| Who is Jesus? Whenever we talk to someone who has left the Church and returned, their song is always the same. "If they put lighted matches under my fingernails, I would not deny my Lord and His Church." How well we can relate to that outcry of the heart. It is as if the Spirit Himself is speaking; as in Holy Scripture, where we are told that the Spirit prays for us, when we do not know how to pray. Our mouths open and our hearts, not our minds, cry out: "I love Him! I cannot live without Him! There is no life without Him!" When we were writing about the Martyrs,1 and interviewing eyewitnesses who knew them, the thought kept running through our minds and hearts, could we die rather than deny our Faith? But you know, the closer you walk toward Jesus, the more you get to know Him, you find yourself deeper and deeper in love with Him and there is no other answer; there is no other way. When you discover Whom it is Who dwells inside your Church, Whom you have to deny when you deny your Church, the Roman Catholic Church, your eyes and the eyes of your heart and soul find their way to Jesus on the Cross, and you are ready to die for the Church. Who is Jesus in our lives? As those of you know, who have read our book: "We came back to Jesus", it wasn’t always so for us. We were "Sunday go to church Catholics." Penny knew very little; Bob knew too much. Penny emotionally felt my Jesus, but didn’t know why she felt Him only in the Catholic Church. Bob had gone through twelve years of Catholic schooling; he went to Mass because Penny felt Jesus there, and he wanted to please her. When we lost our son to an overdose of drugs, we blamed Jesus; we punished Him; we left the Church. And we will scream from the mountain tops, "There is no pain, no emptiness as intense as the loss of our sweet, most precious Lord Jesus." We have known people who have lost loved ones say that our pain, that of losing a child, is one they could not bear. We agree: "Yes, it is a part of your very self that is cut out of you; your heart bleeds from the wound that will not heal; but it cannot compare with the unequaled sorrow, the nothingness, the death that overtakes you when you have cut Jesus out of your life." Do you ever think about those who have left the Church? Do you notice how they go from one church to another? Their hearts are restless. For you see, the Lord, before sending us down from Heaven, takes a piece of our heart and keeps it for Himself. We, on earth, are seeking that missing part of our heart. No one on earth can fill that void. There is only One Who can, and He is our Lord, the same Lord Who comes to us during the Sacrifice of the Mass, the Same Lord Who is a willing prisoner of Love in the Tabernacle. And though those who have left Mother Church do not realize it, they are hungering for the Only One Who can satisfy their hungry heart, a hunger that cannot be fulfilled by man or manna. Jesus said at Capernaum: "Your fathers hungered and they were fed with manna from Heaven and they hungered still. The bread that I will give, you will never hunger. I am the Bread of life. He who eats of this Bread will never die."2 Jesus is talking of eternal life, life that includes this world; and when He speaks of death, it is everlasting death that begins in this world. Jesus said: "Unless you eat My Body, you have no life in you."3 To those who will eat His Body and drink His Blood - the Eucharist, He promised life, eternal life - Resurrection: "And I will raise you up in the last day."4 Now, suppose, as some twentieth century heretics love to prosyletize,5 Jesus never said those words? Suppose, the bad news that there is no Heaven, no everlasting life is true, and when you die, there is nothing? What have you lost by believing there is a Heaven and everlasting life? In believing Jesus’ words, you have at least had peace on earth. But suppose the Church is right, and the words of Jesus are true? What will you have lost by not believing? Eternal life! Who is is Jesus on the road to Emmaus? Those who have left the Church and returned, remind us of the disciples who met Jesus on the road to Emmaus. They are grieving for the Messiah Who is no longer in their lives. They feel lost and helpless, alone, empty. Then when they hear Holy Scripture, explained, their hearts burn. Searching, they go from preacher to preacher and good sounding sermons, seeking Him; but there is something missing. What they come to realize is, it is the Lord in His Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, the One Who is waiting for them in the Roman Catholic Church. They, like the disciples, only recognize Jesus