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“Be imitators of God, as beloved children, and walk in love, as Christ loved us and handed himself over for us as a sacrificial offering to God” (Eph 5:1-2).
“The experience of divine tenderness should be for us far more than a private emotion of overwhelming security. In God love is not an emotion but the law of his Being, his very identity and substance; and so, too, must such unwavering and substantial love become the law and spontaneous operation of our own being” (1).
“Husbands, love your wives, even as Christ loved the church and handed himself over for her to sanctify her” (Eph 5:25-27).
“God’s gift of self is not a suspended abstraction; it is the surrender of a lover to his beloved. Christ’s deliberate handing-over of himself is a gesture that reveals that God’s love for us is not a generic benevolence but rather the specific love driving the heart of a passionately committed Bridegroom” (2). And He continues to hand Himself over to us daily in the Eucharist. “In the Incarnation, Christ comes to encounter us as the Bridegroom of redeemed Humanity and of each of our souls. This is his most intimate identity. Think of what being a bridegroom implies by way of desire for union, passionate attachment to the beloved, unceasing labor for her benefit, and fidelity to the point of death” (2).
“The husband does not rule over his own body, but the wife does” (1 Cor 7:4).
“This principle graphically illustrates how totally wedded spouses should surrender their whole persons to one another. But it also has a strong Eucharistic resonance because it shows how unconditionally the Lord Jesus has entrusted his Real Presence into the hands of the Church, for his Spouse to do with him whatever she deems necessary for the salvation of the world. This includes not only the Eucharistic Sacrifice, but also the Reserved Sacrament for adoration and as viaticum for the sick and dying” (2).
“[God] who did not spare his own Son, but handed him over for us all, how will he not also make us the free gift of everything else along with him?” (Rom 8:32). “For our sake [the Father] made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God” (2 Cor 5:21). “We were reconciled to God by the death of his Son while we were [his] enemies” (Rom 5:10).
“If we are ever tempted to view Jesus’ Passion and Death as merely the regrettable failure of an otherwise admirable mission, then we should read the Gospels carefully again. There we would see clearly the dazzling light of an ardent love, a light that blinds our natural logic with the divine truth that precisely surrendering into the hands of sinners who he knew would kill him WAS the strategy of divine love to redeem the world” (3).
- “For us to be liberated from the death of sin, the Father deemed it necessary that his innocent Son should become sin, that which is most abhorrent to God! Christ, the All-Holy One, became sin by taking up into his person the full consequence of our sins, namely, death. The very God who would not allow Abraham to kill his beloved son Isaac “did not spare his own Son but handed him over for us all”! The all-powerful King exchanged his dignity for that of the condemned slave. The greatest truths are always unbelievable, and that’s precisely why we have to believe them” (3)
Christ takes upon himself the corporate sin of all ages and allows it to crush him on the Cross. Only the power of God’s infinite love is capable of absorbing all evil in this way: it hurls the raging dragon into the consuming heart of the sun. (4)
- “When Christ came into our midst to redeem us, he descended so low that after that no one would be able to fall without falling into him”. – Hans Urs von Balthasar, Heart of the World.
The Greek word for what I have been translating as ‘handing-over’ is parádosis, and it contains a meaningful ambiguity worth pursuing. This one word can be translated not only as ‘to hand over’ or ‘surrender’ but also as ‘to betray’, because a certain kind of handing-over can be a betrayal. A father hands his daughter over to her bridegroom at the altar full of love and hope, but Judas hands Jesus over to his enemies to be rid of him. (5)
- Being “handed over” expresses both the intimacy of a Bridegroom (of a sweet embracing and being embraced by a cherished beloved, of an affective ecstasy beyond all human imagining, and all this because we now possess the Father’s most prized treasure as our very own) and the horrors of the Crucifixion… “From Annas and Caiaphas and Pilate all the way down to the last serving girl, all of these representatives of sinful humanity are portrayed as handing Jesus over to one another blasphemously as their common plaything—for mockery, torture and crucifixion. The players in the Passion reciprocate God’s tender gesture of handing over his Son to them, not by joyfully embracing him, but by betraying him” (5).
His wedding with humanity is going to be a blood-wedding, the wedding feast of “the Lamb slain since the foundation of the world” for the love of his Bride, the Church (Rev 13:8; 19:7). (5)
For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night he was handed over, took bread, and, after he had given thanks, broke it and said, “This is my body that is for you. Do this in memory of me.” In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in memory of me.” For as often as you eat this bread and drink the cup, you proclaim the death of the Lord until he comes. (1 Cor 11:23-26)
Paul, who was not present at the Last Supper, stresses that he is handing on to the Corinthians what had been handed on to him by the Apostles. (6)
- In his text Paul uses the very same word, parádosis, to refer to his handing-on of the celebration of the Eucharist that we have seen him use to refer to the Son’s own handing-down to humanity by the Father, and that the Gospel also uses to refer to the betrayal of the Son by Judas and all sinners.
