Eucharist
According to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “The Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life. The other sacraments, and indeed all ecclesiastical ministries and works of the apostolate, are bound up with the Eucharist and are oriented toward it. For in the blessed Eucharist is contained the whole spiritual good of the Church, namely Christ himself.”
First Holy Eucharist is celebrated by the Second Grade CRE class in the spring. In order to ensure your child’s success in the program, it is vital to attend Mass and CRE regularly.
In addition, preparation sessions for both children and parents will occur prior to the sacrament. These sessions serve two purposes:
1. To deepen parents’ understanding of the Eucharist; and
2. To provide ongoing home experiences that will assist the child at this age level to come to know Jesus through faith shared by others.
For Ascension parishioners or their loved ones who are sick or infirmed and who wish to receive Holy Communion, please contact the office.
Homilies About the Eucharist
How did the Holy Mass come about? The Mass was not an invention of the apostles or something Jesus created out of nowhere. The Mass is a transformation of a Jewish Passover meal. Jesus transformed it during the Last Supper.
In Exodus 12, God commanded the Jews to have a meal before freeing them from the land of Egypt. Four key components of the Passover Meal:
- Sacrifice a lamb and spread its blood. The lamb had to be free of defects and had to be killed in such a way as to not break any of its bones. At the time of Jesus, the lambs had to be sacrificed at the Jerusalem Temple because sacrifice became a right reserved to the Levite priests. Thus, the Passover had to be celebrated in Jerusalem. In Exodus 12, the Israelites had to spread its blood on the wooden lintels of the door. When God passed through Egypt taking the lives of the first-born sons, he would “pass over” their house.
- Eat the lamb with unleavened bread. The Israelites had to eat the flesh of the sacrifice, whose blood was spread to saved them from the death of their first-born child. Having unleavened bread was a sign of the haste with which they left Egypt – they had no time to let it rise.
- Keep this day of remembrance forever. God commanded the Israelites to remember this day generation after generation. It was both a remembrance and a sharing in the very mystery of the Passover. The father of the family would explain to his children the story and the symbolism behind the bread and other foods.
- The four cups. The Jewish Seder meal is divided into the blessing of four cups. This structure also called for the reading of the Hebrew Scriptures and closing hymns.
- The first cup introduced the meal
- The second = explained the bread and food symbols
- The third was drunk at the end of the supper
- The fourth was the closing cup after the final hymn
Passover of the Messiah
At the time of Jesus, a new theory had developed among many Jews, believing that the Messiah would deliver them on the night of the Passover and bring about a new covenant and new exodus, as God had delivered their ancestors from the land of Egypt.
What did Jesus keep from the original Passover?
Matthew, Mark and Luke say that the Last Supper was a Passover meal. They also say that it was done in the evening and in Jerusalem, as was required. The Gospels also include an explanation of the meaning of the bread by Jesus and the conclusion with a hymn.
What Jesus changed
Jesus shifted the focus from the remembrance of the old covenant to the “New Covenant” to be brought about by the Messiah at the Last Supper:
“This chalice which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood” (Lk 22:20). He establishes the new Passover in the following way:
- Jesus focuses on his own body and blood, placing himself as the sacrificial lamb. He takes the bread and explains it in a new light “This is my body.”
- He then takes the wine and says, “This is my blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for the forgiveness of sins” (Mt 26:27-28). Jesus is saying that He is the new Passover lamb. This is the Passover of the Messiah, and He is the new sacrifice.”
- Instead of drinking what would have been the fourth cup of the Passover, Jesus says he will not drink wine again until he drinks it in the kingdom. In its place, after singing the final hymn, he goes straight to the Mount of Olives with his disciples (Mt 26:27-30).
The fourth cup is his sacrifice. In Gethsemane he prays to the Father three times about the cup of his death he must drink… “Let this cup pass from me” (Mt 26:36-46). It is not until he is about to die on the cross that he asks for the last cup, saying, “I thirst.” After he drinks from the sponge full of wine, he exclaims, “It is finished.” Jesus finished the Last Supper on the cross right before he died. Jesus interwove his own sacrifice into the Passover mystery, as the sacrificial lamb, to bring about the Passover of the Messiah for the salvation all.
The Mass is the New Passover. Jesus instituted a new Passover liturgy that was tied to his death. We eat the flesh of the new Passover lamb, Jesus himself, and drink his blood. It is the new covenant that brings about a new exodus, not from Egyptian slavery, but from the slavery of sin, and takes us to the Promised Land.
In addition to the Passover, another feature of Jewish Scripture and tradition was the ancient hope for new manna from heaven. The Jewish manna tradition helps us understand the Eucharist both in the New Testament and the present-day Mass.
In the desert, the twelve tribes of Israel cried out for food, and God responds by saying, “I will now rain down bread from heaven for you” (Ex 16:4). This is a twofold gift: each morning, God gives Israel “bread” from heaven (the manna); each evening, God gives them “flesh” from heaven (the quail). According to Exodus, the manna appears in the morning, “when the dew evaporated” and tastes “like wafers made with honey.” The manna takes like honey is because the manna is a foretaste of the promised land (the land “flowing with milk and honey”)—Israelites’ ultimate destination. The manna is no ordinary bread. They refer to it as the “bread from heaven, and they treat it as holy, placing it in a golden urn and putting it in the Ark of the Covenant inside the Tabernacle. According to the Old Testament, God gives to the Israelites the manna from heaven for forty years, until they finally arrive in the promised land of Canaan. Then the manna ceases. Many years later the Jews believed that when the Messiah finally came, he would bring back the miracle of the manna.
