Homily Notes based on Encylical Letter Ecclesia de Eucharistia The Mystery of Faith

The Eucharist is the source and summit of the Church’s life and mission. The Church draws her life from the mystery of Christ’s celebration of the Last Supper, through his passion and death on the cross. This is what is re-presented each time we celebrate the Eucharist. From earliest times the Church in the Acts of the Apostles witnessed to the “teaching of the Apostles”, “prayer” and the “breaking of bread”. At each Eucharist we are brought back to the Passover celebrated in the Upper Room in Jerusalem and what followed. There we are united through a “oneness of time” with the giving of Christ’s blood on the cross of sacrifice. In the celebration of that Passover meal Christ’s giving of himself was presented and anticipated in the breaking of the bread. At this celebration the gift he spoke about, as recorded in Chapter 6 of John’s Gospel, is given and his promise to give his “flesh as real food” and his “blood as real drink” is realised. This gift is given to the Church, to us as members of that visible body of Christ on earth, as food for our journey on our common pilgrimage of faith. Our incorporation into Christ, which begins at Baptism, is nourished and sustained. Christ is present in many ways in the life of the Church, his presence is real, but that “real presence” of which we speak in the Eucharist is a presence par excellence, a gift without equal, a gift which is not confined to something that happened in the past because all that Christ is participates in the Divine and transcends all time. What is repeated each time we celebrate the Eucharist is the eternal ever present and definitive sacrifice of Christ. The Eucharist cannot be fully understood as something separate from the Cross on which He died. In one of our acclamations after the consecration we say, “Dying you destroyed our death, Rising you restored our life, Lord Jesus, Come in glory” The Eucharist is a mystery of Faith, we are encouraged to see beyond what is visible to our senses and recognise another presence. Before this mystery human reason fully experiences its limitations. We can understand how during the centuries this truth has stimulated theology in the search for understanding of so great a mystery.

Faith seeking understanding is the very bedrock of our human search for a greater appreciation of the Divine.

The Eucharist points us towards a goal, “until you come in glory”. We are invited to get involved now so that our journey to the kingdom of the Father and the realisation of our full potential as people created in the image and likeness of God is part of life and part of death. The pledge of future resurrection comes from the fact that the flesh of the Son of Man, given as food, is that of the Son of Man already risen from the dead, “the first fruits of all that sleep”. Proclaiming the death of the Lord in the mystery of faith entails that we who take part in the Eucharist be committed to changing our lives to make them completely at one with the sacrifice Christ made of himself.

The Eucharist builds the unity of the Church, the unity of the faithful. The Eucharist both expresses unity and brings unity about. At our presence at the celebration of the Eucharist we express and celebrate that desire for a greater oneness with Christ. In receiving him in Holy Communion we go a step further in renewing our efforts. St Paul asks, “The bread which we break, is it not a communion in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread we, who are many, are one body for we all partake of the one bread”. St John Chrysostom reminds us “we are naturally joined to one another and together united in Christ”. The gift of Christ which we receive in Communion fulfils that yearning for fraternal union deeply rooted in the human heart and at the same time elevates the experience of fraternity already present in our common sharing at the same Eucharistic table to a degree which surpasses that of the simple sharing of an ordinary meal. The seed of disunity, which experience shows to be equally rooted in humanity as a result of the effects of sin, can be overcome by the transforming power of accepting Christ’s unequivocal call to daily conversion.