Jan 22: Christ the One, True Sacrifice

Michelangelo Buonarroti: The Entombment
National Gallery, London, c. 1500

Saturday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time

Reading I: Heb 9:2-3, 11-14

Christ entered once for all into the Holy Place, not with the blood of goats and calves, but with his own blood, thus obtaining eternal redemption (NRSV, Heb 9:12).

Father, you send your Word to our mother’s womb offering us a share in your divine life. As we accept, yet without benefit of language or logic, in the power of your Holy Spirit, we are immediately caught up in your own inner life, a life of giving and receiving, of sharing in love. Over the centuries we have tried on our own to give you gifts, sacrifices of animals and first fruits, out of gratitude and to somehow repay you for our sinfulness. It is only in the coming of the Word made flesh among us in Jesus Christ and in his resurrection from the dead that we have realized that we have, from the very beginning, had a true share in what we never could have successfully accomplished on our own. Everything we are and everything we have comes from you, Father. How could we therefore give you anything of ourselves. But as your daughters and sons, as sharers in your life, through the Word in your Spirit, we can join in the life-giving and life-receiving in love that is your very being. How marvelous that through the Word we not only receive your gift of divine life but that through the same Word, caught up in your life, we can give and receive in the mutual sharing in love that is your Holy Spirit.

What is still more marvelous, Father, is that you love us so much that you not only raise us up to be one with you but you also deign, without surrendering your divinity, to take upon yourself, in the Word, a body, to become a human being with us.

One of the great mysteries of our humanity, Lord, is that we are born to pass through death which so often seems like the end, our total undoing. In your great love for us, your Word made flesh, the Lord Jesus, also passed through death so that we would not be alone in this trial but that you would be with us, even in the body, to show us that death is not undoing but an hour of glory. It is your living among us and dying with us that is the visible and tangible sign for us here below of the mutual giving of life in love that is your being, Father, a life which you share with us and in which you call us always to grow.

Father, it is Jesus’ giving of himself that is the true sacrifice that saves. May we, for whom he lived and died and rose, also share in that same sacrifice by serving our sisters and brothers who are all called to be united with you in life and love.

Through Christ our Lord. Amen.