Why do you come to
Mass?
God has a
longstanding habit of feeding God’s people.
When, in the Book of Exodus, the whole Israelite community
is stuck in the desert, grumbling against
Moses and Aaron, God is listening.
And so God rains down bread from
heaven for them, manna, providing
for their physical needs so that the people can withstand the journey to the
promised land. The Israelite community
will come to know that this bread from
heaven offers them much more than physical sustenance, however: accompanied by God’s word, the manna offers
spiritual sustenance as well. Psalm 78
shares this story, declaring God’s glorious deeds and wonders to the generation to come, highlighting how important
memory is to our faithfulness to covenant, how essential it is for the people
to remember their story.
We must remember that
story as well, remember that God rained
manna, the bread of angels, upon
the people of Israel in their time of need.
Why? Because that bread is part of our tradition also. Just as God provided manna for the Israelites,
God provides Eucharist for us – and our survival depends upon it. For Eucharist is not mere physical
sustenance; it is, Jesus tells his disciples in John’s gospel, the food that endures for eternal life, bread,
blessed and transformed, the true bread
from heaven, spiritual sustenance that is life-giving beyond anything we
might dream of. If we accept that gift,
a gift renewed every day at Eucharist, then we must also, as Paul writes to the
Ephesians, put away the old self of
our former way of life…, be renewed in
the spirit of our minds, and put on
the new self, put on Christ. We must
be transformed in our very being.
Why do we come to
Mass? Only in Eucharist does the Lord
feed us with his very self; only in Eucharist can we take in the bread that gives life to the world, a
gift of love that transforms us, that feeds us, a gift that must then be shared
as we work, like the disciples, to
accomplish the life-giving works of
God.
Image source: www.wordle.net
No comments:
Post a Comment