Assuming Christ’s Body and Blood
By Fr. Roy Cimagala Chaplain
Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE)
Talamban, Cebu City
Email: roycimagala@gmail.com
WITH the celebration of the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ, what we are most reminded of is this incredible truth of our faith that Christ wants us to assume his very Body and Blood, if only to be truly one with him as we should since we are patterned after him, are that we are the image and likeness of God and sharers of God’s divine nature and life.
We should just try our best, always asking for God’s grace first of all, to adapt our thinking and the awareness of our true identity to this truth of our faith. To do that we should also try to follow Christ’s example, who being God emptied himself to become like us.
That is why Christ himself said that to follow him, we should deny ourselves, and given our wounded condition due to sin, we also cannot avoid having to carry the cross that first of all is the consequence of all of our sins, so that carrying it with him we can convert it into a means of our salvation.
That is also why Christ strongly exhorted us to be willing to lose even our life for Christ’s sake so we can have the real life meant for us, a life with God. (cfr. Mt 10,39) We need to spend time meditating on these words of Christ so we can build a strong, deep and abiding faith in them, and find concrete ways of how to put them into practice.
In a sense we have to be like empty vessels, a biblical term first referred to in 2 Kings 4,1-6 where a woman, troubled by the creditors of her dead husband, was asked to get as many empty vessels so that oil can be poured into them to pay for her husband’s debt.
That term has come to mean our need to empty ourselves so that the oil of God can fill us, which is the condition or state that is proper to us. We have to empty ourselves of our own selves, so to speak, so that the spirit of God, the spirit that is proper to us since we are God’s image and likeness, can fill us.
This need has been referred to several times in the New Testament, in particular in the Second Letter of St. Paul to Timothy: “If anyone cleanses himself from what is dishonorable, he will be a vessel for honorable use, set apart as holy, useful to the master of the house, ready for every good work.” (2,21)
Let’s remember that God being our creator and savior through Christ in the Holy Spirit, it’s he who actually directs our life toward its fulness and perfection. We should find ways of how we can discern his constant guidance and how we can be most receptive to his inspirations and graces. The ideal condition for us is to be constantly aware of what he is showing us and to follow him as closely as possible.
Thus, we can already deduce from these considerations that we really need to be contemplative souls even and especially when we are right in the middle of the world which, in the first place, is where God placed us to test us to see if what he wants us to be is also what we ourselves would like to be.
We need to try our best to convert ourselves into real contemplative souls, the means for which are actually readily and abundantly available to us.