If we have true faith, hope and love for Jesus, every sacrament is a personal encounter with Him, especially Holy Communion. True faith: both in what the Eucharist is (the body, blood, soul and divinity of Christ under the appearances of bread and wine) and as total trust and confidence in the Person of Jesus. True hope: the certainty that He will deliver on His promises to us, especially that He will raise us up on the last day because we have eaten His flesh and drunk His blood. True love: not only affectionate feelings towards Jesus but the readiness to sacrifice ourselves for Him as He did for us.

We must try to be as ready for Holy Communion as we would want to be ready for heaven itself. Heaven will be the definitive personal encounter with Him, no longer under sacramental signs, but in full blown reality. That’s why, out of love for Him, we must seek to be as free from sin as possible when we come for Holy Communion. Not out of a puritanical or moralistic obsession with ourselves, but out of love for Him, out of gratitude for His sacrifice on the Cross to cleanse us from sin and to prepare us for Communion with Himself and with the Father and the Holy Spirit. That’s why we must be diligent in trying to know and get rid of the sins we have committed. If I love someone, I won’t want to come before them with a bad conscience, heedless of how I have offended them. I will want to understand what they consider to be hurtful and offensive and do everything in my power to be free of it. Here is the beauty of both the Sacrament of Reconciliation or of a serious examination of conscience and act of contrition before receiving Holy Communion. It means we are taking both sin and our love for Christ seriously.

Without faith, hope and love, and without repentance from sin, the reception of Holy Communion will do us no good. The sole physical act of receiving the Eucharist does not somehow produce a magical effect in my heart. Communion is not just a physical ritual. It is a personal and interpersonal encounter which thus involves everything usually involved in any relationship we would have. Indeed, it requires more since we are not just encountering another human being whom we love, but the Lord Jesus Christ, the risen Son of God, who has loved us and sacrificed Himself for our sake.

But if we approach Communion with conscious and deliberate intent, with sincere preparation, and with an open heart filled with faith, hope and love for Jesus who is our Love above all, then we will have opened the flood gates of our whole being to receive Him and all the gifts and graces He brings. It’s impossible to list exhaustively all the graces He brings, but let’s consider three perspectives.

First, there is first the grace of His very Person. It’s true that He is always present to us in different ways in our lives, but in the Eucharist, we receive the whole Christ. His whole Body in our whole body; His whole humanity in our whole humanity; His whole Blood in our whole blood; His whole Divinity in our whole being. Through this total union with us He shares with us everything He is and has. As St. Paul once said in another context, “I no longer live. It is Christ who lives in me.” This profound and all-embracing oneness with whole Jesus is both the foundation and the anticipation of eternal life. As the prayer over the offerings of today’s Mass says: “O Lord, our God, who once established these created things (of bread and wine) to sustain us in our frailty, grant, we pray, that they may become for us now the Sacrament of eternal life.” Clearly, we can only know and discern this truth of eternal life through faith. It’s not a matter of feelings or emotions even if sometimes we do experience these at Holy Communion. In Communion, Jesus Himself draws our frail humanity into His risen life and elevates its dignity and value infinitely, preparing it for the resurrection of the dead. As St. Augustine once put it, the Eucharist is the bread which transforms us into Itself as we consume it. Our very bodies now carry the seed of the resurrection within and so we need to live in them in a way which befits their eternal destiny. As our soul, so our flesh matters to God, eternally.

Second, when Christ enters our whole being with His whole being in Holy Communion, He does not find us bereft of other gifts of grace already in us, such as the graces of baptism, confirmation, matrimony, holy orders and the other graces of the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit such as joy, peace, kindness, humility, patience and the rest. When we receive Him in the Eucharist, He renews and revives all these graces. He is like a celestial vitamin who unleashes new energies; or like a celestial antibiotic, who eliminates the venial sins and other weaknesses which undermine our joy and peace in Him. Of course, we will only benefit from all this if we respond to Him with the resolve of our will to act upon them. He can’t strengthen us if we won’t let Him or if we don’t rouse ourselves to welcome and work with Him.

Third, I mentioned that it is the whole Christ we receive in the Eucharist. The whole Christ also embraces His own communion with the Father and the Holy Spirit and with the whole Church on earth, in heaven and in purgatory. Indeed, the whole Christ embraces all those who sought, seek and will seek Him with a sincere heart even although they do not know His Name or His Gospel. The whole Christ also includes the whole cosmos because all things were created by Him, exist in Him, are held together by Him and are for Him. So, when we receive the whole Christ in Holy Communion, it is not merely a private matter between Jesus and me: it has ecclesial, cosmic and heavenly proportions. If received in faith, Communion turns me outwards to embrace everyone and everything because Christ is in everyone and everything in different ways and degrees. In Communion, I open myself to the whole of creation because in eternal life that is how I will be. It is how everyone will be without fear, regret or shame. The Eucharist sends me on mission to love as Christ loves both in this world and in the next. The Eucharist makes me real with the reality of Christ. He is reality.

Lord, grant us the light and grace to understand the magnitude of what we are doing when we come for Holy Communion. Cleanse our hearts from sloth and presumption, from thoughtless habit. Stir our faith, hope and love to encounter and welcome You with open heart and mind. May our Eucharist today be a new beginning in the way we prepare for You and receive You. When the Mass is ended, send us on mission to witness and proclaim Your love to the world. O Sacrament most holy, O Sacrament divine, all praise and all thanksgiving be every moment thine!