Getting Ready to Pray                     

God will never give us a gift which would render God obsolete or as only a spectator.

  “Nature abhors a vacuum.” We are by nature oriented to the good as known and any experience of the good asks for more. The giver of a gift is revealing something about the giver and about the receiver as well.

The person receiving the entire gift must receive also what is being said.

We long for the good. We can come close, especially in loving relationships. We could perceive God as a bit perverse by not giving us our completion here on earth instead of only glimpses of the totality. In a small way, we are perverse, in that we are inclined to fill up our own vacuum by asking a gift to be the giver of fullness. Bur even paradise did not complete Adam and Eve.

Some Thoughts 

As I sit down to write this reflection, I am celebrating the smells from the two loaves of bread I have prepared with tender care and the guidance of my blood-brother, Mike’s recipe. I live in hope and so does the community as they too are surrounded by bread-breath.

Moses had been preparing his community for entering their new homeland by instructing them about just how they should act as the holy and chosen people of God’s new revelation in a covenant. There are many laws, instructions and liturgical observances proclaimed.

What we hear at the beginning of our First Reading is a great “Amen!” And communal agreement by the people to all they have heard from God through Moses. These “words” from God will be a protection from their wandering into other (foreign) cultural ways. They will be also a reminder of who they are as God’s holy people.

Then we hear of a liturgical experience which Moses performs to ratify what God had spoken and that the people had heard and agreed to. Young bulls are sacrificed and Moses takes some of the blood and pours it on the altar that he had constructed. This altar represents the holiness of the God who has spoken.

Moses then sprinkles some of the blood on the people, demonstrating their acceptance of having heard and agreed to it all. He did this sprinkling after the people had heard, and they received the blood as a sign of their new life as God’s chosen people.

So the liturgy of the Word took longer than even our longest readings, and the sacrifice took even longer!

Living out this liturgy would be at the center of God’s relationship with Israel and the people’s response to what God had said they were. Blood was their “life source” and the closest thing to God the “Life-Source” that there was. Blood offered to God and shared with the people meant that they were bonded, united to God and with each other. Much of the Book of Leviticus is spent around this symbol of Holy and unholy blood and the constant need for human purification.

Our Gospel for this feast is set around a celebrational liturgy as well. It begins with a preparing for the Passover, which recalls the blood of the Passover lamb being sprinkled on the door posts of the Israelites to keep them safe from the final plague in Egypt. It seems that Jesus has planned for a certain “upper room,” and the disciples are shown the place. They begin setting for something new coming through the old.

We hear Mark’s account of the “institution Narrative.” Jesus and his disciples are recalling the great and wonderful events of the Exodus—the coming out of slavery—as well as the destruction of Pharaoh’s pursuing troops. The story is related by many symbols and various forms, and, within the celebration of their national past, there is a meal with unleavened bread and raising of cups of wine, all recalling who they are and who God is for them.

It is a celebration of life.

In our Roman Catholic tradition we celebrate the New Passover with great reverence for the former, from which we all share. The very person of Jesus is a most wonderful gift to and for our humanity. He was really present physically as a gift from the Infinite Giver, revealed to this world, the receiver.

In his Body we are re-membered, re-united to each other as a sacred experience.

As we re-celebrate being freed from our slaveries, we are reminded that we are being brought into a sacred life. We believe all that the Giver has said about us. And who we are because of the Body of Jesus whose blood is the source of our new Passover-life.

“I will take the cup of salvation, and call on the name of the Lord.”
(Psalm 116)