Behold the Lamb of God

Dear Friend,

We were setting up for Mass on Monday morning in the Mission church and I was looking for a place to put a flower arrangement that a family donated last week. Someone suggested right in front of the altar, so I headed that way and stopped…The image on the front of the base of the altar brought me up short: behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world…

At no point in this liturgical year will we experience quite as direct - and visual - a connection between the Gospel proclaimed and our offerings at the altar as we do this week, as we hear John the Baptist reacting to the approach of Jesus: Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world…  

Our ongoing reflection on liturgy here in the parish is meant to remind us and draw us into what we believe about our Sunday (or Saturday evening) gathering: namely, in our sabbath assembly, the word of the Gospel proclaimed, and the bread broken at the altar, are not representations or some kind of a staging of Jesus’s action. On the contrary, the word proclaimed, the bread broken, and the wine poured bring us into an encounter with Christ as real as that which John the Baptist experienced with Jesus at the Jordan river.

As Pope Francis writes: “From the very beginning the Church, enlightened by the Holy Spirit, grasped that all that was visible in Jesus - all that could be seen with the eyes and touched with the hands, his words and gestures, the concreteness of the incarnate Word - everything of Him had passed into the celebration of the sacraments.”  

Peace be yours!

Fr. Dan ofm