The Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (B), June 7, 2015 – Ex 24, 3-8; Heb 9, 11-15; Mk 14, 12-16. 22-26

He is mediator of a new covenant (Heb 9, 15)

To belong to the new covenant is to draw our life from Jesus’ love and to live loving as he did.

Since Jesus shed his own blood for us, not the blood of sacrificial animals, he could not love us any better. Nor could there be a better high priest of the things that have come to be. Nor could God show us his love any better, for “he proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.”

And the love of the one who sent us his only Son to save us, not to condemn us, enables us to love. “We love because he first loved us.” This same love has gathered us together besides, so that, loving like Jesus, we become part of the new people of God.

Those who are perfected in love, belonging indeed to the New Testament, are to the world what Jesus was, namely, the presence of God’s love. Theirs is the calling to leaven all humanity as the yeast does to the whole batch.

So then, we Christians come from divine love and we return to the same love. And since this love is effectively signified in the Eucharist, through the outpouring of the called-upon Holy Spirit, rightly is the Eucharist considered “the fount and apex of the whole Christian life” (LG 11). The Eucharist challenges us who draw our life from it to live in the manner of the one who, possessed of a “love that is inventive even to infinity,” instituted this august Sacrament (SV.FR XI:142-148). This, in effect, means that the “Eucharist commits us to the poor” (CCC 1397).

Of course, St. Vincent de Paul successfully met the challenge. He was as creative as when he conceived of and accomplished great projects as when he proposed, seeing himself not excused, despite his age, from the responsibility to evangelize the poor: “If I cannot preach every day, then I will preach twice a week; if I cannot go to important pulpits, I will try to have the unimportant ones; and if I am not heard there, what could stop me from talking plainly and familiarly to these good folks, just as I am speaking to you now, making them to gather around me just as you are now?” (SV.FR XI:136)

That is because the saint learned to start, right where he was, to draw life from creative love and to live loving in a concrete way as Jesus did.

Lord, may our participation in the mystery of your body and blood make us partakers of your inventive love.

Ross Reyes Dizon

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