OT XIII [C]: I Kgs 19:16b, 19-21; Gal 5:1, 13-18; Lk 9:51-62

Jesus is traveling to Jerusalem for the last time.  Along the way, he meets three men who have heard his call in their hearts. These encounters teach us three tough lessons about what it means to follow Christ. To follow Christ, we have to transfer our sense of security.  We have to relocate it from ourselves to God. We have to unlearn the lesson we have been taught our whole life long, to rely only on ourselves for success and happiness. We have to learn to rely wholly upon God, plugging all our efforts in life into his grace. This is what Jesus means when he says that "foxes have dens and birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of man has nowhere to rest his head."

Christ is trustworthy, but he is not predictable. When we follow him, we have to agree to go one step and one day at a time - he refuses to give us a full-life outline in advance. When we follow him, we have to stop pretending that we can keep our lives under control by our own efforts. By accepting Christ's friendship, we agree to follow him, to put our lives under his leadership.

The prophet Elisha gives us an eloquent example of this transferal of our security in the First Reading. When Elijah comes and calls him [Elisha] to become his successor as Israel's prophet, Elisha goes back home to tie up loose ends. And he really ties them up.

He was a farmer. His whole livelihood, his whole way of life, was linked to his farm. This was how he made his way in the world. Up until the time of his calling, this was the source of his security. But when God makes his will known, Elisha doesn't hesitate to break completely with that former way of life. He doesn't just leave the farm behind. He actually slaughters his most important farm animals and burns his most precious tools - offering them all to the Lord as a sign that from now on he will depend on God for his livelihood and his happiness. Not everyone is called to serve God in this way, by consecrating their lives completely to the Church. But all Christians are called to make a spiritual offering to God of our oxen and our plows, of those things, talents, or activities that we tend to depend on instead of God.

God can only fill our lives with the meaning and fruitfulness we long for if we put him first, trusting that he will lead us better than we can lead ourselves.

 

We live in a fallen world. When we declare ourselves to be citizens of Christ's Kingdom, in a sense, we lose our citizenship in this world; we become aliens, refugees waiting to return home to heaven, or, as sacred Scripture often affirms, pilgrims. This earth is no longer our home, and the closer we get to Christ, the more we realize it, the more we feel its sufferings and imperfections. Christ only reached Easter Sunday by passing through Good Friday, and Christians can expect nothing less.

Two young martyrs names are mentioned in the First Eucharistic prayer: Saints Perpetua and Felicity. Their lives are so challenging to any Christian of all times. Perpetua, a young noblewoman and her slave Felicity, were martyred for their faith in A.D. 203, under emperor Severus. At the time of their arrest, Perpetua had an infant son, and Felicity was pregnant and a couple of days before their martyrdom she also gave birth.

Prior to their arrest, the women had been studying the Scriptures and were preparing for baptism. They were baptized in prison by their teacher, who was imprisoned with them. Their prison warden was so inspired by their faith that he converted.

While she was in prison, Perpetua wrote about the circumstances leading up to their death in a diary that was later published as The Passion of Saints Perpetua and Felicity – one of the earliest writings by a Christian woman. Perpetua’s mother was a Christian but her father was a Pagan.

In that diary she described: While we were still under arrest, my father out of love for me was trying to persuade me and shake my resolution.

“Father,” said I, “do you see this vase here, for example?”

“Yes, I do,” said he.

And I told him: “Could it be called by any other name than what it is?”

And he said: “No.”

“Well, so too I cannot be called anything other than what I am, a Christian.”

Despite threats of persecution and death, Perpetua, Felicity refused to renounce their Christian faith.

In her diary, Perpetua describes her period of captivity: “What a day of horror! Terrible heat, owing to the crowds! Rough treatment by the soldiers! To crown all, I was tormented with anxiety for my baby…. Such anxieties I suffered for many days, but I obtained leave for my baby to remain in the prison with me, and being relieved of my trouble and anxiety for him, I at once recovered my health, and my prison became a palace to me and I would rather have been there than anywhere else.”

Perpetua and Felicity were thrown into an arena of wild animals, but they were not killed. Tragically, the emperor Severus then commanded that they be put to death by the sword.

Persecution for religious beliefs is not confined to Christians in ancient times. Consider Anne Frank, the Jewish girl who with her family, was forced into hiding and later died in Bergen-Belsen, one of Hitler’s death camps during World War II. Anne, like Perpetua and Felicity, endured hardship and suffering and finally death because she committed herself to God. In her diary, Anne writes, “It’s twice as hard for us young ones to hold our ground, and maintain our opinions, in a time when all ideals are being shattered and destroyed, when people are showing their worst side, and do not know whether to believe in truth and right and God.” Perptual and Felicity did not have a long history of the Church before them only a little over a hundred years. How could two young mothers with babies not older than a couple of weeks say I love Christ more than my own life and my babies? Can you and I do that? Let’s think over it and check how strong our faith in Christ is.

