Bahamas Archbishop Lawrence J. Burke of Nassau giving his lesson on the pope's encyclical.

Earlier this year, on the feast of the Most Holy Trinity, the Church provided for our reflection a reading from the Book of Deuteronomy. In the fourth chapter we read:

"Moses said to the people, 'Ask now of the days of old, before your time, ever since God created man upon the earth; ask from one end of the sky to the other. Did anything so great ever happen before? Was it ever heard of? Did a people ever hear the voice of God speaking from the midst of fire, as you did, and live? Or did any god venture to go and take a nation for himself from the midst of another nation, by testings, by signs and wonders, by war, with strong hand and outstretched arm, and by great terrors, all of which the Lord, your God, did for you in Egypt before your very eyes? … This is why you must now know and fix in your heart that the Lord is God in the heavens above and on the earth below, and there is no other'" (Deut 4:32-34, 39).

Yes, God is an awesome God! Totally other than his creatures, he constantly intervenes in our history to save us, to show his love for us and to express his intimacy with us.

But Moses could not imagine the extent to which God would go to express his solidarity with us! Who would ever think that our God would take flesh and live among us? This mystery of the Incarnation, revealed to us who live in the Christian era, set the stage for Christ's gift of the Eucharist to the Church on the night before he died.

"The Church has received the Eucharist from Christ her Lord not as one gift — however precious — among so many others, but as the gift par excellence, for it is the gift of himself, of his person in his sacred humanity, as well as the gift of his saving work" (Ecclesia de Eucharistia, 11).

When Jesus established the Eucharist he consciously chose the time of the Passover. Many commentaries have been written showing the many similarities and references connecting the Last Supper with the Passover meal, especially the Passover as described in the 12th chapter of the Book of Exodus.

But there are, as well, essential differences between the two events. The death and resurrection of Jesus make the new Passover. For us Christians it surpasses the old Passover and becomes the saving event in salvation history. Redemption for any person who has ever lived or will ever live in this world is accomplished by the passion, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Through this saving event we can now pass over from slavery to freedom, from sin to grace, and from death to life.

The lamb slain is no longer taken from sheep or goats. Jesus, God himself, is the new unblemished lamb slain for us. His blood is the blood of the New Covenant shed for us. His blood on our lips, the entrance to our bodily temples, will take the place of the blood on the lintels and doors of the houses of the Israelites.

The Lord told Moses, "This day shall be a memorial feast for you, which all your generations shall celebrate" (Exod 12:14). Likewise, the death and resurrection of the Lord must be perpetuated by the community of believers who are commanded by the Lord to repeat the Eucharist in his memory. Jesus, with his arms stretched between heaven and earth while nailed to the cross, now becomes the everlasting sign of God’s love and new covenant with us.

We Roman Catholics are so privileged and blessed! For every time we celebrate the holy sacrifice of the Mass, we not only tell the story of Christ. Through the ordained priest acting in persona Christi, the sacrifice offered on the cross only once for us becomes real and present to the worshiping, believing community, along with its saving effect.

Our Holy Father puts it well in his encyclical: "When the Church celebrates the Eucharist, the memorial of her Lord's death and resurrection, this central event of salvation becomes really present and 'the work of redemption is carried out.' This sacrifice is so decisive for the salvation of the human race that Jesus Christ offered it and returned it to the Father only after he had left us a means of sharing in it as if we had been present there" (11).

Some people complain that the Mass is boring, that we do the same thing every Sunday. Can we ever tire of remembering what God has done for us in Christ Jesus? There is no substitute! While others go to church to be entertained and to feel good, we go for one reason: to give thanks to God by remembering the death and resurrection of the Lord that was accomplished for our salvation.

And so the Church is constantly being built up and draws life from the Eucharist. The Apostles, by accepting the invitation in the Upper Room to eat of the bread which is his body and to drink of the cup of his blood, entered for the first time into sacramental communion with him. Our incorporation into Christ is constantly renewed and consolidated by sharing in the eucharistic sacrifice. In the Eucharist Christ enters into a relationship of intimacy, love and friendship with us. He abides with us and we in him. The Eucharist not only nourishes a relationship with Christ but also builds up the relationship between each of us who form one body in Christ.

By their union with Christ, people of the New Covenant, far from closing in upon themselves, become a "sacrament" for humanity. They are a sign and instrument of the salvation achieved by Christ, the light of the world and the salt of the earth, for the redemption of all (cf. Matt 5:13-16). The Church's mission stands in continuity with the mission of Christ: "As the Father has sent me, even so I send you" (John 20:21). From the perpetuation of the sacrifice of the cross and the Church's communion with the body and blood of Christ in the Eucharist, the Church draws the spiritual power needed to carry out her mission. The Eucharist thus appears as both the source and the summit of all evangelization, since its goal is the communion of mankind with Christ and, in him, with the Father and the Holy Spirit.

I don't understand how Catholics, who encounter the living Christ, can say that they have never experienced Christ as their personal savior in the Catholic Church. Receiving the Lord in the Eucharist or spending time in adoration before the Blessed Sacrament are awesome experiences of Christ as our personal savior. We enter into a most intimate relationship with our Lord. This relationship with the Lord should be primary in our lives. Take some time and effort to open yourself to that relationship and nourish it.

Remember, it is Christ who first reached out to us and chose us before we were in our mother's womb.

The gift of Christ and his Spirit which we receive in eucharistic communion superabundantly fulfills the yearning for fraternal unity deeply rooted in the human heart. At the same time it elevates the experience of fraternity already present in our common sharing at the same eucharistic table to a degree which far surpasses that of the simple human experience of sharing a meal.

Through her communion with the body of Christ the Church comes to be ever more profoundly "in Christ in the nature of a sacrament, that is, a sign and instrument of intimate unity with God and of the unity of the whole human race" (Ecclesia de Eucharistia 24).

Each time we celebrate the Eucharist and see the body of Jesus broken for us and his blood poured out for us, we are reminded of the extent of God's love for us and the meaning of our Christian life. We are to be persons who put others first and persons who are life-giving, blessed, broken and shared for all. The Eucharist, therefore, not only nourishes us but it enables us to carry out our mission as Church.

Pope John Paul II asks in Ecclesia de Eucharistia, "What more could Jesus have done for us? Truly in the Eucharist he shows us a love which goes to the end, a love which knows no measure" (11).

When we reflect upon the gift of the Eucharist we have a greater reason than Moses to say, "What an awesome God we have! Did anything so great ever happen before? That is why you must fix in your heart that the Lord is God and that there is no other."

How blessed are we, the people the Lord has chosen to be his own!

Archbishop Lawrence A. Burke of the Nassau Archdiocese in the Bahamas is a member of Nassau Council 10415.