Email Guidelines Guidelines Eucharistic Celebration - Part II
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The food of truth – the word and the Eucharist...
MONDAY
John 8:32 “And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall set you free.”
The theme of this week’s readings is “The food of truth – the word and the Eucharist”. We are looking at the relationship between the physical presence of Christ in the Mass, in the bread and wine, and its relationship with the Word of God read to us at Mass and explained to us in the homily, which teaches us that Christ comes as real food and real drink for us.
The truth that John’s gospel refers to is that Jesus’ whole life is given up for us. John 3:16 “God so loved the world that he gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life”. The whole purpose of his life and ministry was to give us life to the full.
Jesus help us to be aware of your presence in our lives, that you long to be real food and drink for us and that you want to give us life to the full.
TUESDAY
John 14:16 “And I will pray to the father and he will give you another helper, that he may abide with you forever.”
We are concentrating in these readings on the homily, and its importance in the Mass. In the Mass the priest shares with us the significance of what we read in the scriptures and its impact on our lives.
He is hopefully talking to us about what has been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit, the truth of our faith, which is God’s amazing grace. In spite of failures, and our weakness, God welcomes us home to his house of love.
The call of the priest is to remind us of God’s amazing mercy and forgiveness, without which our relationship with God remains distant and not at all inspiring to ourselves or others.
Help us to listen attentively each Mass to God’s word of grace and mercy. Help us not just to listen with our ears, but to open our hearts to live lives transformed by grace.
WEDNESDAY
The central purpose of the homily is to introduce us for the first time, or to remind us that our lives are meant to be lived in dialogue or a conversation with God, in truth and free from false ideas or perceptions. The word Homily comes from the Greek Homilein, meaning dialogue. Our life is meant to be attentiveness to what he wants for our lives.
We are called to share this reality with others, yet there are times when our witness is not so well received. Perhaps the people at or workplace or in the wider secular world, just don’t want to hear about our faith, or worse still make fun of us
In this reading Jesus is hustled out of the village and they try to throw him down a cliff. It can be hard, but we are called to hold on to our faith and allow the Holy Spirit to help us find ways to share our faith with others.
I invite you to prayerfully read verses 18-19 again.
“The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He has anointed Me to preach the gospel to the poor; He has sent me to heal the broken-hearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to set at liberty those who are oppressed; to proclaim the acceptable year of the Lord”.
THURSDAY
Today’s reading is taken from the gospel of the day. The focus all this week has been the role of the homily in the Eucharistic service.
This reading is all about hearing the word of God and putting it into practice. There are times when we don’t listen to God and end up pursuing our own aims instead of God’s aims, when we put ourselves first.
God longs to feed us with his word in order that we can reach out to others in their need. We can be real life for others
The words spoken to us by the priest illuminates for us what we hear in the scriptures and how that relates to the Eucharist we celebrate. The Eucharist which we reflected on last week is a thanksgiving for the life of Christ in us.
In giving thanks we receive all that Christ has to give us, complete healing and sending us out to be food for others. We are their source of life, healing and hope, as we introduce them to the life of Christ alive within us.
Lord, help us to become true witnesses to the life you give us. Help us to reach out to those overburdened by a sense of guilt of past failings, weighed down by past hurts, and left empty by the sometimes aggressive secularism of our modern world.
FRIDAY
Once again the focus of today’s reflection is the role of the homily in the Eucharist.
The gospel for today is from Matthew’s gospel where Jesus heals the leper, who is nameless. This is such a small detail, but it signifies that that man’s sins were known to God, and God healed him. It was not just a physical healing but a spiritual healing.
We all have our spiritual leprosy – our own broken nature which needs real healing. We can be healed by a tender God who loves us for who we are.
He sends us out to be a source of healing for other people.
The Creed which we say after the scripture readings and homily affirms all we believe. For me it is grabbing my attention on what the Eucharist is all about.
When I take Christ in to me, he not only completely forgives me but enables me to enter into a complete intimate, personal relationship with His Father, His daddy and my daddy. Our ‘Abba’.
It is the breaking down of a barrier between me and God. By taking in the body and blood of Christ I am accepting that all the distance and barriers between me and God have been taken away by the act of Jesus dying on the cross. Jesus has destroyed the power of sin and brought us to new life in Christ.
Thank you Lord that by going through the terrible suffering and death on the Cross you broke down the barrier between me and God and destroyed the power of death and sin over my life.
©Verbum Dei * 2010
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