A Sermon Preached by Rev. Fr. Bernard Uttley, O.S.B., on June 29, 2014
My beloved people, this Tuesday is the feast of the Most Precious Blood of Our Lord Jesus Christ, and in popular piety the entire month of July is dedicated to the devotion of the Precious Blood.
Although Our Lord’s entire Sacred Humanity is worthy of divine honor, since it is united to a divine Person, the Church allows public veneration and official liturgical worship for only two parts of His humanity: His Sacred Heart and His Precious Blood. The reason would seem to be that these two parts are most closely connected with our Savior’s redeeming work. His Heart is the symbol of the love which urged our Blessed Lord to deliver Himself to death for us, and the shedding of His blood was the actual means by which expiation for the sins of the world was made.
Just as with devotion to the Sacred Heart, there is a material side of this devotion and a spiritual or mystical side. As we adore and worship the physical Heart of Christ, so in this devotion we adore and worship the actual blood of Christ, for this blood is literally the blood of God, of God made man, the Word Incarnate. Our Lord first received this blood from His Virgin Mother when He was conceived and grew in her womb. After His birth, as His body grew according to natural laws, His blood increased and kept Our Lord alive all those years, until the hour came for it to be shed for our redemption. Oh, how anxious Our Lord was for that hour to arrive in which He could suffer for our salvation! For He said, “I have a baptism wherewith I am to be baptized, and how am I straitened until it be accomplished!” A baptism in His own blood, and He was eager for it because He loved us.
Why is there a double consecration during Holy Mass?
The blood of Christ that we honor today in this devotion is the blood that Jesus shed in His Passion. From the time of His agony in the Garden of Gethsemane to His Resurrection, His Precious Blood lay where it had fallen, but all the time it still belonged to the Divinity and was united with the Second Person of the Holy Trinity — God personally was united with each drop of that blood, so that, even though it was trampled underfoot by men, it was adored by millions of unseen angels as the blood of God Himself, worthy of all honor and glory. This blood, shed during His Passion, was afterwards reunited to His Sacred Body at the Resurrection. It filled once more the Sacred Heart and throbbed with life in the veins of Christ’s glorified Body. At the Ascension it was raised into heaven, and in the Holy Eucharist, it is substantially present in this most Holy Sacrament. At each Mass, the unbloody re-enactment of Calvary, His blood is mystically shed, mystically separated from His Body. That is why we have the double consecration of the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ, and it is truly given to us as the spiritual food of our souls in Holy Communion. Our Lord is present in each host, in each particle of the Host — Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity.
In a sense, Christianity and salvation are the very opposite of the whole vampire craze today. Vampires take your blood, but Christ gives us His blood for the redemption of the world. Salvation is like a divine blood transfusion. He doesn’t nourish Himself on us, but we on Him. In all of nature, there is a process of transformation, a cycle of life from death — nothing lives except something dies — minerals are taken up by plants and become plant; plants are slain by animals to become part of the animal; animals are eaten by us and become transformed into us, and yet, when Christ gives us Himself as our food in Holy Communion He doesn’t change into us — we change into Him.
Adorable as the Precious Blood of Jesus is in itself, the Church does not propose it to our devotion for its own sake. It is the sym- bol for the whole mystery of Redemption which was accomplished by the Sacrifice of Our Lord as the spotless Lamb of God. A sacrifice to God is a sacred drama; a sign portraying externally, in the most eloquent and impressive manner, man’s complete and loving inward submission to, and willing dependence upon, God. The Passion was the true and perfect liturgical sacrifice, of which all the sacrifices of the Old Law were but shadows. From all eternity, God had decreed as the price of man’s salvation, that Christ, as Head and Representative of humanity, would freely surrender His life in token of humanity’s willing obedience to God. The whole Passion, from the Garden of Gethsemane to the hill of Calvary, may be summed up in this verse: “He humbled Himself becoming obedient unto death; even to the death of the cross.”
In this great Sacrifice, Christ was both Priest and Victim — the Offerer and the Offered. As Victim, He would be completely passive. He would be apparently powerless in the hands of His persecutors, but only because He freely willed it. “Therefore doth the Father love Me, because I lay down My life, that I may take it up again. No man taketh it away from Me: but I lay it down of Myself, and I have power to lay it down; and I have power to take it up again. This Commandment have I received of My Father.” As Priest, elevated on the cross, Christ offered His wounds, His blood, His agony and His death, to His Father as eloquent testimony of His obedience to the Divine Will, even unto death. Man was at last what he ought to be — obedient to God. It was the greatest act of adoration and love a human nature could render to God and had an infinite value because Christ is a Divine Person.
Christ’s blood was the ransom, the price of our redemption
His Blood is precious because it is the blood of God and it is precious because it is the price of our redemption; St. Peter and St. Paul speak of Christ’s blood as the price of our redemption, the ransom that bought us from the slavery of sin and of the devil and of eternal damnation. We are not to think that God paid a ransom to the devil, but rather it was the adequate satisfaction to God’s justice for the sins of the world. In short, the blood of Christ represents all the effects of our Lord’s passion and death, that is, the reconciliation of fallen man with God and his restoration to the supernatural state of sanctifying grace. St. Paul says, “Through Him, it hath pleased the Father to reconcile all things unto Himself … making peace through the blood of the cross.”
<<Christ gave His all, every drop of blood, so that there should remain absolutely no doubt how much He loves us, and how much we should value heaven.>>
Jesus shed every drop of his blood to prove to us how much he loves us
“You were not redeemed,” says St. Peter, “with corruptible things as gold or silver … but with the precious blood of Christ as of a lamb unspotted and undefiled.” If Christ had shed just one drop of His Precious Blood, it would have been enough to save a million worlds. It would have been enough for God, but it would not have been enough for us, that is, we would have still wondered if He really loved us. That is why Christ gave His all, every drop of blood, so that there should remain absolutely no doubt how much He loves us, and how much we should value heaven. We know what value someone places upon something by the price they are willing to pay for it, and God was willing to pay for our salvation by His own death and the shedding of all His blood for us.
What is the infinite God worth? That shows us that everlasting life in Heaven will be simply incredible, absolutely amazing and worth all the effort and suffering that it takes to cooperate with God’s plan for us. Everything good in our lives, all hope of future eternal happiness, is due to that Precious Blood. Father Faber says that we weep that the Precious Blood was shed, and should weep. We do well in weeping, but if it had not been shed we would have wept eternally. The Pharisees called Christ a fool — He was. A fool of love. His love drove Him to such utter folly for us, for us who are, sadly, often so ungrateful and indifferent. Let us not cause that blood to be shed in vain on our behalf. We owe Christ absolutely everything, our whole selves, our entire lives. May that blood be upon us to sanctify and save us! Thank you, Lord Jesus Christ, for shedding Your blood for us — for me and for all of you!
–Taken from the Reign of Mary Quarterly Magazine, Issue 158
