IN THE FLESH: More shameless cribbing from Dappled Things. (I will post something I actually personally wrote soon!) Excerpts:

…It would be easy for us to reduce Christ’s mission to a simple moral lesson and to reduce the Gospels to edifying texts of ancient history, and plenty of people have done precisely that. But as nice as that all is, it’s really not enough to save a world. It’s not even enough to save a human being. The Scriptures themselves tell us that there is something more. Salvation comes from Calvary, and Christ has given us a way to stand under the Cross and bathe in the very Blood that pours from His side, the fountain of life from which the Church has her power and Saints are born.

Within the words of institution, with which Christ established the Eucharist on the night before He died, we find an explicit connection with the Sacrifice that was to be offered on the Cross the next day.

[clipped]

In the Eucharist, though, the reality of Jesus’ Resurrection, which took place so many years ago, and which even now continues in eternity, comes to us as a foretaste of the sweetness that is promised us, too. We receive His victory over death into ourselves and are reminded of the truth of our baptism, “If we have died with Him, we have a sure hope that we shall rise to life with Him.” The Eucharist is, as it were, a down payment on that promise. It is a little bit of Heaven on earth, the rosy glow in the East that precedes the dawning of the sun.

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