in the breaking of the bread - the Sacrifice of the Mass. We are not saying that the Lord is not present in His Word and in the people, in the churches of our brothers and sisters in Christ, but as the hearts of the disciples burned when Jesus explained the Scriptures, yet they did not recognize Him in the Word, only in the breaking of the bread, the Mass, so it is with the Lord’s children, still till today. We need the Lord in His entirety - in His Word and in His Body and Blood. We need the Lord in His Priests because out of Divine humility and love, He chooses vessels through which His Love, His Grace can flow. We find the Lord in His people, because He has made us one, "one in Him as He is one in the Father". But it is by partaking of the one Bread, when we share in the Eucharist during the Mass, we become One Body, 6 we become one in Him as He is one in the Father. It is by communing with Him, in Holy Communion that we become community; we become Church. When we receive the Eucharist, we do not consume Jesus, we are consumed by Him (St. Augustine), and we are no longer the same. This is what Holy Scripture is saying when we read: "They will know us by how we love one another."7 What do you think is the motivating force which makes us love one another? The Lord Who is Almighty in all that is Good, with Love that is overflowing, fills us through His Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity with a super human capacity to love. It is not we who love, but the Lord Who loves through us, for we are no longer ourselves but are transformed into His Instrument, using His Heart to love, His Eyes to see, His Arms to open wide and embrace our brothers and sisters. Who is Jesus on the Altar? A priest once said, when Catholics realize what happens on the Altar during each and every Mass, when they recognize Who is Jesus, Who comes to us at the moment of Consecration, Who remains with us in the Holy Tabernacle, we will have to come to church two or three hours early; it will be Christmas and Easter every Mass, the churches will be filled to capacity spilling out into the street. Walk with us, now, as we share in the Paschal Mystery. With our return to the Church, was our return to Our Lord and to the Mass. Since that first day, since that first Mass when we heard the readings and the Gospel, we knew we had found our Lord; He had waited for us; He still loved us. We were home! We found ourselves growing closer and closer to the Lord through His Word, to what He was saying to us during the Mass; the Mass became personal to us. But the high point was the Eucharist! Although we did not quite understand the fullness of His action on the Altar of Sacrifice, in our small church in California, we knew He was there! We knew in an unexplainable way, the way a blind man knows his loved one has entered a room. We could see Him through the windows of our hearts, and we were in love. But as one Mass followed another, six Daily Masses each week culminating into one glorious Sunday Mass, one year into another until nineteen years flew by as if overnight, we found ourselves discovering more and more about our Lord, just as one finds out more about a loved one, the more we are with our beloved. As we began to learn more and more what is really happening during the Mass, we found ourselves coming to terms with the price our Lord paid for us, we found ourselves staring at the Cross. He loved us so very much, His Heart was pierced out of love for us. He loved us so passionately; He carried that love on the Cross and that love ripped through His bruised and beaten Body. That love was nailed along with Him on that Cross. Love hung on that Cross and was raised on high with the Spotless Lamb Who offered Himself to the Father out of love for us. The Cross! That’s what we discovered, as one Mass became another for us. We found a Jesus Who loved us to the point of death on the Cross. We found a Jesus Who loved us with so much fire, at the Last Supper His thoughts were of us. He so longed to continue loving us, Jesus commissioned His first Priests to bring Him to us during Mass. Not satisfied with that short time with us, He remains in the Monstrance and is a willing Prisoner of love in the Tabernacle. Just as we think we know all there is to know, another awesome truth of this great Mystery unfolds before our eyes. As we are pounding these words on our word processor, we find ourselves being blinded by tears. Our emotions always run high when we write about our Church, our Lord and His Mother, His Angels and the Saints, but nothing compares with when we write of the Eucharist. We start to