Sunday, 8/3/14
This miracle of feeding five thousand with just five loaves
is the only miracle told in detail in all four Gospels.
A strange thing is that the sequence of Our Lord’s actions
is the same in four accounts: he took, he blessed, he broke, he gave. Rightly
or not, churchmen feel that in writing these Bible accounts, the writers followed the sequence they had been
following for years in their Sunday Masses.
I have been away for three days, so forgive me for filling
in here with thoughts on the Mass that I have talked about before.
Twenty years ago a fine priest who has since passed on asked
me to give a talk on the Eucharist at a weekend retreat. I told him I had
things I’d like to say, but he insisted that my talk should follow closely on a
book on the Mass that he gave me to study.
The book insisted that the Mass be seen as following closely
on the prayers offered by Jesus at the Last Supper. Jesus followed the three
parts of a traditional table blessing.
For the first part the table blessing the host urges the
people to recall the great favors they had received from God.
For the second part of the blessing the host begs God to
send his Spirit on the diners to unite them and to empower them to speak to
God.
For the third part of the traditional blessing the host
asked the diners to join him as parts of a pleasing gift to God. The pleasing
gift would consist in everyone subjecting themselves to God’s will.
The Greek word
they used for pleasing gift was Eucharist.
Both Luke and Paul told us that it was just when they were arriving at that
third part of the table blessing that Jesus took bread, broke it, and gave it,
saying, “This is my body.”
The reason that it was just at that time that he gives his
body and blood to us is so that we might be not only mentally one with him in
the Pleasing Gift., but that we be physically one with him as part of the Pleasing Gift, of the
Eucharist.
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