The Latin equivalent of parádosis is traditio, and so we see here that the Eucharist is the core and source of our living tradition as Christians, our most precious heritage. The gesture of surrender contained in the Eucharist, then, communicates not two but three interrelated meanings: (1) the eternal divine action of Father and Son, (2) the temporal human action of betrayal at the time of the Passion, and (3) the sacramental divine-and-human action of the Church. All three are parádosis, traditio, ‘handing-over’, and they are inseparable from one another. (7)
- Because Christ handed Himself over before His death through the Eucharist, He “sacramentally institutes in the present an action that overtakes in time the destructive historical action of his murder that hasn’t yet occurred, while at the same time giving to it a startling redemptive meaning. Thus, the interior significance and effects of the future action of betrayal are radically changed by divine intervention before the betrayal occurs. The malice of man is overtaken by the goodness of God. Love swallows up hatred, even though the lover dies of its poisoning” (7).
“At the very moment when he is going to allow himself to be handed over to the forces of darkness, Jesus shows himself to be more than ever the sovereign Lord of creation and of history: of (1) creation, because he takes the elements of bread and wine and re-creates them, transforming them into his Body and Blood; of (2) history, because he takes the impending evil deed of his betrayal and transforms it already before it occurs into the best possible occasion for him to surrender his person to us, his betrayers, out of love, as the Bridegroom of the Church, with the total fidelity, dedication and passionate love that befits a royal bridegroom” (8).
“Do this in memory of me!” (Luke 22:19)
How beautiful that Christ asks us to do to others out of love what he has first done to us by telling us to do it in his (8) memory—as if he were saying: ‘Just remember me and love will come easily!’ Truly, it is the quality of our interaction with others—at home, in the workplace, in the street where we encounter the homeless—that will confirm the authenticity and heartfelt devotion of the liturgical Mystery celebrated in the church. Or do we simply forget Christ and his gift of self to us when we leave the church? Is the Mass nothing but a ritual fantasy that confirms my self-complacency? (9)
‘Do not forget what I have done for you,’ Jesus says to us incessantly. When we are overwhelmed by sorrows of any kind, or are perhaps suffering the pangs of a devouring guilt that can tempt us to despair; when it seems that our life has reached a dead-end either through the treachery of others or through our own grave errors: then our only salvation is to believe with all our might in the power of Christ’s creative anticipation, that is, in the sovereign ability Christ demonstrated at the Last Supper and on the Cross to take an evil deed that will lead to his own crucifixion and providentially transform it into an event of Resurrection. Christ’s unconditional handing-over of himself to us in advance of anything we might do ought to give us the certainty that no sin we commit can defeat the Mercy of God, and that no wound that is inflicted by others on us can surpass the power to heal of the divine Physician. Indeed, Christ “has foresuffered all”. Let us not stubbornly clutch our sufferings to our chest like greedy paupers; Christ’s tender deed of creative anticipation on the Cross has made it so that all my sufferings already belong, in advance, more to him than to me. (9)
“Love one another as I have loved you”, Jesus commanded us (Jn 13:34).
As Christians we are not free to love any way we wish, half-heartedly or when convenient. We must strive to love as we have been loved, which is with all the tenderness of God’s whole Heart. “The measure of love,” says St. Bernard, “is to love without measure.” We cause something like a short-circuit in the cosmic circulation of love, which is supposed to flow on through us, if, after receiving Christ from the Father, we do not imitate God’s gesture and instead make his outpoured love stop abruptly with ourselves… This is not our work, but the work of God in us. Christ in us is never a mere static object that we dispose of; he is the Subject acting in my soul, the risen Lord who lives in me and strengthens me, the true Protagonist of my life and personal history (10).
In summary, then: It was his unbounded divine compassion as response to human betrayal that moved Jesus to institute the Holy Eucharist. The Eucharist is a sacred work of total transformation which the Church performs in obedience to and imitation of her Lord. It effects a transformation of time, of matter, of the meaning of emotions and experiences, and of the human person. In it we see Jesus transform, not only bread and wine into his Body and Blood, but also his own human weakness and defeat and death into divine tenderness and mercy. He makes one supreme moment in time flood any other moment that remembers his action—all by the power of the Holy Spirit that indwells Jesus. This pattern of transformation through the power of mercy should, in turn, rule our whole life as Christians. (10)
Christ’s incandescent, indeed radioactive, Presence in the Blessed Sacrament is no inert object for mere distant veneration. Christ wants to pervade my whole person so that I become his Real Presence in the world. Christ wants to be born into the world, wants to be handed over by me to others, through my deeds of love, until his love becomes the vital law and spontaneous impulse of my own being. (11)
Prodigal Catholic 
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