EIGHTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME - MARCH 2, 2025

EIGHTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME

When the prophet Isaiah wrote down a song of praise for God in his Apocalypse, he envisioned that God would deliver the nation of Israel from their enemies and bring about lasting peace. In these words, he wrote, “He will swallow up death forever. The Lord God will wipe away the tears from all faces.” Centuries later, the Apostle Paul would take the words written by the prophet of old and share with the Church in Corinth the same message: “Death is swallowed up in victory. Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” Paul knew what Isaiah could only prophesy–when death was swallowed up in victory, it was, and still is, done literally.

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Isaiah accompanies his praise for God’s deliverance and the celebration in Zion with a description of a “feast of rich food and choice wines, juicy, rich food and pure, choice wines.” As Paul writes to the Church in Corinth, he is quoting from the prophet and deliberately choosing to use this word “swallow”. In Hebrew scriptures, this word is often interchangeable with consuming or devouring. Paul’s translation of the word in Greek has a similar usage, meaning to consume, swallow, or to drink down. As Christ prophesied his own death to his followers, he also used the same imagery, often speaking of his passion as a cup from which he must drink. Hundreds of years before the arrival of Christ, though, a faithful member of the nation of Israel like Isaiah could not imagine that God Himself would become one of us and die in our place as a perfect sacrifice so that we may be delivered to the feast that the prophet envisioned. Christ descended into the lowest parts of God’s creation and tasted death so that we may be saved from it. More touching, though, is that he offers us the very same cup. He first offered it in words to the Apostles James and John, though they probably did not understand exactly what drinking of this cup entailed. Then, as he sat amidst his closest followers for the celebration of the Passover feast, he offered them the cup, and one by one, each drank from it. That night, he prayed to his Father in Heaven that the cup be passed from him, until he accepted his mission of death and went to the cross for us. That very same cup can be found on every altar at every Mass in the world. Within that cup is the antidote to death–the blood of Christ, commingled with his body. In the reception of the Eucharist, each one of us has the opportunity to drink from this cup, to consume the body, blood, soul, and divinity of Jesus Christ, and to swallow death. The consumption of this Eucharist, though, is not allowing death to become one with us; rather, we swallow death in victory, becoming one with the person who conquered death for us.