Monday 12 October 2020
Monday of week 28 in Ordinary Time
Spiritual Reading
Your Second Reading from the Office of Readings:
Monday of week 28 in Ordinary Time
St Fulgentius of Ruspe's Tract against Fabian
Sharing in the body and blood of the Lord sanctifies us
When we offer the sacrifice the words of our Saviour are fulfilled just as the blessed Apostle Paul reported them: On the same night he was betrayed the Lord Jesus took some bread, and thanked God for it and broke it, and said: ‘This is my body, which is for you: do this as a memorial of me.’ In the same way he took the cup after supper, and said, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Whenever you drink it, do this as a memorial of me.’ Until the Lord comes, therefore, every time you eat this bread and drink this cup, you are proclaiming his death.
So the sacrifice is offered to proclaim the death of the Lord and to be a commemoration of him who laid down his life for us. He himself has said: A man can have no greater love than to lay down his life for his friends. So, since Christ died for us, out of love, it follows that when we offer the sacrifice in commemoration of his death, we are asking for love to be given us by the coming of the Holy Spirit. We beg and we pray that just as through love Christ deigned to be crucified for us, so we may receive the grace of the Holy Spirit; and that by that grace the world should be a dead thing in our eyes and we should be dead to the world, crucified and dead. We pray that we should imitate the death of our Lord. Christ, when he died, died, once for all, to sin, so his life now is life with God. We pray, therefore, that in imitating the death of our Lord we should walk in newness of life, dead to sin and living for God.
The love of God is poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, who has been sent to us. When we share in the Lord’s body and blood, when we eat his bread and drink his cup, this truly means that we die to the world and have our hidden life with Christ in God, crucifying our flesh and its weaknesses and its desires.
Thus it is that all the faithful who love God and their neighbour drink the cup of the Lord’s love even if they do not drink the cup of bodily suffering. Soaked through with that drink, they mortify the flesh in which they walk this earth. Putting on the Lord Jesus Christ like a cloak, their desires are no longer those of the body. They do not contemplate what can be seen but what is invisible to the eyes. This is how the cup of the Lord is drunk when divine love is present; but without that love, you may even give your body to be burned and still it will do you no good. What the gift of love gives us is the chance to become in truth what we celebrate as a mystery in the sacrifice.
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In other parts of the world and other calendars:
Saint Wilfrid, Bishop and Missionary
From a sermon of St Wilfrid
Keep in mind and recall to the brethren those days of old, how we read in the Old Testament that God’s beloved patriarchs and his firstborn, Israel, “passed from nation to nation and from one kingdom to another”, awaiting the promise and not despairing. Moses too, and Aaron and all the prophets of God endured men’s persecution, for their trust was in the Lord. In the New Testament we read how the great Shepherd of the Sheep and Head of the whole church, Jesus Christ, was crucified by the Jews and his disciples scattered. Later dispersed throughout the entire world, they and their followers after various tribulations received the crown of martyrdom. They did not forget those words of comfort which are addressed to us too as His sons, in the epistle to the Hebrews: “My son, neglect not the discipline of the Lord; neither be thou wearied whilst thou art rebuked by him, for whom the Lord loveth he chastiseth and he scourged every son he receiveth,” so brethren and helpers in Christ, in the words of the same epistle “Let us also who have so great a cloud of witnesses over our head run with patience the race that is set before us.”
Copyright © 1996-2020 Universalis Publishing Limited: see www.universalis.com. Scripture readings from the Jerusalem Bible are published and copyright © 1966, 1967 and 1968 by Darton, Longman & Todd, Ltd and Doubleday, a division of Random House, Inc, and used by permission of the publishers. Text of the Psalms: Copyright © 1963, The Grail (England). Used with permission of A.P. Watt Ltd. All rights reserved.