Marriage and the Eucharist (3)

MARRIAGE as a sacrament that should be based on love in the beginning and that must foster love in those who receive it together expects the mutual presence of a respectful and devoted cohabitation. From the very nature of marriage there devolves the duty of union and of procreation.

Marriage requires still more . . . mutual sacrifice. And here again its similarity to the Eucharist is remarkable.

Our Lord instituted the Eucharist not only to give us His Presence, not only to provide us with the benefits of Holy Communion. Rich though these benefits be, they do not constitute the culminating benefit. What is the great wealth of the Eucharist?

On Calvary, Our Lord offered Himself all alone to His Father. But by His sacrifice He merited for us the grace to be grafted on Him. Stretched upon the bloody Arbor of Calvary Christ’s Hands and Feet and Side were cruelly notched; through the benefits of these divine openings we have gained the privilege, we wild offshoots since the time of Adam, branches deprived of divine life, to be set, to be grafted to the single Vine, the only Possessor of sanctifying sap.

Made other Christs that day, all Christians . . . Christiani . . . received the power, each time that the Lord Christ Jesus would repeat His sacrificial oblation of Calvary through the hands of His priest for the glory of the Father and the salvation of the world, to offer it with Him. This repetition of that offering is the Mass. Jesus, the divine Mediator, assumes again His attitude of Mediator; held between heaven and earth by the hands of the priest, He reiterates the dispositions of the complete immolation of Calvary.

On Golgotha, He was alone to carry through the sacrifice, the bloody sacrifice. Having been made that day by Him into Christ, we, since we are inseparable from Him except by sin, have the mission, whenever Christ renews His oblation, to offer it and to offer ourselves to Him. Effective participation in Mass is to be united with the Divine Head and all members of the Mystical Body in the intimacy of the same oblation renewed.

Jesus brings to us the benefits of His very own sacrifice; we bring to Him the offering of our own sacrifice. It is this part of the offering that the martyr’s relic in the altar stone and the drop of water into the wine at the Offertory represent; the union of two sacrifices in the unity of the same sacrifice.

Marriage will have to reach heights like that to succeed in satisfying the utmost demands of love. The husband must be ready to sacrifice all for his wife; the wife must be ready to sacrifice all for her husband. From these conjoined sacrifices, love is made; love likewise demands these conjoined sacrifices.

What shall I do to show my wife that I love her? What fine deed can I accomplish, what prowess display, what humble, noble act perform? That is the spirit of chivalry.

And the wife: What shall I do to make my husband happy? What will give him pleasure?

This is the nourishment and the condition of love, the relish for mutual sacrifice.