The Fifth Luminous Mystery

The Institution of the Most Holy Eucharist

They reclined at table.  I cannot help but consider the Road to Emmaus.  We can infer from the Gospels that this moment was not only a great banquet in the tradition of Moses but it was also something new.  Like each of the mysteries that illumine us we here find another Theophony.  It is in the breaking of the bread that they knew him.  They knew him in the breaking of the bread.  Each time ... the breaking of the bread.  This moment finds its repetition over and over again in the New Testament in both explicit and implicit ways.  It is as if this moment is just as central to the new found Christian life as that august moment of the Cross.  After this moment the Apostles no longer ask who he is.  They now possess a singular knowledge of the Logos.  God has revealed Himself and has fed them the bread that is, in fact, His very heart.  They are fed and they are filled.  What they are filled with is the bread of angles come down from heaven.  This bread fills them and sustains them in the journey that is to come.  It is the grace of this central diadem among all the Sacraments whereby they are nourished so that they will come to nourish us.  They receive on their very lips the God who sits before them.  Lord, let the scales fall from my eyes so that I may see you ever more clearly.  Through my sight fails my hearing delights in the words pronounced in all your Churches, "Hoc Est Corpus Meum."  My ears drink in these words day after day without any sign of wanting less.  Instead, each morsel enflames my soul and calls me back to your most awesome love.