Like the woman who anointed Jesus in Bethany, the
Church has feared no 'extravagance', devoting the best of her
resources to expressing her wonder and adoration before the unsurpassable
gift of the Eucharist. No less than the first disciples charged with
preparing the 'large upper room', she has felt the need, down the
centuries and in her encounters with different cultures, to celebrate the
Eucharist in a setting worthy of so great a mystery. In the wake of Jesus' own
words and actions, and building upon the ritual heritage of Judaism, the Christian
liturgy was born. Could there ever be an adequate means of expressing the
acceptance of that self-gift which the divine Bridegroom continually makes to
his Bride, the Church, by bringing the Sacrifice offered once and for all on
the Cross to successive generations of believers and thus becoming nourishment
for all the faithful? Though the idea of a 'banquet' naturally suggests
familiarity, the Church has never yielded to the temptation to trivialize this 'intimacy' with her Spouse by forgetting that he is also her Lord and that
the 'banquet' always remains a sacrificial banquet marked by the blood
shed on Golgotha. The Eucharistic Banquet is truly a 'sacred' banquet,
in which the simplicity of the signs conceals the unfathomable holiness of
God: O sacrum convivium, in quo Christus sumitur! The bread which is
broken on our altars, offered to us as wayfarers along the paths of the world,
is panis angelorum, the bread of angels, which cannot be approached
except with the humility of the centurion in the Gospel: 'Lord, I am not
worthy to have you come under my roof ' (Mt 8:8; Lk 7:6)."
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