become. The key to it all is that we are Christ’s body. We were in his
body on the cross. We died and rose in him as his body. And now we are called
to recognize ourselves and others as his body always.
Hebrews tells
us this means to recognize and love all our “fellow Christians” as our own
body. We should “show hospitality” and “keep in mind those who are in prison...
and those who are being ill-treated” as if it were happening to us — “since you
too are in the body.” Marriage “must be honored by all... and kept undefiled,”
for the married are “two in one flesh” in a way beyond human understanding.
We should accept as “leaders”
those who “preached the word of God” to us, and “imitate their faith. Jesus
Christ is the same yesterday, today and forever.”
The New
Jerusalem Bible footnote comments: “They [Church leaders] may change or
disappear, but Christ remains, and it is to him that Christians owe their
allegiance.” Priests and bishops may be saints or sinners (we are all both at
the same time), but what we see in them (and they in us) is Christ, and what we
imitate in them is their faith, regardless of their works. This faith keeps us conscious
that we all one body, the redeemed body of Christ, already “made perfect” in
God’s time, but struggling in our human time to let Christ grow to “full
stature” in us all.
In Eucharist, everything should
make manifest that we are all one, all united, all equal and equally
participating in the sacrifice of Jesus made present in the celebration. Paul
wrote:
I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, by the name
of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you be in agreement and that there be no
divisions among you, but that you be united in the same mind and the same
purpose.[2]
There are “divisions” if some
sing and others remain silent in the pews; if some sit together and others
alone; if dress and protocol make some appear to have “higher” status through
their ministry than others; or if the sanctuary is seen as an area that only
the “elite” can enter. The Lord is my
light and my salvation. We need no other affirmation than that. And his
light is shining in us all.
We are one body. In all of us
Jesus Christ is equally present, speaking, acting, and giving glory to the
Father. We have to make that visible.
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