REFLECTIONS ON
THE “MEMORIA PASSIONIS”
REFLECTIONS ON
THE “MEMORIA PASSIONIS”
(From a Passionist Oblate day at our monastery, August 9, 2008)
O SACRUM CONVIVIUM, in quo Christus sumitur: recolitur memoria passionis eius; mens impletur gratia et futurae gloriae nobis pignus datur.
O SACRED
BANQUET, in which Christ is received,
the
memory of His
Passion is renewed, the
mind is filled with grace, and a pledge of future
glory given to us.
“Above all else, I
rejoice in the Lord that you often find yourself plunged
and immersed in the
Sacred Passion of Jesus and in the great furnace
of His Eucharistic Presence....” (St. Paul of the
Cross)
God’s
Agape Love Revealed
in the Death
and Resurrection of Jesus
(We continue to draw our reflections from Pope John Paul II as well as the excellent book, Wellspring of Worship, by Fr. Jean Corbon, O.P., a major contributor to the Catholic Catechism. If the Eucharist is the making present of the death and resurrection of Jesus, then it is important especially for Passionists to have an ever deeper understanding of it.)
Last month we
reflected on God’s outpouring, self-giving, Agape love --
that endless
stream of Divine life and mercy ever springing forth from
the throne
of God and of the Lamb --
and how this River of Life is present to us in
the Holy Eucharist
and the other sacraments.
Today, we reflect on
how God’s Agape love is revealed in the death
and resurrection of Jesus,
and how this
love is made present to us in the Holy Eucharist
in order to
transform our hearts and lives.
St. Paul
of the Cross had an infused understanding of the Passion and death
of Jesus as the work of God’s infinitely powerful love for us.
To proclaim the Word of the
Cross,
to help people enter the mystery
of the Wisdom of the Cross
in their lives
and to live in union with the One
who died on the Cross---
this was the
great motivating energy of his life and work.
He wrote: “The
Passion of Jesus is the greatest
and most
stupendous work of divine love.”
This event is meant to become
more and more real to us and transformative
for us as it was for Paul.
Since the Holy
Eucharist makes the Passion, death and resurrection of Jesus
intimately present to us, we will want to
cultivate more and more
our devotion to this incredible gift.
We will want to take an active part in the
Holy Sacrifice of the Mass
and become completely “Eucharistic”
by our willingness to take up the cross of our
daily life
and to reach out in works of mercy to the
“crucifieds” of our time.
“This sacrifice is
so decisive for the salvation of the human race
that
Jesus Christ offered it and returned to the Father only after
He had left us a means of sharing
in it as if we had been present there.
Each member of the faithful can thus take part in it
and inexhaustibly gain its fruits.”
(Pope John Paul II:
Ecclesia de Eucharistia #11)
A) The Cross -
“He emptied himself....”
(Phil 2:5-11)
The Kenosis
(Self-emptying) of the Son of God that began
at the Annunciation is completed in the cross.
Jesus
emptied Himself totally,
accepting our human condition without
reservation,
including our death.
“He loved
them to the end”
(John 13:1) –
that is, to the extreme of which the love of a
God-Man is capable.
Jesus is the only man
not caught off guard by death, like a mere victim.
He does not
undergo death as something unavoidable.
He does not
try to escape it or struggle against it as we do.
He goes to
death with sovereign freedom.
He wills it
with His whole love for the Father and for us.
“No one
takes my life from Me; I lay it down of my own free will.”
(John 10:18)
His death was freely
accepted. It was a free sacrifice of love.
The Church
in Eucharistic Prayer II puts it this way:
“Before He
was given up in death, a death He freely accepted....”
“The gift of His love and obedience to the
point of giving His life
is in the
first place a gift to His Father.
Certainly, it is a gift given for our sake...
yet it is
first and foremost a gift to the Father....”
(Ecclesia de Eucharistia
#13)
The Incarnate Word
freely offers Himself in sacrifice.
When Jesus
is arrested, He refuses to resist.
When He is
scourged, condemned, crucified, He forgives.
