Wednesday, July 15, 2015

Month of the Precious Blood of Jesus - Fifteenth day




A LAMB STANDING AS IT WERE SLAIN 


What a grand spectacle in the sight of high heaven, looking down upon this sinful earth, to see not 250,000 sacrificial lambs and the bloody doorposts of the Old Law, but Jesus the Son of the living God, a Lamb standing as it were slain on 250,000 altars every day the world over, pleading with His Five Wounds for us poor banished children of Eve!

250,000 chalices with Thy Blood, O Lord, the Blood of Gethsemane, of the Pretorium, of Golgotha, all the Blood poured out in Thy seven effusions! What love, what a bountiful redemption! Copiosa apud eum redemptio!

The Bollandists relate of the virgin, St. Coletta, that once on a Maundy Thursday, while the celebrant of the Mass, a bishop, was elevating the sacred Host after the consecration, she began to exclaim: O my God! O merciful Jesus! O ye angels and saints! O Christians and sinners! Do come and behold this miracle, oh, listen to this intercession! And she continued to cry aloud until her confessor was called and commanded her to be silent. After the service the bishop in company with his three priests went to the saint and asked her to explain the cause of all that disturbance. Coletta replied: When you raised the Sacred Host at elevation, Rt. Rev. Bishop, I saw dear Jesus in living reality, covered with fresh and bleeding wounds and affixed to the cross with nails. At the same time I saw Him, with eyes raised to heaven, pleading most tenderly: O merciful Father look with favor down upon Thy beloved Son; behold My sufferings, My wounds, My blood, behold My obedience to Thy will, My zeal for Thy honor, My pity on unfortunate sinners! All this I offer Thee, that all sinners may find mercy and grace with Thee and serve Thee in love. O most holy Father, let not My sufferings endured for them, let not My blood shed for them, be lost to them; accept My vicarious satisfaction and sanctify them, that they may be saved and rejoice in Thee with eternal gratitude! The bishop was deeply moved and said: I believe with my whole soul that Jesus is ever pleading in the tabernacle as hostia (Victim) in the omnipotence of His utter abasement and with the compassionate Blood of His Wounds to obtain for us mercy and grace that we may not spend eternity in hell cursing the Holy Trinity, but praising it forever in heaven. And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all things to myself. But how wilt Thou draw us, O Lord? Ah, as the flower is inclined to the sun, as the hart is drawn to the running fountain. 


By the love of Thy Precious Blood leaping out from Thy Sacred Heart on the Cross and falling in profusion over us in the holy sacrifice of the Mass and flowing through the channels of Thy sacraments into our souls, thereby softening our hardened hearts and making our indifferent and drooping spirits  revive like a plant after a refreshing rain. But now in Christ Jesus, you, who some time were afar off, are made nigh by the blood of Christ. The Blood of Christ is a magnet that draws souls unto itself and inclines God, the tree of life, to show us His mercy. St. Mary Magdalen de Pazzi. At this stream of Christ’s Precious Blood, let us weep when we remember our Saviors excessive love for us, as the Israelites did of old when they remembered Sion near the rivers of Babylon. Let our right hand be forgotten, if we do not hang up our work-a-day instruments to make the holy sacrifice of the New Law the beginning of joy, at least on the Lord s day. Let my tongue cleave to my jaws, if I sound not Thy praise, O Lord, in Thy holy temple, where Thou, our King, dost offer worship to Thy heavenly Father in our behalf. For You are come to mount Sion and to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to the company of many thousands of angels and to Jesus the mediator of the dew testament, and to the sprinkling of blood which speaketh better than that of Abel.

    It is in the Mass that we come to Jesus the mediator of the New Testament and to the sprinkling of blood. Here our souls are sprinkled with the Blood of the Lamb that taketh away the sins of the world, even as Moses sprinkled the chosen people with the blood of animals and as the priest sprinkles the people on Sunday with holy water. And this divine Blood cries to heaven for us during the Mass with as many voices as there are drops of Blood in the chalice.





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