I Corinthians x.16
All baptized Christians are welcome to receive the Holy Eucharist at Saint Thomas and you can view the calendar to see the schedule of Masses offered throughout the week, and join the celebration of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass!
In the Eucharist, the church is fed by Christ and with Christ. On the night he was betrayed, Jesus was at supper with his friends, keeping the Passover, the celebration of God’s liberation of God’s people from bondage in Egypt. He took bread, blessed it, gave it, and said, “Take, eat: this is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” As the supper was ending, he took a cup of wine, blessed it, and gave it to his friends, saying, “Drink this, all of you: it is my blood of the New Covenant, shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins. Whenever you do this, do it in remembrance of me.” In the Eucharist, we not only remember that Last Supper, but we recall the whole of Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection and we discover ourselves re-membered, made whole, by that life. In the Eucharist, we join the disciples at the Supper, we go to the Cross, we witness his resurrection body really and truly present to us in the Bread and Wine with which Christ, through his church (his Body), feeds us. The Eucharist is not a mere ritualized drama or an elaborate act of signification–it is itself the reality it communicates: the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus. In the Eucharist we receive the forgiveness of our sins, we receive grace to live the life of love, we are strengthened in all virtue, and we are made one with Christ, receiving the divinity of the One who shared with us our humanity.
The word Eucharist means “Thanksgiving” and it is in the context of Jesus’ whole life that we offer a sacrifice of thanksgiving in, with, and through him. It is a sacrifice not in the sense that we believe Jesus is offered again for us, but in the sense that the Eucharist is a making-present of Jesus’ one, full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice which he made on the Cross, which is itself the culmination of the sacrifice, the self-giving in love, the perfect and fragrant offering, which is the whole of Jesus’ life.
