Q. "Christ is both sacrifice and sacrament; both an offering and food. Sacrificial offering of man to God and divine food of God to man."
Those words you've just spoken remind me of that other quotation you sent me a while back from some Australian dude: "But all these other Sacraments draw their efficacy from their relation to the central sacrament, the Blessed Eucharist. And this is not a mere chance. Prayer and the sacraments are both means of life. In prayer man approaches God. In the sacraments God approaches man. But both culminate in the same point. For the highest prayer is the Mass, and the highest sacrament is the Eucharist. Thus at the point where man's approach to God reaches its uttermost intensity, God's response is at its most measureless richness."
A. Ah, yes! Frank Sheed!
Q. Sacrifice and sacrament... Anything more you want to add on this before I fire my next question?
A. Well to understand the link between sacrifice and sacrament a bit better, realise that even in the natural order "...before any can be food for the other, it must go through some form of sacrifice or other" Even with man alone we notice the same trend.
For him to eat anything he must first kill it: "plants must be torn from the roots, purified in waters; animals must be slaughtered… all attesting to the law of nature that before something can become a sacrament of physical nutrition, it must first become a sacrifice."
So too with Jesus: His Body and Blood offered as divine food on Holy Thursday was nourishing because He was already offering it up as a sacrifice that was dramatically completed on Good Friday.
Similarly at every Mass, we receive Holy Communion precisely from the bread that has been blessed, broken and distributed.
-"Blessed" meaning "made holy", "taken away from secular day to day use and kept exclusively for divine use".
-"Broken" meaning "destroyed", "sacrificed", "made into a holocaust so that the gift is used up singularly for divine use with nothing left behind".
-"Distributed" as food for nourishing and for communion with Christ and with one another: The blessing-cup, which we bless, is it not a sharing in the blood of Christ; and the loaf of bread which we break, is it not a sharing in the body of Christ? And as there is one loaf, so we, although there are many of us, are one single body, for we all share in the one loaf. (1 Cor 10:16-17)
Happy Thursday!
2ndFebruary 2017