see the words come to life; we are in Bethlehem, and Jesus is coming to life before our eyes. We feel the presence of The Holy Spirit Who descended upon the Blessed Mother and the Apostles in the upper room on Pentecost, now reaching out to us, now pouring out His Love on us, now infusing strength into us as He did to the Apostles, giving them the courage to become Martyrs. Jesus is revealing Himself so intimately, in the Holy Eucharist, so passionately, and why? So we can begin to know how very much He loves us. Who is Jesus in the Sacrifice of the Mass - in the Father’s Mind and Heart, right from the beginning. We know that from the very beginning, when our first parents Adam and Eve were betraying the trust that God the Father had placed in them, He was already planning the Redemption of their children, the Redemption of the world, through the great Sacrifice of His Only Beloved Son Jesus, His Son Who would be the new Adam, Who by His obedience would pay for what Adam by his disobedience had brought about. We travel through the Bible and we find Abraham. The Lord our God is asking him to sacrifice his only son. Although Abraham did not understand the Lord’s command, he said yes. That yes, like the yes of Mother Mary could not have been an easy yes! But he said yes. The Lord put Abraham to the test: "Take your son, your only child Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah. There you shall offer him as a burnt offering, on a mountain I will point out to you.’...He (Abraham) chopped wood for the burnt offering and started on his journey to the place God pointed out to him. "Abraham took the wood for the burnt offering, loaded it on Isaac, and carried in his own hands the fire and the knife. Then the two set out together. Isaac spoke to his father Abraham, ‘Father...Look here are the fire and the wood, but where is the lamb for the burnt offering?’ Abraham answered, ‘God Himself will provide the lamb for the burnt offering.’ Then the two of them went on together. "When they arrived at the place, God had pointed out to him, Abraham built an Altar there, and arranged the wood. Abraham stretched out his hand and seized the knife to kill his son. "But the Angel of the Lord God called to him from Heaven. ‘Abraham, do not raise your hand against the boy...Do not harm him, for now I know you fear God. You have not refused me your son, your only son.’...Abraham saw a ram caught by its horns in a bush. Abraham took the ram and offered it as a burnt offering in place of his son."8 As we dig deeper into the circumstances surrounding Abraham’s yes, we see the prefigurement of God the Father doing what He did not finally ask Abraham to do - sacrificing His Son! The world was not redeemed of the sin of Adam and Eve by Abraham’s yes. No, a sacrifice was necessary. Adam had broken the covenant; and a new Adam would have to pay. As with Abraham, once again a human would be called to say yes to the sacrifice of a Child. But the Sacrifice would have to be of a Spotless Lamb, a Victim without blemish. God sent His perfect, beloved Son to the earth through the Womb of a human - Mary, an extraordinary human born without the stain of sin, a woman, the one that God spoke of in the Garden of Eden, who would crush the head of the enemy. She said yes to bearing a Son Who would be the Messiah, the God-man Who would be the spotless sacrificial Lamb. As with Abraham before her, Mary said yes. But unlike with Abraham, God accepted her Son as the final Sacrifice. The wood that was to be used for the sacrifice was placed on Abraham’s son Isaac’s shoulders. And then unknowingly, Issac carried the wood upon which he was to be sacrificed. Jesus carried the wood, the Cross He was to be sacrificed upon. Only with Jesus, He knew and said Yes. Abraham’s son was to be sacrificed on an Altar on top of a mountain. Jesus died on the Cross on a mountain top - Calvary. God the Father, along with His Son Jesus, paid the price for our sins, the price He did not exact from Abraham. = Who is Jesus Who comes to us under the appearance of bread and wine? Recently a teacher of Scripture, in a Catholic High School, said "They have to know Jesus before I can teach them about the Holy Eucharist." At first, we felt offended. Then it hit us, how can you revere, adore, worship a Lord you do not know? The question and answer we memorized in our youth comes to us, once more: "Why did God make us? He made us to know Him, to love Him and to serve Him." What better way, what more personal way than through the Cross, the Sacrifice of the Cross, and now the Sacrifice of the Mass, the ongoing Sacrifice of the Cross.9 