Consanguinity
During the first days of Holy Week, the Red Cross sponsored a blood drive on the Boston College campus. The generosity of the young students in donating their blood was an inspiration, and the sight of them prone on tables as their blood dripped into the receptacles to be used for the good of others was an image that I carried with me throughout the Paschal Triduum.
The Vatican website has posted Pope Benedict’s homilies for the Triduum. As usual, they are splendid. Here is an excerpt from his Holy Thursday homily:
Scholars tell us that in those ancient times of which the histories of Israel’s forefathers speak, to “ratify a Covenant” means “to enter with others into a bond based on blood or to welcome the other into one’s own covenant fellowship and thus to enter into a communion of mutual rights and obligations”. In this way, a real, if non-material form of consanguinity is established. The partners become in some way “brothers of the same flesh and the same bones”. The covenant brings about a fellowship that means peace. Can we now form at least an idea of what happened at the hour of the Last Supper, and what has been renewed ever since, whenever we celebrate the Eucharist? God, the living God, establishes a communion of peace with us, or to put it more strongly, he creates “consanguinity” between himself and us. Through the incarnation of Jesus, through the outpouring of his blood, we have been drawn into an utterly real consanguinity with Jesus and thus with God himself. The blood of Jesus is his love, in which divine life and human life have become one. Let us pray to the Lord, that we may come to understand ever more deeply the greatness of this mystery. Let us pray that in our innermost selves its transforming power will increase, so that we truly acquire consanguinity with Jesus, so that we are filled with his peace and grow in communion with one another.
“Let us pray that in our innermost selves its transforming power will increase, so that we truly acquire consanguinity with Jesus, so that we are filled with his peace and grow in communion with one another.”
It’s interesting to wonder about how human beings, sometimes in groups but often on their own, passionately dedicate themselves to good works. The connection with Jesus Christ, while important for Christians, isn’t what allows people of other faiths and no-faith to do the same.
Whatever the nature of personal transformation, it’s a development that clearly crosses all sectarian divisions.
Paul – originalfaith.com
Christ is the very definition of Love from the beginning.
Paul — it is true that non-Christians can indeed choose to do good things, and do so in ignorance of Christ. But even when non-Christians do such good works, they cannot avoid doing so in connection with He who is goodness itself.
Even though they may protest and insist that they did not see Jesus when they fed the hungry, etc., still, whenever they did so, they did it to Jesus.
A lovely piece from BXVI, and one worth pondering if only because in the Anglo-American world, the term “covenant” has been so long associated with groups banding together against the outside world, rather than for that world and its inhabitants (I’m thinking particularly of the Solemn League and Covenant of the Scottish Presbyterians in the 17th century, which became in ways a weapon to use against their enemies). But this excerpt from Maundy Thursday talks instead of a covenant which is universal, at least potentially, with no restrictions of blood or culture or anything of the sort.