He returns
no violence because He does not will
the death of the sinner.
His
non-violence is not weakness. It is the transforming power of love.
His enemies want to
destroy Him, but they end up raising (exalting) on high
the true Tree of Life
whose leaves
have the power to heal them!
(Rev 22:2 and John 3:14)
"It is precisely in this that God
proves his love for us: that while we were still
sinners, Christ died for
us...for if, when we were God’s enemies, we
were reconciled to him by the death
of his Son,
it is all the more certain that
we who have been reconciled will be
saved by his life.”
(Romans 5:8,
10)
At the moment when His
kenosis is complete,
the non-violence of His love is Almighty.
He dies in order to give life to those who crucified
Him.
In His death, divine life gushes forth for us.
Jesus pouring Himself out on the
Cross is the revelation
of God’s Agape love for us–
“the most stupendous work of
God’s love.”
(St. Paul of
the Cross)
We need to gaze long and lovingly
at His face in these awesome
mysteries of divine love, and enter within His
Heart.
Love is repaid by love alone.
"They shall look upon
Him whom they have pierced through.”
(Zec 12:10, John 19:37 and
Rev 1:7)
St. Paul of the Cross
would have us make this mystery our own through love:
“Love is a unifying virtue which takes upon
itself the torments of its beloved
Lord. It is a fire reaching through to the
inmost soul.
It transforms the lover into the one
loved.
More deeply, love intermingles with
grief and grief with love,
And a certain blending of love and
grief occurs.
They become so united that we can no
longer
Distinguish love from grief nor
grief from love.”
(St. Paul of the Cross)
And as we gaze prayerfully at Jesus in this
stupendous mystery of love we
see that even in the darkness of Calvary, the
outpouring,
Agape love of the Blessed Trinity
is shining
forth in the Humanity of the Son of God.
In the act
of dying, Jesus gives Himself wholly to His Father;
He hands
over His Breath, His Spirit for us.
Jesus
dies in an act of the utmost love, and this obedient,
Self-emptying of the God-Man’s
love redeems the world!
It is this act of love in the Heart of Christ Crucified
that we are to make more and more
our own.
With Mary our Mother,
we pray for the infusion of the Holy Spirit
that we
might know, truly know by loving experience
Our Lord in
the power of His resurrection
and the
fellowship of His sufferings.
(cf Phil 3: 10)
At the moment of His
death,
the veil of the sanctuary is rent from top to
bottom.
The true
“Holy of Holies” is thus revealed and we are invited in.
The divine
energy of the River of Life, the Wellspring of Love,
is now pouring forth from the Body of the
Beloved Son, the slain Lamb
and we are allowed to drink.
This is the most important
event in human history.
It is the beginning of the new creation.
The death
and resurrection of Jesus are not two events.
They are two phases of a single event and mystery.
We call this the Paschal Mystery.
And “The Church was born of the Paschal
Mystery.
For this very reason the Eucharist...stands at
the center of the Church’s
life.”
(Ecclesia de Eucharistia
#2)
“The Church draws
her life from the Eucharist....
The Second Vatican Council rightly proclaimed that
the Eucharistic Sacrifice
is the source and summit of the
Christian life.
For the most Holy Eucharist contains
the Church’s entire spiritual
wealth:
Christ Himself, our passover and living Bread.
Through His own flesh, now made living and life-giving
by the Holy Spirit,
He offers life to men.”
(Ecclesia
de Eucharistia #1)
B) The Resurrection
- Christ Becomes a Life-giving Spirit
(I Cor 15:45b, 2 Cor 3:17)
By His death and resurrection, Jesus opened paradise for us.
At the moment of the
Resurrection,
the Father
fills the dead Body of His Beloved Son with His own Breath.
The Body that rises living from the tomb is no
longer a body that
experiences human thirst.
It is now
and forever the Body of the Wellspring of Life.
Pope John Paul speaks
of the Paschal Mystery as being
the “wellspring” of the
Church.
He continues:
The
Paschal Triduum “is gathered up, foreshadowed and
concentrated forever in the
gift of the Eucharist.