Before we can adore our Jesus, hidden under the appearance of a piece of bread and a cup of wine, we have to travel with Him and the Apostles to the upper room, to the evening of Passover when they celebrated the Last Supper, together. You have to know how Jesus carefully planned, so that we could have Him with us till the end of time. You have to look inside the moment: What was Jesus thinking? Who was He thinking of? What were His feelings, as He prepared for His horrible Passion? Was His Heart breaking for His Mother who would share in His pain? Had His bleeding begun for those who would betray Him, run away from Him, deny Him, ignore Him, who would stand by and do nothing? Before we can feel passionately involved with what is happening on the Altar, we have to first know what happened to Jesus those last days and hours of His Life. We go to Jerusalem. Jesus had entered triumphantly on Palm Sunday. Here it was Thursday, the first night of the Passover. Jesus was in the upper room. Below, there was the tomb of David, the king from whose lineage, it had been foretold the Messiah would come. Jesus sat with His trusted Apostles. Before Him were the bitter herbs, the wine and the unleavened bread that the Jews would partake of at this time, each year, in commemoration of the Passover of the Jews from captivity. = We must go back in time to the Israelites and their liberation from Egypt. The Pharaoh of Egypt had enslaved the Jews. The Lord God commanded Moses to go to the Pharaoh and tell him that unless he let His people go, He would send down many plagues upon him and his people. Moses protested: His fellow Israelites (the Jews) had not listened to him; why would the Pharaoh listen to him. The Lord promised Moses that after He was finished with the Pharaoh, not only would he obey the Lord God’s commands but the hard-hearted Israelites who had refused to heed Moses, would know the power of the Lord, and obey. 10 Even after nine plagues, the Pharaoh, whom the Lord God had made stubborn for His purpose11 did not get the message. He refused to allow the Israelites to leave Egypt. The Lord God told Moses He would send a tenth plague - the death of the first born of every Egyptian household, including that of the Pharaoh. The Lord God told Moses to have the Israelites, on the tenth of the month,12 take an animal from the flock, an animal without blemish, a male one year old which could be from the sheep or the goats. They were to keep the animal until the fourteenth day of the month, when it was to be slaughtered; the blood of the animal to be placed on the doorway and lintels of the house where it was eaten. The Lord God went on to say, that very night the animal must be roasted on an open fire and then eaten with bitter herbs and unleavened bread. No part of the animal was to be left over till the morning; but should any be left over, it was to be burned. He further instructed Moses to tell the Israelites they were to eat hastily, their loins girded ready for departure. He also told Moses that He would, that night, strike down every first-born of the land, man and beast alike. The Lord God said that the blood on their lintels would be a sign they were His people; He would pass over their home, and they would escape the punishment He would inflict on the land of Egypt. The Lord God said: "This day is to be a day of remembrance for you, and you must celebrate it as a feast in the Lord God’s honor...for all generations." For seven days you must eat unleavened bread...On the first day you are to hold a sacred gathering..."13 At midnight, the Lord God struck down the first-born of every household, man and beast alike, including that of the Pharaoh. The Pharaoh called Moses, along with his brother Aaron, and pleaded with him to have the Israelites leave their land. And they did so, carrying with them, their unleavened dough. But after the Pharaoh ordered safe passage for the Israelites, he changed his mind and sent his armies after them. The Lord God opened the Red Sea for the Israelites that they might pass through unharmed. But when the Egyptians in hot pursuit, entered the Sea, it closed in on them, drowning every one of them. Moses told the people of Israel that they were to keep this day in remembrance of the day they were released from slavery, and when they celebrated this favor, granted to them by the Lord God, they were to eat only unleavened bread. They had been told by the Lord God that through His power, they would flee from Egypt. He directed them not to use leavened bread. Therefore they did not use yeast. In the Old Testament, one of the prayers said during this