Two examples in the New Testament: In the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus teaches his disciples to pray “give us our daily bread.” This bread applies to both daily needs and to the supernatural, the manna of the Messiah.
The second example of Jesus mentioning the manna is John 6—the crowds challenge him to perform a sign like that of Moses, who gave the fathers “manna in the desert” Jesus identifies the Eucharist as the true manna from heaven: “Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died; this is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat it and not die. And the bread that I will give is my flesh for the life of the world.”
We can understand why the first Jewish Christians believed in the real presence of Jesus in the Christian Eucharist. From a Jewish Christian perspective, if the old manna was miraculous bread from heaven, the bread of angels, then the new manna of the Eucharist could not be just a symbol. If it were, that would make the old manna greater than the new.
In the Catholic Mass, we find a subtle but beautiful allusion to the Eucharist as the new manna in the epiclesis of Eucharistic Prayer II, when the priest says, “Make holy therefore these gifts, we pray, / by sending down your Spirit upon them like the dewfall, / So that they may become for us, / The Body and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ.” In the words “like the dewfall,” there is a biblical allusion to the manna of the Exodus, which comes down from heaven each day with the morning “dew.”
This explains why we have Mass not just on Sundays but also on weekdays: just as the old manna is a daily gift from God, so too the Church encourages the faithful to receive the new manna “even daily.”
Manna comes from a Hebrew phrase—what is it? What is this bread? In the light of Christ crucified and risen, the Catholic faith teaches that it is the true bread from heaven—the Body and Blood of Christ—which the Church gives to her children each day in the Mass, as she journeys toward the heavenly promised land of the pilgrim people of God.
FOUR MAIN PRIESTLY VESTMENTS
Alb: white; symbolizing purity of heart
Cincture: “girdle:” symbolizing purity of the body
Stole: symbolizes priestly authority
Chasuble: “little house,” sleeveless; symbolizes charity
TRANSUBSTANTIATION The earliest text concerning the Real Presence is found in the eleventh chapter of Paul’s first epistle to the Corinthians, written probably about A.D. 57, or 27 years after Christ’s death and ten years before the Gospel of Mark is composed. Paul became a convert between four to seven years after the death of Christ. He was an eyewitness of the earliest Eucharistic celebrations.
1 Corinthians 11:23-29…
- This is my body, which is for you. Do this in memory of me.
- This cup is the new covenant in my blood…do this as a memorial of me.
Paul and the first Christians knew that belief in the Eucharist demands faith. The body present in the Eucharist is that of Christ now reigning in heaven, the same body that died on the cross, but different because it has been transformed. It is this glorious body that is now, under the appearance of bread, given to us. Paul stresses this tradition throughout his letters.
Three of the Gospels–Matthew, Mark, and Luke–tell us what happened at the Last Supper. Although each has its own character, mode of writing, and details, it is the essential truth that matters.
The doctrine of the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist was believed throughout the centuries, but it was not until the 13th Century when Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of the scholastic theologians, gave us the defining understanding of “transubstantiation.” Saint Thomas used the principle of “substance and accident” from the Greek philosopher Aristotle to explain transubstantiation.
Substance=making something what it is
Accident=the appearances of something (using sense knowledge)
By the consecration of the bread and wine a change takes place in which the whole substance of bread is changed into the substance of the body of Christ our Lord, and the whole substance of the wine into the substance of his blood. The Catholic Church calls this “transubstantiation.”
Transubstantiation is a substantial conversion. One thing is essentially converted into another thing.
Jesus’ words at the Last Supper “this is my body” indicated a complete change of the entire substance of bread into the entire substance of Christ. As soon as the sentence was complete, the substance of the bread was no longer present. Christ’s body was present under the outward appearances of bread. The accidents, or the appearances of bread, remain. It looks like bread; it tastes like bread; it smells like bread, and so on. However, the words of institution at the Last Supper are the words of transubstantiation.
At Mass the priest does exactly what Christ told him to do at the Last Supper. He does not say, “This is Christ’s body,” but “This is my body.” These words produce the whole substance of Christ’s body. In the same way the words of consecration produce the whole substance of Christ’s blood. They are Christ’s body and blood, as they are now living in heaven. The appearances of his human body are in heaven too. They are present, therefore, in the Holy Eucharist.
The entire substance of Christ is present in each consecrated host and in a chalice of consecrated wine.
When the priest at Mass, obeying Christ, speaks the words of consecration, the substance of bread and the substance of wine are changed by God’s power into the substance of Christ’s body and the substance of his blood. The change is entire. Nothing of the substance of bread remains, nothing of the substance of wine. Neither is annihilated; both are simply changed. However, the appearances of bread and wine remain. We know that by our senses. We can see, touch, and taste them. We digest them when we receive Communion. After the consecration they exist by God’s power.
The words of the enduring Catholic devotional book, Imitation of Christ: “We must beware of curious and useless searching into this most profound sacrament. He who scrutinizes majesty will be overwhelmed by its glory.”
