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If you want to know Jesus, you need to know that He is a priest.
Read chapter 22 of the gospel according to Saint Luke here.
What is a priest? A priest offers sacrifice to God on behalf of the people.
Why does God demand sacrifice? It's not so much that God demands sacrifice, but rather, love demands sacrifice. If you are not willing to give up anything for another person, you don't love that person. If you are willing to sacrifice a little, you love a little. If you are willing to sacrifice much, you love much.
God is love. He loves us and in His Son Jesus He makes the ultimate sacrifice for us. He gives us His very body, broken on the cross, to us in the Eucharist.
We need physical food to nourish our bodies and spiritual food to nourish our souls. We can tell pretty quickly when we neglect the former but we don't always notice when we neglect the latter. Jesus gave Himself to His dear friends at the Last Supper, and He gives Himself to us today throughout the world in the Eucharist because He wants to dwell in our souls. He wants to be there and we need to Him to be there. When we receive Him reverently in the Eucharist, we enter into the perfect communion of love that exists between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Jesus is love, and He wants us to abide in His love.
Jesus is both fully human and fully divine. We see this most clearly in His agony in the garden, when His human nature desperately wants to avoid the torment of the Cross. "He was in such agony and he prayed so fervently that his sweat became like drops of blood falling on the ground." Yet in His divine nature He surrenders Himself completely to the goodness and wisdom of His Heavenly Father. "Not my will but yours be done."
How does receiving Jesus in the Eucharist transfigure the apostles? At first it doesn't appear to. In fact, Peter denies Jesus, and the other apostles abandon Jesus, following His arrest. The truth is that we can expel Jesus from our heart when we commit a mortal sin, even after we receive Him in the Eucharist. But the beautiful truth is that this rejection need not be final. Jesus sees Peter deny Him, but He also sees Peter's bitter tears of repentance. He forgives Peter, and He forgives all of the apostles, when He appears to them on Easter Sunday. Fortified by the spiritual nourishment of the Eucharist, they will go on to build the Lord's church, and will surrender their own lives in service to the one who saved them.
Jesus invites all of to the Eucharistic banquet, where we commemorate the definitive sacrifice He made for us on Calvary, where we receive Him Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity, so He can dwell within us and we can share the Good News of our salvation with all the world.
"After Holy Communion, I heard these words in my soul: 'I am in your heart, I whom you had in your arms.'" (Diary of Saint Faustina Kowlaska, 609).
Pray the Divine Mercy Chaplet every day for the salvation of souls.
Michael Haverkamp Jr. is a lifelong member of the Roman Catholic Church. He is grateful to his parents for raising him in the faith. He resides in Columbus, Ohio with his amazing wife and three sons. By day he is a (usually) mild-mannered grant writer. You can read more of his writing at his blog, buildonrock.org.
