THE EUCHARIST AND THE DEATH OF OUR SAVIOR

Quotiescumque manducabitis panem hunc, et calicem bibetis; mortem Domini annuntiabitis.
As often as you shall eat this bread, and drink the chalice, you shall show the death of the Lord. (1 Cor. xi. 26.)

I
FROM whatever angle the Eucharist is viewed, it reminds us in a striking manner of the death of our Lord, He instituted it on the eve of His death, "the same night in which He was betrayed," Pridie quam pateretur . . . in qua nocte tradebatur.

He called it the New Testament instituted in His Blood. Novum testamentum in sanguine meo.

The state of Jesus is one of death. At Brussels and at Paris, in 1290 and in 1369 respectively, He appeared with His wounds, like a Divine Victim.

He is without power of self-motion, without a will of His own; like a corpse that has to be carried around.

The silence of death reigns around Him. His altar is a tomb; it contains the bones of Martyrs.

A Cross rises above it; a lamp sheds light on it as it might on a tomb; the corporal which enfolds the sacred Host is a new winding-sheet, novum sudarium. When the priest makes ready for the sacrifice, he wears emblems of death; all his sacred vestments are marked with a cross, which he wears before him and behind him.

The entire setting speaks of the Cross and of death; such is the state of the Eucharist considered in itself.

II
CONSIDERED as a Sacrifice and as Communion, the Eucharist reminds us of death still more forcefully. The priest pronounces the sacramental words separately over the bread and over the wine; so that through the direct power of these words the Body ought to be separated from the Blood, and that means death. If death does not take place in reality, the reason is that the risen and glorified state of Jesus Christ prevents it. But He puts on as much of death as He can; He is in a state of death; He is "a lamb as it were slain" for us.

Thus, through His mystical death, Jesus continues the Sacrifice of the Cross, renewed thousands of times for the sins of the world.

The Savior's death is made complete in Communion. The heart of the communicant becomes His grave; for as soon as the Sacred Species have been dissolved in the stomach, His sacramental state ceases to be. The Body of Jesus Hostia is no longer within us. That is the death of the Sacrament, the consummation of the holocaust.

The heart of a just man is a grave of glory; the heart of a sinner a grave of ignominy. On losing His sacramental being in the former, our Lord deposits therein His Divinity, His Holy Spirit, and a seed of the risen life. But in the sinful heart Jesus cannot live; the purpose of the Eucharist is thwarted. Communion becomes a profanation. Our Lord dies a violent and unjust death, crucified by new executioners.

III
WHY has our Lord willed to establish so close a relation between the Sacrament of the Eucharist and His death? It was, in the first place, to remind us of the price His Sacrament cost Him.

The Eucharist, in fact, is the fruit of the death of Jesus.

The Eucharist is a testament, a legacy, which becomes valid only at the death of the testator. To give His testament legal force, Jesus had then to die. Every time we come into the presence of the Eucharist we may therefore say: "This precious testament cost Jesus Christ His life; He thereby shows us His boundless love, for He Himself said there is no greater proof of love than to lay down one's life for one's friends."

Jesus gave me the greatest proof of His love when He went to His death in order to make the Eucharist possible and give it to me. How many think of this price paid for the Eucharist? And yet Jesus is there to remind us of it. But like unnatural children we are bent only on using and enjoying our riches without ever thinking of the One Who acquired them for us at the cost of His life.

IV
ANOTHER reason for our Lord's linking the idea of death to the Eucharist is to tell us over and over again what ought to be in us the effects of the Eucharist.

The first effect is to make us die to sin and our vicious inclinations.

The second is to make us die to the world and to crucify us with Jesus Christ, according to the words of Saint Paul: Mihi mundus crucifixus est, et ego mundo. "The world is crucified to me, and I to the world."

The third is to make us die to ourselves, to our preferences, to our desires, to our senses so that we may put on Jesus Christ; in other words, that Jesus Christ may live in us, and that we may be His members, docile to His will.

The last is to make us share in His glorious Resurrection. Jesus Christ sows the seed of His own life in us; the Holy Ghost will quicken it and through it will give us a new life, but a life of glory that will never end.

These are some of the reasons that have induced Jesus to surround with emblems of death this Sacrament of life, the Sacrament in which He is glorious and in which His love is triumphant.

He wants to keep constantly before our eyes what we cost Him and what we ought to do to correspond with His love. "O God," we should say to Him with the Church, "Who in a wonderful Sacrament hast bequeathed to us the memorial of Thy Passion, grant we pray that we may so venerate the sacred mysteries of Thy Body and Blood as continuously to experience within us the fruit of Thy Redemption."


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