Tag Archives: Gospel

Devotion to the Mother of the Eucharist

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When St. Luke wrote his account of the human origins of Our Lord, he wanted to make an important connection to Our Lady as the Ark of the New Covenant.  Likewise, St. John saw the need to make this connection more explicit in the Book of Revelation when he describes seeing the Ark of the Covenant in heaven and then describing it in terms that could only apply to Our Lady (c.f. Rev 11:19-12:5).  It was during Our Lady’s fiat at the Annunciation that she embraced her vocation as the true Ark of Covenant.  The Bread of Life, the True Bread Come Down from Heaven, was baked within her womb.  Her womb then became the first tabernacle as she embraced her title as Mother of the Eucharist.

Our Lady is Mother of the Second Person of the Trinity, the Son of God, who took His body and blood from her, created a soul for Himself and united it to His divinity in her womb.  In this way, the title is not surprising.  For that same Divine Person in an analogous way repeats the act on the altar during the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.  Each time Christ takes flesh on the altar, an echo of Our Lady’s fiat is heard as the Church gives birth to Our Lord in His Eucharistic presence. 

Mary, Model of the Communicant

Mary’s Annunciation then is the model for all of us in receiving the Eucharist.  With her Amen, Our Lord took flesh in her womb.  In so doing, she received an abundance of sanctifying grace.  Because she was perfectly disposed she received not just a spiritual but a physical participation in the divine life of the Trinity.  The difference is not just one of degree however.  According to Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange, Christ gives Himself so that we might live by Him, but in Mary He not only did this but also deemed to live by her and receive life from her. 

We ought to imitate her disposition as Christ seeks to unite His flesh with ours.  We ought to conceive in our hearts the “Son of God the most high” (Lk 1:32).  The Magnificat (Lk 1:46-55) is the template of after Communion  thanksgivings.

Mary, the Perfect Communicant

Our Lady is more than just a model Communicant through the Annunciation.  She is the perfect communicant because she received Our Lord most perfectly in the Eucharist.  We can often abstract Mary’s life so much that we forget that she lived as a Christian just as we did.  After the Ascension, she lived with a priest and would have received the Eucharist regularly from the hands of St. John.  It is her reception of the Eucharist, first prepared for by her fiat at the Annunciation, that was perfected in Ephesus with St. John.  It is this we must study and seek the grace to imitate.

Not all receptions of the Eucharist are the same.  The Eucharist contains ex opere operato sanctifying grace.  In fact, because it contains the source of all grace, Christ Himself, it contains enough grace through a single reception to perfectly sanctify the communicant.  What stops this from happening is the personal disposition of the recipient.  The more fervently one hungers for the Eucharist, the greater the infusion of Divine life through sanctifying grace. 

Having actually participated in the sacrifice on Calvary, she knew more than anyone what was being offered, even if in an unbloody manner, on the Altar.  Having made the oblation with Christ, she could continually make that same oblation in a spirit of adoration, thanksgiving, reparation and thanksgiving (the 4 principal purposes of the Mass according to Pope St. Pius X).  Furthermore, as Venerable Mary Agreda tells it in Mystical City of God, after being told by Our Lord about His enduring presence in the Eucharist,

“she burned with the desire of seeing this Sacrament instituted, and if She had not been sustained by the power of the Almighty, the force of her affection would have bereft Her of natural life…Even from that time on She wished to prepare Herself for its reception, and asked Her Son to be allowed to receive Him in the holy Sacrament as soon as it should be instituted. She said to Him: ‘Supreme Lord and life of my soul, shall I, who am such an insignificant worm and the most despicable among men, be allowed to receive Thee? Shall I be so fortunate as to bear Thee once more within my body and soul? Shall my heart be thy dwelling and tabernacle, where Thou shalt take thy rest and shall I thus delight in thy close embrace and Thou, my Beloved, in mine?’  The divine Master answered: ‘My beloved Mother, many times shalt thou receive Me in the holy Sacrament, and after my Death and Ascension into heaven that shall be thy consolation; for I shall choose thy most sincere and loving heart as my most delightful and pleasant resting place.’”

In short, the Eucharistic Presence of Our Lord would have been one of those things “she held in her heart”, especially because she knew what a great consolation it would be.  You can imagine how difficult it would be for Our Lady having spent every day save three with Our Lord for 30 years, having seen Him often during His three years of public ministry, to no longer have Him present with her.  With that in mind her hunger to receive Him the Eucharist must have exceeded all the saints throughout history combined. 