special feast of Passover is: "What makes this night different from other nights?" = This night, Passover, centuries later, Jesus, the Bread of Life would leave His Body under the appearance of a piece of unleavened bread, a Host, and His Blood in a chalice under the appearance of wine, so that all His children would, through His Body and Blood be freed from eternal captivity. How much did Jesus love us? He knew what was ahead for Him. He had told the Apostles, He would be betrayed and that He would have to suffer the Passion. He knew the pain His Mother would share with Him, not only this night but for all the nights and days she would remain on earth, without Him. And who was He thinking of, that night? Us! He would free us from captivity. He would once more open the Red Sea by His Blood on the Cross, and free us from the sin that separates us from Him, and continue to free us through the unbloody Sacrifice of the Mass. This is one of the few times Scripture speaks of Jesus singing. He is going to His death, a horrible death on the Cross and He is singing 14! Is it possibly because He knows that He is not really leaving us? Is it because He will be a part of us every time we receive Him in Holy Communion? Is it because He can speak to our hearts, as we keep Him company in the Blessed Sacrament? God the Father spoke to Moses and commanded that the Feast of Passover be celebrated as a commemoration of the time that He, by His power, released the Israelites from captivity. God once again is reaching out to His people, only now it is Jesus, His Son, the Second Person of the Holy Trinity: "When the hour came He took His place at table, and the apostles with Him, and He said to them, ‘I have longed to eat this Passover with you before I suffer; because I tell you, I shall not eat it again until it is fulfilled in the kingdom of God.’ "Then taking a cup, He gave thanks and said, ‘Take this and share it among you, because from now on, I shall not drink wine until the kingdom of God comes.’ "Then He took some bread and when He had given thanks, He broke it and gave it to them saying, ‘This is My Body which will be given up for you; do this as a memorial of Me.’" 15 Jesus said "Do this as a memorial of Me."16 in commemoration of this time that He, by His power, was releasing the new Jerusalem, the new Israelites, the Catholic Church from the slavery of sin. And His faithful priests are remembering Him and his Gift to us at an ongoing Last Supper, the Sacrifice of the Mass. Long before God the Father sent His Son to the earth to be the final Spotless Lamb offered to Him for the redemption of man’s sins, He, through His prophets and priests of the Old Covenant, was paving the way for Jesus’ongoing offering of Himself to the Father through the Sacrifice of the Mass. It is our Lord Who is speaking to us through the readings and the homily, teaching us once again, preaching as He did when He walked the earth. During the Offertory, it is He Who is receiving the offerings. As the Holy Spirit prepares to descend upon the Altar, it is Jesus Who is praying the Eucharistic Prayer. We see a priest or bishop but they are representing visibly the One Who is invisibly present. Whenever we have shared this truth with priests, a truth they knew and maybe have forgotten, or painfully put away with the prayer card of their ordinations, they protest at first and then say it is a humbling thing to accept. And we reply "It is an awesome responsibility, a call to holiness, to sainthood and to martyrdom, if need be. It is the Sacrifice of the Cross, only now on the Altar of Sacrifice." Our Lord has called us to be One with Him, as He is One with the Father. He desires we all be part of this Passover when He comes to us in His Word and in His Eucharist. Our Lord knows that only through His Body and His Blood can we become one body, can we be in communion with Him and the Father. He chooses man in his weakness, granting him the grace to participate in this most monumental time when Jesus offers His Heart, whether he calls him as a priest who will bring the Lord in His Word and in His Eucharist - His Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity to the Faithful; whether as a Deacon; whether as a Lector proclaiming the Readings of the Mass; or as a Minister of the Eucharist; or as one of the Faithful who exclaim with their Amen "I believe - I agree - I say Yes!" Come and find out Who is Jesus. Reference: "This Is My Body,This Is My Blood, Miracles of the Eucharist Book II by Bob and Penny Lord. www.bobandpennylord.com Endnotes:
1 Bob and Penny Lord’s book: “Martyrs, They died for Christ” |
