meditation of the day

“My appointed time draws near”

How often have we heard Jesus repeat, my time has not yet come. Now at last it is time. This is the sufferer’s reward; he knows that his time has come, the time of mercy…. The image of the betrothed set free, saved, purified, is before the sufferer’s eyes. She is his reward. Say to daughter Zion, “See, your savior comes! See, his reward is with him, his recompense before him” (Is 62:11). With him, you, like the betrothed with her spouse—you, the new Zion, the assembly of God’s people to whom he comes; you the sufferer, yet no plaintive sufferer, but rather triumphant as the presser of the vintage, as victor—you are his beautiful reward, the cup from which he will drink with joy in God’s kingdom.

For the sake of this cup of joy he does not refuse the other cup of pain that the Father offers him…. It is time now. God’s marriage with his creation has come. The wine of God’s life flows from the press; his spouse is the chalice that offers itself to catch the flow; and all the ages of men from the world’s beginning until its end shall drink, the called and the chosen, the King’s guests at his marriage; all say to him full of wonder: You have kept the good wine until now (Jn 2:10)….

The Church has fasted for forty days and now she hungers for her Lord, as he did when he had fasted in the desert among the beasts. To him, God fasting, came angels to do him service. An Angel is coming now to feed the Church at the end of her fast: the Lord himself. Because he has fasted, practiced denial, directed himself; because he has been the cluster that was pressed (Is 63:3), the seed that has fallen in the earth (Jn 12:24-26), therefore is he now in the hands of his people, the ecclesia, and a cup in their hands.

The Church sees the picture before her: the vivid truth of the Lord as Host and Food. Apostles and prophets have opened her eyes to what this means. She perceives in these pictures what is now taking place, and what is taking place in a few days’ time: death, the seed in the earth, and the cluster in the wine-press. It is death in the sign of the cross, death through the cross, for the plow that will make the earth ready to receive the seed, and the wine-press, are in their most ancient form a cross. But when the cross has done its work of destruction the bread of life will give off its odor to the hungry, and the wine that makes glad will run in the cup.

Sister Aemiliana Löhr, o.s.b.

Sister Aemiliana († 1972) was a German Benedictine nun who wrote about the liturgy. / From The Great Week: An Explanation of the Liturgy of Holy Week, D.T.H. Bridgehouse, Tr. Copyright © 1958, Longmans, Green & Co. Ltd., New York, NY. All rights reserved.