So if you are ever around a seminarian this would happen quite frequently, at least early on in seminary, we’d see one of our friends and say, “hey! How was your day? What was the best part of your day?” You know, small talk like that, and almost without faith they would say, “going to Mass and receiving Jesus in the Eucharist.”

 

So we learned that we had to caveat our question so you’d have to say, “Besides going to Mass, what was the best part of your day?”

 

I think about that because we just had some young men ordained to the priesthood last weekend and it was beautiful. I would venture to bet that even if you ask “what’s your favorite part of being a priest?” to these young men that they would say “confecting the Eucharist. Making Jesus’ body and blood present on the altar for everyone who believes to receive and to fed by God and encounter God in this way that He has prepared and given to us.” That’s what I would say!

God has really been preparing His people for a long time. In the book of Exodus we hear this blood of bulls being sprinkled on the people. Moses said, “this is the blood of the covenant that God has made with you in accordance with all these words of His.”

 

The people had said, “we’ll do everything that the Lord has told us. Everything that the Lord has said we will heed and do.” Here, this is the covenant being made between God and the Israelites.

But then Jesus comes along and He perfects this covenant with His own blood. Where the blood of these bulls and the blood of the unblemished lamb from Passover in a different reading in Exodus. At passover the angel of death passed over the houses that had blood on the door posts, this was the sacrifice of the unblemished lamb of the passover meal and the people would participate in this every year.

But Jesus comes and gives a new covenant. He gives His own Blood. Even though it might be difficult to understand or to see and appreciate it, this is Jesus’s Body and Blood!

This is what He says in this Gospel reading today. They were celebrating the passover and they were having the Passover meal together and Jesus says to them, “Take it. This is my Body” about the bread and about the cup that everyone drank from he says, “This is my Blood of the covenant which will be shed for many” 

This is the new covenant! Instead of the blood going on the doorposts or being sprinkled on us, the Blood goes on the doorposts of our lips, the entrance of our body. We receive Jesus’s body and blood into us to strengthen us, to heal us, to bring us closer to him, and to renew this covenant with Him.

We renew this covenant with Him every week. Some people renew it every day, like myself, I receive Jesus’s body and blood every day. I celebrate Mass every single day whether at nativity or back at my house or wherever I am in the world! I celebrate this covenant. I renew this covenant.

I renew this covenant for many reasons, but also for the reason that it said in Exodus. When we receive the Body of Christ the priest says, “The Body of Christ” and we say, “Amen.” This amen means “I Believe.”

It doesn’t just mean “I believe this is the Body of Christ.” It means something deeper. It means “I believe in all the words that you have taught us God. I believe in all the commands that you have given us through the Catholic Church. I believe and I will heed all these commandments and statutes that you have given us in your great love and mercy and wisdom to help us and care for us”

So every time we receive the body and blood in the Eucharist, I should note that whenever we receive the Host, that is the Body, we believe that to be the body, blood, soul and divinity. We don’t separate the body from the blood. Just like if you chunk off a bit of your arm, you wouldn’t be able to separate the blood from the flesh. They’re all together. In the very same way, when we receive the “Body” we still receive the blood in that way. Either form is the body, blood, soul and divinity

But when we receive that, the blood of Jesus renews the covenant that we have made with Him. And we will do everything that He has said. All that the Lord has said we will heed and do. We renew that covenant each day, each time we receive His Body and Blood.

And He renews that covenant with us, which is to say that He has taken away our sins. That’s what we hear in Hebrews,

“For this reason he is mediator of a new covenant:
since a death has taken place for deliverance
from transgressions under the first covenant,
those who are called may receive the promised eternal inheritance.”

So Jesus, likewise, when we renew our end of the covenant, he renews His end of the covenant saying, “I take away all of your sins. I forgive you. I remove your transgressions. As far as the east is from the west, I remove these transgressions.” 

We can then be assured of eternal life. We are pilgrims on a journey. That’s what we said at the beginning of that sequence, “to the pilgrim that has striven.” To the pilgrim. We are pilgrims on this earth and we are on pilgrimage to heaven, to eternal life. This is our life source, the source of our eternal life is the body and blood of Jesus.

So we thank God for that and we have greater reverence for His body and blood and we want to continue to receive it, to long for it, to have him strengthen us. In that way we can truly say what was the best thing that I did this week, today? It was to receive Jesus’s body and blood. To participate in Mass. To receive Him and to know that we have upheld our part of the covenant and He is going to uphold His part of the covenant.