“When we eat this bread and drink this cup, we proclaim your death, O Lord, until you come again.” Is death really something worth proclaiming, though, as if it were good news? Usually not, but when it comes to the death of Christ, yes, it is, because his death means the end of death as we know it. What can that mean?

God did not create death. Original sin did. Mortal sin, of which original sin was the first, separates us from God and so from life itself which God is. Until Christ, death meant sin prevailed. And sin does not only separate us from life. It also separates us from love, from God who is love. Death thus meant the loss of life and of love. And death is not just physical. Think how, when a loved one dies, our reaction to it is much more than physical. Grief affects the whole being of the mourner because death affects the whole being of the deceased. We perceive our loved one as gone from us not only in body but also in their very person, their heart and soul and mind. Our fear is that not only is the body dead but also the very person, as if somehow they have vanished or evaporated into thin air, as if they had never existed. This is the terror of those who have no belief in an after-life which conserves the identity of soul of a loved one. In their minds, death is simply the end. We return to nothing.

But we proclaim the death of Christ when we eat this bread and drink this cup, when we celebrate the Mass. Christ took on our death out of compassion, not because he had sinned. The Father’s purpose was that the Son should engage with death, with the only thing He had not created, and make it serve the Father’s original purpose: to give life and love to all His sons and daughters. Christ died in utter self-sacrificing love for the Father and for us, not out of sin. Sin takes away life and love and causes death. Christ gives His life and love away in death and transforms death from being what separates from the Father into being what reunites us with Him. As we hear in the Letter to the Hebrews, Christ freed humanity from slavery to the fear of death by taking the power of death away from Satan and claiming it for Himself. Christ transforms death from being the return to nothingness to being the return to the fullness of God.

Christ’s death was not just a personal experience or a heroic moral example. No, His death gutted death of the meaning it had because of sin and invested it with the new meaning of His victorious love for us and for the Father. Christ changed death from being darkness into light, from being the end to being the beginning, from being destruction to being new creation, from being separation and loss to being reunion and reward. When Adam died, he breathed out for the last time the natural life God had breathed into his nostrils. When Christ dies, he breathes into Adam’s nostrils the breath of heaven itself, the Holy Spirit, eternal and supernatural life.

When Christ was baptised in the muddy waters of the Jordan, He immersed Himself in our murky human condition of sin and decay. When we are baptized in the cleansing water of the baptismal font, we are immersed in the death of Christ. His death unleashed the river of the waters of eternal life in the Spirit and the baptized are caught up into those flowing waters. These are like the torrents which Ezekiel saw coming from the Temple in Jerusalem, symbolizing the torrents of blood and water pouring from the side of the Crucified. They cleanse us from sin and therefore from death.

In Baptism, our death is swallowed up in the victory of Christ’s death. That’s why it frees us from original sin. The living waters of Christ’s death are constantly flowing deep in our being, always there for us to return to for the reassuring and abiding love of Christ, for purification and healing, for strength and new hope. And those waters carry us downstream to receive the other sacraments from which they flow. We are awash with God through baptism and the sacramental life of the Church. We are saturated with divine life if we want to be, if we reach out for it, if we don’t separate ourselves wilfully from it by mortal sin. To be immersed in the death of Christ is thus to be immersed in the life of Christ.

Nowhere is this more so than when we receive the Eucharist, if we do so worthily and with faith. The Eucharist is the body and blood He gave up and poured out for us on the Cross, but it is also the entire divinity and humanity which He took up again when he rose from the dead. The Eucharist is pregnant with the whole Mystery of Calvary and the Empty Tomb. That’s why it renews the grace of our baptism and of the other sacraments and confers so much more, since the Eucharist is the source and summit of the life of the Church. It is so, quite simply, because it is the crucified and risen Christ. To receive the Eucharist means to live the Eucharist, to live in the death and resurrection of Christ in our daily lives.

When, therefore, we hold the Eucharist in our hand, we hold the new and true meaning of death, of our own death, in our hand. It tells us how to die now in view of the day when, like Jesus, we will say, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.” And how do we die now? By living a life of self-sacrificing love, which is the same thing as saying by living a moral life in accordance with the Eucharist and the Gospel, by dying to sin every time we reject temptation and by rising to grace and holiness every time we reach out in love. Christ’s death revealed to the world His true identity as the Lover of the human race and as the Loving Son of the Father. It is by allowing in faith His love to well up within us that we build and strengthen our true identity in the sight of God. Only what we have done in love will survive death. Death will bring us before Christ and He will reflect back to us as in a mirror the presence or absence of true love in our hearts. That will be our judgment. All our other achievements in this life of whatever kind, all our relationships, will stand or fall to the degree that they reflect true love, the death of Christ. In the evening of life, says St. John of the Cross, we will be judged on love. Yes, and in love and by Love.

Death is daily self-surrender in love, be it in action, in suffering, in praying, in silent waiting. Let us die to self and rise to love. Let our death be our greatest act of love, our own personal Eucharistic offering to God.