Mystical Supper

It is critical, I believe, that when we   worship we think of making our worship personal. Although we worship as a group, that which is offered up must also be individual. We must offer our own very lives back to God in worship. Our worship is modeled on the worship of Jesus. He offered Himself to the   Father in thanksgiving for life. We must not fall into the pattern of the past and choose to offer only Jesus up to the   Father, allowing ourselves to only offer up something – someone – who has been given to us. We must join with   Jesus and offering our very lives back to the Father.

I sense that so often Catholics, in particular, fall into the error of offering up Jesus to the Father in worship. Jesus already did that as a means of showing us how to worship God. The worship that Jesus modeled for us was/is the offering of one’s self to the Father in thanksgiving.

This means, therefore, that we must think about ourselves as being truly represented by the bread on the paten and the wine in the chalice. They are symbols of human life since they are food. Jesus used them to signify that He was offering His very life back to the Father. We join with Him in doing this.

The symbolic offering of ourselves to the Father in worship, however, is truly meaningless unless it is joined with a firm commitment to transform or change ourselves, attempting to make ourselves more in the likeness of God as represented in the Person of Jesus Christ. When we say that we want to grow in the likeness of God, we are actually saying that we want to become more and more like Jesus as we know Him through the Sacred Scriptures and Holy Tradition. To be like God is to be like Jesus, God Incarnate.

This means, however, that we must first realize that we have to change and then commit ourselves to changing our hearts and minds, working to bring them more into concert with the mind and heart of Jesus.

To do this we must fast and pray so that we have the courage to become more like Jesus. Then it means that we must examine our lives and determine what we must do to be more like Jesus. In most instances, I think, it means to bring our thinking more into concert with His thinking about life and,         especially, about others. We must learn how to see all others as brothers and sisters of the very same Father.