This week we Lectio the Liturgy with the Prayer after Communion for the Feast of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ.
Grant, O Lord, we pray, that we may delight for all eternity in that share in your divine life, which is foreshadowed in the present age by our reception of your precious Body and Blood. Who live and reign for ever and ever.
Last week I was looking for something in scripture to study and came across the book of Haggai. Haggai was written around 520 B.C. and is found near the end of the Old Testament. It is only two chapters long, so I decided, why not?
In Haggai, the Lord is waiting for the temple to be rebuilt, but the people keep telling him, “Not now.” (Haggai 1:1) The people have things to do. They are rebuilding their own homes and they’re trying to keep food on the table.
But the Lord told them to look around. His exact words to them are, “Reflect on your experience!” The people are sowing but there’s barely enough to eat. They’ve eaten, but they’re not full and they have not even noticed it. Because of their lack of attention to the Lord, they are living in the midst of a drought.
God kept asking them to build the temple, but it was not precious enough to them.
The connection that came to me between this prayer and the book of Haggai is the word precious. In the Latin form of the prayer, for the word precious, we find the word pretiosi, which means of great value.
In the book of Haggai, God is telling the people that their lives would be different if they would change their priority. For 16 years they walked over and around the foundation of the temple that was already laid. God was waiting for the people to recognize the value of His presence in their midst. For 16 years, when God asked about building the temple, He heard, “Not now.”
God’s temple was His presence among the people, just like the Eucharist is for us today. So when it comes to the Body and Blood of Christ being a priority for us, do we, too say, “Not now?” As we look around our lives, are there any clues that our lives would change if we would only make the Eucharist precious to us?
When we come to understand the value, or how precious the Eucharist is, we being to delight for all eternity in that share in your divine life. The divine life is foreshadowed in the present age, but the doesn’t mean we can’t have a taste of it now.
When we pray in the “Glory Be,” we proclaim that His glory is eternal, it was in the beginning, it is now, and ever shall be, and we are invited to share in the glory of the divine life now.
The people in Haggai did rebuild the temple. It was much humbler temple than they remembered, but God promised that soon the temple would be even more beautiful than before. God reminded the people numerous times that He was with them and in Haggai 2:2, God promises His people, and we are included, “From this day, I will bless you."
This week as we celebrate the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ, reflect a bit on how precious He is to you because you are very precious to Him.