In this gift, Jesus Christ
entrusted to His Church the perennial making
present of the Paschal Mystery.
With it, He brought about a mysterious oneness in time
between that Triduum and the passage of the centuries.
This thought should lead us to profound amazement and gratitude.
In the Paschal
event and the Eucharist which makes it present
throughout the centuries, there
is a truly enormous capacity
which embraces all of history
as the recipient of the grace of the redemption.
This amazement should always fill
the Church assembled for the
celebration of the Eucharist.”
(Ecclesia de
Eucharistia #5)
Easter is the day of
the new creation delivered from death.
Jesus risen from the dead is the “Beginning”
of the New Covenant struck by the
Resurrection.
The consent of the Son
to His eternal birth from the Father
completely
permeates the Body of His sacred Humanity.
Jesus rises
from the tomb as a “life-giving Spirit.”(1
Cor 15: 45b, 2 Cor 3:17)
Let us not
imagine this event as being a thing of the past!
It
did occur once and for all in history.
But
the resurrection of Jesus is not in the past,
for
if it were, this would mean Jesus did not conquer death.
The
historical circumstances of His death are of the past,
but the death of Jesus was by its very nature the death of our death.
Once time is delivered from death, it no longer passes.
In #1085
of the Catholic Catechism we read:
“
In the liturgy of the
Church, it is principally his own Paschal mystery that
Christ signifies and
makes present. During his earthly life Jesus announced
his Paschal mystery by
his teaching and anticipated it by his actions. When
his Hour comes, he lives
out the unique event of history which does not pass
away: Jesus dies, is buried,
rises from the dead, and is seated at the right
hand of the Father ‘once for
all.’ His Paschal mystery is a real event that
occurred in our history, but it is unique: all other historical events happen
once, and then they pass away, swallowed up in the past. the Paschal
mystery of
Christ, by contrast, cannot remain only in the past, because by his
death he
destroyed death, and all that Christ is - all that he did and suffered
for all
men - participates in the divine eternity, and so transcends all times
while
being made present in them all. The event of the Cross and
Resurrection abides
and draws everything toward life.”
And from
Pope John Paul II:
“The
Mass makes present the sacrifice of the Cross;
it does not add to that sacrifice nor does it multiply it.
What is repeated is its memorial celebration...
which makes Christ’s one
definitive redemptive sacrifice always
present in time.
The
sacrificial nature of the Eucharistic mystery
cannot therefore be understood
as something separate, independent of the Cross,
or only indirectly referring to the sacrifice of Calvary.”
(Ecclesia de
Eucharistia #12)
Again, the Catholic
Catechism tells us:
#1104 Christian
liturgy not only recalls the events that saved us but
actualizes them, makes
them present. The Paschal mystery of Christ is
celebrated, not repeated. It is
the celebrations that are repeated, and in
each celebration there is an
outpouring of the Holy Spirit that makes the
unique mystery present.
The
event that is the cross and resurrection of Jesus does not pass away.
[The sacrifice of Christ] “does not remain confined to the past,
since all that Christ is, and all that He did and suffered for all
men,
participates in the divine eternity,
and so transcends all times.”
(Ecclesia de
Eucharistia #11)
This
“hour”of Jesus is not in the past.
It simply is, it abides, it lives on throughout our time and sustains
it.
It transcends time and space.
We recall once again
what Pope John Paul said:
“This sacrifice is
so decisive for the salvation of the human race
that
Jesus Christ offered it and returned to the Father
only after He had left us a means of sharing
in it
as if we had been present there.
Each
member of the faithful can thus take part in it
and
inexhaustibly gain its fruits.
This is the faith from which generations of
Christians down the
ages have lived.”
(Ecclesia de Eucharistia
#11)
Since that moment [the
event of the Paschal Mystery of Christ],
the communion of the Blessed Trinity has
unceasingly been spreading
throughout our world,
flooding
our time with its fullness, and taking the form of liturgy.
The Church, in
Eucharistic Prayer III, calls the Eucharist
“a holy and living sacrifice.”
