May 18, 2003

The children of the parish did such a fine crowning of the Blessed Mother last Sunday, that I want to leave the decorations up for a few more days. On that festival, which also was Good Shepherd Sunday, we recalled how Christ the Good Shepherd gave us from the Cross his own mother to be our mother.

Pope John Paul II reminds the Church in the new encyclical Ecclesia de Eucharistia (The Church from the Eucharist) that the Blessed Mother lived a Eucharistic life and teaches us how to do the same. First, by saying “Amen” or “Let it be” at the Annunciation, she became the first “tabernacle” in history when our Lord was conceived in her womb. When the priest says, “The Body of Christ” at communion, the faithful also respond “Amen” and become human tabernacles of the Lord. The Pope writes: “…the flesh of the Son of Man, given as food, is his body in its glorious state after the resurrection. With the Eucharist we digest, as it were, the ‘secret’ of the resurrection.” (n. 18)

Secondly, the Blessed Mother is a model of how to think eucharistically all the time. From the time of the Presentation when Simeon said that a sword would pierce her heart, she was thinking of her Son’s sacrifice. This anticipation intensified at the wedding in Cana when Christ spoke of his approaching “hour.” At the foot of the Cross she was a witness to the Holy Sacrifice as we are at each Mass. After Pentecost, she received the Eucharist with the rest of the believers when the Apostles celebrated the new sacrament. As such, she shows how we should divide each day and week into either thinking of the Holy Mass we are going to attend, or giving thanks for the Holy Mass we have attended.

The Pope speaks of an “eschatological tension.” Eschaton is a word which refers to the culmination of human history and the vision of heaven. In the Eucharist we are in time and space, in a building made of stone by human hands, but we also are in the heavenly company of the angels and saints and the Blessed Mother. That creates a tension, not in the sense of a contradictory neurosis, but as a joyful communion with the Church in heaven, in expectation of our own eternal life. "...in celebrating the sacrifice of the Lamb, we are united to the heavenly ‘liturgy’ and become part of that great multitude which cries out: ‘Salvation belongs to our God who sits upon the throne, and to the Lamb!’ (Rev. 7:10). The Eucharist is truly a glimpse of heaven appearing on earth. It is a glorious ray of the heavenly Jerusalem which pierces the clouds of our history and lights up our journey.” (n. 19)

Fr. George W. Rutler