Likewise when Our Lord “earnestly desired” to give the Church the Eucharistic sacrifice, He was expressing a great desire to unite Himself to each one of us individually, but none so much as His Mother.  He knew that the Eucharist would not only sustain her, but would unite Him to her in a deeper and deeper way with each fervent reception.

This is why Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange says that “Each of Mary’s Communions surpassed the preceding one in fervor and, producing in her a great increase of charity, disposed her to receive her next Communion with still greater fruit. Mary’s soul moved ever more swiftly Godwards the nearer she approached to God; that was her law of spiritual gravitation. She was, as it were, a mirror which reflected back on Jesus the light and warmth which she received from Him; concentrated them also, so as to direct them towards souls” (Mother of the Savior and the Interior Life).  It is this same habit, the habit of receiving Our Lord with greater love and devotion at each Mass, that we must strive after.  Let us sit at the foot of Our Mother Mary and ask that she obtain for each one of us this most important grace.  As Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange put it, “In everything she was the perfect model of Eucharistic devotion. If we turn to her she will teach us how to adore and to make reparation; she will teach us what should be our desire of the Blessed Eucharist. From here we can learn how to pray at Holy Mass for the great intentions of the Church. and how to thank God for the graces without number He has bestowed on us and on mankind.”

The Divine Quadrilemma

Bible, Defending the Faith, Faith and Reason, History, Paganism, Passion of Christ, The Life of Jesus, , , , ,

The greatest heresy in the history of the Church was the Arian heresy.  At one point during the Fifth Century, nearly 3/4 of the world’s bishops were Arian.  Arius posited that Jesus was not truly God but instead the greatest of God’s creatures.  The popularity of this heresy was due to the fact that it would enable Christianity to be palatable to both Pagans and Gnostics alike.  By denying the equality of the Father and the Son, Christianity would take a decidedly Pagan turn.  This is what made this particular heresy such a threat—it made Christianity more palatable to Pagans and could be a source of unity throughout the recently Christianized Roman Empire.  This blending of Christianity was, of course, rejected by the Council of Nicaea with St. Athanasius leading the charge.  It took a long time for the Nicene effect to be felt throughout the Church, but eventually the Arian Heresy was squashed.  Unfortunately, heresies never wholly die, but are reincarnated in different forms such that we have seen a revival of the errors of Arius in our own day.  This time it comes in the form of a religious eclecticism that attempts to blend all religions together.

In our day there are any number of people who say, “there are many paths up the mountain, but the view is the same at the top of the mountain.”  They present the metaphor usually as a defense of blending religions or choosing a religion that best suits them (as opposed to one that is true).  This religious indifferentism is really a substitution of spirituality for religion.  Spirituality is about self-fulfillment whereas religion is about a relationship with God.  But it is problematic for a more fundamental reason, one that is easily uncovered once we drop the metaphor and actually compare religions. 

To insist that they lead up the same mountain while simultaneously contradicting each other makes this hard to believe.  One says Jesus is God, another that He was a prophet, another that He is the brother of Lucifer, another that we are all gods, and another that says everything is God.  While it may be convenient to use the “same mountain” metaphor, the truth is that there is no way that Christianity, Islam, Buddhism and Pantheism can be reconciled.  Depending on which you believe you will end up with vastly different conclusions.  They are not different paths on the same mountain, but different mountains all together.  

It may be possible to blend some religions together, but Christianity does not lend itself to any blending whatsoever.  This is because Jesus, in His infinite wisdom, has forced us all to take a stand.  Unlike any other religion, He made the claim to be God Incarnate.  That means that you must either accept that claim as true and relate to Him as absolute Lord or you must treat Him as a crazy, lying cult leader and dismiss everything He said.  If it is the latter, then to say that you like His teachings, that is to label Him as merely a human teacher, is not really an option.

The Quadrilemma

Those familiar with CS Lewis’ Christological trilemma will recognize this as a version of it.  Lewis said that you must treat Jesus as either lunatic, liar or Lord.  Those are the only three options.  You cannot treat Him as a merely human teacher however.  You either submit wholly to Him or you run as far away from His teachings as possible, even if some of them are actually helpful.  Lewis’ trilemma however is not impenetrable because, thanks to “biblical scholars” in our own time, there is now a fourth option that many people are choosing.  They claim that Jesus never actually said He was God.  And in this way, we see how the Arian heresy is coming back into play.

