Manete in Dilectione Mea
RESPONDING TO THE GIFT OF LOVE
“Remain in my love.”1 The essence of Eucharistic Adoration and living a Eucharistic life is summed up in these words of Christ at the Last Supper. Our encounter with the living God is an encounter with Love Himself, and it is necessary to return to the Upper Room to learn how we must respond to this great manifestation of God’s love for us. In this pastoral letter, I invite you to join me in contemplating the face of Christ, so that we, like the Apostles, can truly encounter Him in the breaking of the bread and thus remain in His love.
Each day that we celebrate the Eucharist, we are not merely recalling past events; rather, we are actually there with Jesus and the Apostles in the Upper Room. It is so easy for us to focus our attention on the things we can see and hear with our physical senses, but we must also approach the Paschal Mystery with a sense of faith if we are to experience the spiritual things that are just as real as those we perceive with our senses. I can see the child in the pew in front of me who is fidgeting in his mother’s arms, but do I also see Jesus washing the feet of the Apostles? Do I see how Simon Peter responds to the Lord’s insistence on washing his feet? Do I see John resting his head on the heart of the Master? Do I see Judas as he consumes the choice morsel? Do I hear the words of Jesus as He institutes the Eucharist? These events are represented (presented again) to us each time we are at Mass, but do we recognize them? Are we so caught up in the things of our current time that we fail to acknowledge the things of eternity? Are we aware that we truly enter the realm of heaven while we are at Mass? With this in mind, let us turn our thoughts to the events in the Upper Room so that, by meditating on these words from Scripture, we can truly and personally experience them each time that we come to the Lord’s Table.
At the beginning of all four Gospel accounts of the Last Supper, we are told Jesus and His disciples were in the Upper Room to celebrate the Passover. To fully appreciate what Jesus does in the following lines, we need to understand how the love of God is revealed in the events of Passover; for as Saint Augustine reminds us, “The New Testament lies hidden in the Old and the Old Testament is unveiled in the New.”2 The shedding of the lamb’s (the Pasch’s) blood was the means by which the Israelites would be marked as God’s chosen people. The Jewish people had done nothing to merit such a wondrous gift; it was solely an act of God’s special love. So too, we who approach the Blessed Sacrament are the beneficiaries of God’s unending love for us. The Israelites who participated in the Passover would certainly have seen the great gift of life that God was offering as symbolized in the blood of the lamb because they saw blood as a great symbol of life. God was offering them not only freedom from Egyptian oppression, but the opportunity to participate in His very life, to enter into a covenant relationship with Him. In the Eucharistic prayer, the priest, acting in the person of Christ, extends this same invitation to us.
1 John 15:9
2 Saint Augustine, Quaestiones in Heptateuchum 2, 73