Episode Transcript
[00:00:12] Speaker A: Welcome to the Blessed Sacrament Homilies podcast, where our mission is to help everyone recognize and experience the presence of God. We hope you are nourished and encouraged by the word. Thank you for joining us.
[00:00:25] Speaker B: The Lord be with you and with your spirit. A reading from the holy gospel according to Mark. Glory to you, O Lord.
On the first day of the feast of unleavened bread, when they sacrificed the Passover lamb, Jesus disciples said to him, where do you want us to go and prepare for you to eat the Passover?
He sent two of his disciples and said to them, go into the city and a man will meet you carrying a jar of water.
Follow him wherever he enters. Say to the master of the house, the teacher says, where is my guest room where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?
Then he will show you a large upper room, furnished and ready.
Make the preparations for us there.
The disciples then went off, entered the city and found it just as he had told them, and they prepared the Passover.
While they were eating, he took bread, said the blessing, broke it and gave it to them and said, take it, this is my body.
Then he took a cup, gave thanks and gave it to them, and they all drank from it.
He said to them, this is my blood of the covenant, which will be shed for many.
Amen, I say to you, I shall not drink it again of the fruit of the vine until the day when I drink it, new in the kingdom of God.
Then, after singing a hymn, they went out to the Mount of Olives, the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ.
If you normally do not take a bulletin with you, take one this weekend.
Not because I want you to have the schedule of what's going on or anything like that, but I want you to have the COVID of it. Because the COVID of this week's bulletin is a quote from St. Teresa of Avila, reminding us of who we are, of what we're about and what we're supposed to do.
It's reminding us that Christ's presence in the world now is up to us, that we are the effort that happens. We are his eyes, we are his hands, we do his work, and that's what we're commissioned to do as baptized christians.
But if you want to know in a very clear way what Jesus did for us, these readings give us a pretty clear understanding.
Because the letter to the Hebrews reminds us that God was separated from the people. God was confined to the holiest of holies, and only one person, the priest of that year, was allowed to even go in there and be before him, while Jesus tore down that wall, ripped up that curtain, and brought God's presence out of the sanctuary and into us, allowing himself to be not just around us or near us, but intimately connected, living a part of us.
And the Eucharist, for us that we celebrate today, the body and blood of Christ, is the food we need to allow that to happen, because it's his presence that literally becomes bone of our bone and flesh of our flesh.
And it's important for us to always remember that the Eucharist is not thing, and it is easy sometimes to get that confused. We speak of it, but it's not an it.
The Eucharist is a living encounter with Christ in the same sense that none of you are. It's, I wouldn't go and have lunch with Mike Knoff and say, well, I looked at it.
We wouldn't. Well, maybe, but he wouldn't do that.
I'd said, I was with Mike. We were together for lunch. Well, the Eucharist is that encounter. It is being in the real active presence of Jesus Christ, and he becomes part of us.
And if you ever want to see the most real living eucharistic procession, you can see as you leave church today, look around at the people walking out of the doors, because that's exactly what we're doing. We're taking the presence of Christ that becomes one with us as we gather around this table. We're taking that presence out into the world. We're taking it to our occupations. We're taking it to our schools. We're taking it to the playgrounds. We're taking it to the grocery store.
We're making Christ present as St. Teresa on the front of the bulletin reminds us.
And while that can seem like it is an awesome responsibility that we could never live up to, we're reminded that it's not an individual thing.
It's each and every one of us gathered together as the living body of Christ, that we all do it together.
So when one of us is having an off day, not me, because I never have an off day, but you might, we rely on everybody else to kind of pick up the slack. We're doing it together. We are the living body of Christ.
This day is the day we celebrate that not just as our parish blessed sacrament, but as the church throughout the world. We make Christ present and active.