When we focus on whether Jesus actually said He was God (as opposed to whether or not that is true) we move from the realm of faith to that of history.  In other words, this is an attack on the historical reliability of the Gospels.  As an internal witness, the Bible is quite clear that Jesus made Divine claims.  But in order to grasp this, we must first take a necessary tangent in order to examine how He might say it.

The Internal Evidence

If the Incarnation were to have happened in our day and age you might expect Him to say (in English) “I am God.”  But if we look at the translations of the gospels we have today, we do not find such a direct statement, nor should we expect to.  We should expect that Jesus would say it the way a first Century Jew might.  Our Lord’s moments of self-revelation always invoke the Old Testament name for God, the same name He gave Moses and that the Jews treated as unutterable (YHWH).

In Greek, the language of the gospels, the Name is translated as egō eimi or “I am”.  This phrase is used in a number of places, but any time it is used in an absolute sense without any predicate, it refers to the Divine name.   The most obvious examples occur within John’s Gospel where we find he uttering things like: “unless you come to believe that I AM, you will surely die in your sins” (Jn 8:24).  Likewise, when the soldiers come to arrest Jesus in the Garden and announce it is Jesus they are seeking, He answers egō eimi.   In the ordinary sense it simply means “I am he” letting them know they have found who they were looking for.  However, those who hear this response fall to the ground suggesting that they are party to a theophany.

John’s Gospel, written later in the first Century, has a distinctive emphasis on the divinity of Christ because it was, according to Irenaeus, meant to counter some of the early Christological heresies that had arisen (Against Heresies, Book 3, Ch11).  But he is most certainly not the only one who uses this Jewish formulation for identifying Jesus as divine.  These references are found throughout the Synoptic Gospels as well.  First, there is the fact that only one reason is given for His crucifixion—blasphemy.  When on trial before the Sanhedrin, the High Priest asked Him:

“Are you the Messiah, the son of the Blessed One?”  Then Jesus answered, “I AM”; and “you will see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power and coming with the clouds of heaven.”  At that the high priest tore his garments and said, “What further need have we of witnesses?  You have heard the blasphemy. What do you think?” They all condemned him as deserving to die.”

(Mk 14:55-64, c.f. Mt 26:59-66, Lk 22:66-71)

Notice that Jesus invokes the Divine Name and equates Himself with God by prophesying that He will sit at God’s right hand.  Likewise, He is also accused of blasphemy for setting Himself equal to God when He forgives sins (c.f. Mk 2:6-7, Mt 9:3).

Perhaps His clearest revelation comes in the form of a question to the Pharisees about whose son the Messiah will be.  They tell Him David, which He does not deny but He shakes their limited understanding by quoting from Psalm 110: “The Lord said to my lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I place your enemies under your feet’? If David calls him ‘lord,’ how can he be his son?” (Mt 22:44-45, c.f. Mk 12:35–37; Lk 20:41–44)    By referring to the Messiah as both pre-existing David and David’s LORD, He is admitting to being God Incarnate.

The External Evidence

Those who challenge that Jesus said that He was God often overlook the fact that we have external evidence as well.  They try to attack the timing and historical accuracy of the Bible but forget that we have writings of the Apostolic Fathers that confirm what has been said has been received as such.  These writings show that Christ’s divinity was not something added later on but was understood to be true directly out of the hands of the Apostles.  There are numerous quotations that could be shared, but a few should suffice to show that the gospels are historically reliable.  First there is Ignatius of Antioch, a disciple of John who was likely ordained by Peter who said, “For our God, Jesus Christ, was conceived by Mary in accord with God’s plan: of the seed of David, it is true, but also of the Holy Spirit” (St. Ignatius of Antioch, Letter to the Ephesians 18:2).  There is also the aforementioned St. Irenaeus, the disciple of St. Polycarp who was a disciple of John who said “…He indicates in clear terms that He is God, and that His advent was in Bethlehem…” (AH, Book 3, Chapter 20). Finally we have Pliny the Younger, a Roman Governor, describing Christians as “singing hymns to Christ as to a god” in a letter to the Emperor Trajan.

Given both the internal and external evidence, we must conclude that Jesus did make the claim that He was God.  This, of course, doesn’t prove that He was, but it does render our potential quadrilemma as a trilemma.  Christianity cannot be mixed with other religions because of the unique demands Jesus makes upon His followers.  He is either Lord or Liar, but you must choose one or the other.