 

THE MOST HOLY BODY AND BLOOD OF CHRIST [C] (Gn 14:18-20, 1Cor 11:23-26, Lk 9: 11b-17)

The Solemnity of Easter was the revelation of Jesus as the Son of God and his oneness with God the Father. At the end of the Easter season we celebrated the Pentecost, the revelation of the Holy Spirit as the third person of the Trinity and His oneness with the Father and Son. Last Sunday we had the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, the worship of the One God in three different persons. And, today we have the Feast of the Most holy Body and Blood of Christ, honoring the sacrifice of Christ.

At the heart of the system of worship in the Old Testament is sacrifice: the offering to God of the best that humanity has to give Him. Much of the book of Leviticus is given over to setting out how the people of Israel are to worship God with sacrifice. Indeed, from the beginning of Genesis, the importance of right worship is a theme we find in the narrative: there is the story of Cain and Abel and the offerings they make, and we encounter too the slightly mysterious figure of Melchizedek, priest of the Most High God, and his offering of bread and wine about which we read in today’s first reading. He is the first priest mentioned in the Bible, and he comes long before the Jewish priesthoods of Aaron and Levi are established. Melchizedek is therefore an example of religion before Scripture. Human beings existed long before recorded history; the stories in the Bible are actually very recent in the grand sweep of human existence. Melchizedek is a sign of God’s care for human beings before he chose his Chosen People. In Psalm 101, Jesus Christ is predicted — a king from before the dawn of time who will outlast time, and a priest from before priesthood whose sacrifice will end all sacrifice.

Alongside those texts which speak of the need to worship with sacrifice, we also find passages of the Old Testament which treat sacrifice as a much more ambivalent phenomenon. ‘I desire steadfast love and not sacrifice,’ (Hosea 6:6), ‘the knowledge and love of God is greater than burnt offerings.’ In Psalm 49(50), animal sacrifice seems almost to be mocked: ‘Do you think I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?’ Sacrifice – the attempt to give anything, even what we hold most valuable, to God – is always going to fall short, because at the most fundamental level we don’t have anything to give Him which is not already His. Thus, one of the dangers of offering sacrifice is that we can think that, by giving God something valuable, we have in some sense ‘bought Him off’ and done our bit in relation to God, so that we can then act as we choose without further reference to Him. This is the attitude Isaiah criticizes when he says, ‘bring your worthless offerings no more’ (1:13), and ‘stop doing evil! Learn to do right; seek justice and correct the oppressor, defend the fatherless and plead the case of the widow’ (1:16-17).

But if the offering of sacrifice is so problematic, or liable to misunderstanding as it seems to be from the history of the Old Testament, why is it nonetheless such an important element of the worship? In the context of today’s feast of the Body and Blood of Christ, we can find part of the answer in the sacrifice of Christ, the perfection of humans’ worship of God. The Old Testament teaches us that sacrifice – despite the dangers of misunderstanding and abuse – is important because that helps us to understand what Christ does for us on the Cross. His offering, unlike human beings’ earlier attempts, really is perfect and sufficient, because the life he freely offers to the Father is the life he shares with the Father from all eternity, an offering more precious than the whole of the universe or anything in it and an offering which is as much the Son’s to give, as it is the Father’s to receive.

Because Christ’s offering is perfect, a worthy sacrifice to give to God, human beings, in Christ, can now offer truly acceptable worship to God. Not only has Christ offered himself, once for all, as a perfect and living sacrifice, but he has given us the means to participate in that sacrifice in a manner appropriate to our earthly life, allowing us – the Church, his Body – to offer his Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity to the Father under the appearance of bread and wine. The sacrifice of the Mass is the source and summit of our Christian life because it simply is the praise and worship of God in which the life of heaven consists. As the book of Revelation presents, there is a constant praise and worship of God by the denizens of Heaven.

The Eucharist follows this pattern. There is constant praise and worship of God for giving us a second birth through Christ who sacrificed himself for us and shares himself with us. How Jesus shares himself is well represented in the miracle of the Gospel today. Jesus took the loaves and fishes that the Apostles gave him, and he multiplied them.

We give to God simple bread and wine. Then, through the ministry of the priest, Jesus takes these gifts, blesses them, and transforms them into his very self, his real presence. Our offerings represent our lives and work. Our offerings are both the fruits of our labor, and the means by which we stay alive. He wants us to give him our lives, our work, our resources, our talents, our time, thereby our whole week’s life, every efforts our week becomes a sacrifice. He will transform what we give to him with his grace, and make them blossom in ways far beyond we could ever imagine. We should never live it as an empty ritual or dry obligation.

When we bring our everything to him for his blessing: Our sicknesses, spiritual and physical, he can bless us with healing, spiritual or physical, as he sees best for our souls. St. Cyril of Alexandria said. “The Savior will multiply the little you have beyond expectation.”

To give due honor to the Body and Blood of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament involves those ritual actions by which we express our faith in the real presence, like worthy celebrating the Mass, offering everything without restraint, taking time communicating with Jesus after the reception of the Holy communion, spending time before the blessed sacrament etc., but more than that, it involves living a life which expresses that mystery of God’s love for humanity through the Eucharist, we share. So, on this feast of the Eucharist, let’s ask for the grace to help us grow in appreciation of the most real presence of God among us.