What we are offering to the Father is
“the
Victim whose death has reconciled us” to God.
Here in
the Mass, as well as in our private Eucharistic adoration
and in all our prayers, works, relationships and sufferings,
we Passionists are meant to become more and more
"devoted to the Passion of
Jesus,”
to this greatest and most overwhelming work of God’s love,
as St. Paul of the Cross put it.
We read in the
Catholic Catechism’s section on prayer:
#2655 In the sacramental
liturgy of the Church, the mission of Christ and of
the Holy Spirit proclaims,
makes present, and communicates the mystery of
salvation,
which is continued in the heart that prays. The
spiritual writers
sometimes compare the heart to an altar. Prayer internalizes
and assimilates
the liturgy during and after its celebration. Even when it is
lived out "in
secret," prayer is always prayer of the Church; it is a communion
with the
Holy Trinity.
In #50 of Ecclesia
de Eucharistia, Pope John Paul II expressed the hope that
the whole
Church would become
“a
profoundly Eucharistic Church
in which the presence of the mystery of Christ
in the broken bread
is as it
were immersed in the ineffable unity of the three divine Persons
making the Church herself an icon of the
Trinity.”
(Pope
John Paul is
referring to Rublev’s famous depiction of the Trinity, with the
Eucharist at the heart.)
In #1109 of the
Catholic Catechism we find these beautiful words:
"The grace of the Lord
Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of
the Holy Spirit" have to
remain with us always and bear fruit beyond the
Eucharistic celebration.
The Church therefore asks the Father to send the
Holy
Spirit to make the lives of the faithful a living sacrifice to God by their
spiritual transformation into the image of Christ, by concern for the Church's
unity, and by taking part in her mission through the witness and service of
charity.
May this truly be the precious fruit the death and resurrection of Jesus
bears in our
hearts and lives!
*************************************************************
Prayer Starters:
1) Repeat with gentle
love: “All that I want is to know Christ in the power of
His
resurrection, to know how to share in His sufferings and to be formed in the
pattern of His death.”
(Phil 3:10)
2) Ponder:
“This sacrifice is
so decisive for the salvation of the human race
that
Jesus Christ offered it and returned to the Father
only after He had left us a means of sharing
in it as if we had been
present there.
Each
member of the faithful can thus take part in it
and
inexhaustibly gain its fruits.
3) What difference at
Mass would it make for you, if the truth expressed in
#2 really took hold of you?
4) What does sharing
in His sacrifice mean?
5) Ponder:
“He called the
bread His living Body and He filled it with Himself
and His Spirit....
He who
eats it with faith, eats Fire and Spirit....
Take and
eat this, all of you, and eat with it the Holy Spirit.
For it is truly My Body and whoever eats it
will have eternal life.”
(Ecclesia de Eucharistia
#17, quoting St. Ephrem)
6) Words of Wisdom
from Pope Benedict XVI:
“The Eucharist is our most beautiful
treasure. It is the sacrament par
excellence; it introduces us early into
eternal life; it contains the whole
mystery of our salvation; it is the source
and summit of the action and of the
life of the Church.
“Therefore, it is particularly important that pastors and faithful
dedicate
themselves permanently to furthering their knowledge of this great
sacrament.
“I would like everyone to make a commitment to study this great
mystery...so as to bear witness courageously to the mystery. In this way,
each
person will arrive at a better grasp of the meaning of every aspect of
the
Eucharist, understanding its depth and living it with greater intensity.
Every
sentence, every gesture has its own meaning and conceals a mystery.”
7) These words from
#478 of the Catholic Catechism contain riches that quiet
contemplative prayer
can yield:
“Jesus knew
and loved us each and all during his life, his agony, and
his Passion, and gave
himself up for each one of us. ‘The Son of God…loved
me and gave himself for
me.’ (Gal 2:20) He has loved us all with a human
heart. For this reason, the
Sacred Heart of Jesus, pierced by our sins and for
our salvation, is quite
rightly considered the chief sign and symbol of
that…love with which the divine
Redeemer continually loves the eternal
Father and all human beings without
exception.”
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