We do not love our Lord in the Most Blessed Sacrament because we ignore or do not sufficiently look into the sacrifices made by His love for our sake. They are so amazing that the mere thought of them overwhelms my heart and fills my eyes with tears.

It cost our Savior the whole Passion to institute the Eucharist. How is that? Because the Eucharist is the sacrifice of the New Law. Now, there is no sacrifice without a victim, there is no immolation without the death of the victim, and to share in the merits of the sacrifice we must share in the victim by eating of it*. All this takes place in the Eucharist.

It is an unbloody sacrifice because the Victim died once and, by that one death, made sufficient reparation and merited full justification; but the Victim perpetuates itself in its state of immolation so as to apply to us the merits of the bloody Sacrifice of the Cross, which is to last and to be reoffered to God until the end of the world. We must eat our share of the Victim; but if it were not in this state of death, we would be loath to eat it. We do not eat living things.

The Eucharist cost our Lord the agony in the Garden of Olives, the humiliations He had to undergo before the tribunals of Caiphas and of Pilate, and His death on Calvary. The Victim had to pass through all these immolations in order to reach the sacramental state and come to us. 

By instituting His Sacrament, Jesus perpetuated the sacrifices of His Passion. He condemned Himself to undergo desertions as heart-breaking as the one He suffered in the Garden of Olives; the treachery of His friends and disciples who would become schismatics, heretics, and renegades and who would sell the Sacred Host to the sorcerers.

He perpetuated the denials that distressed Him in the house of Annas; the sacrilegious fury of Caiphas; the scorn of Herod; the cravenness of Pilate; the shame of seeing a passion, an idol of flesh, preferred to Him, as He had seen Barabbas; the sacramental crucifixion in the body and in the soul of the sacrilegious communicant. 

Well, our Lord knew all this beforehand. He was acquainted with all the new Judases; He counted them among His own, among His well-beloved children. But nothing of all this could stop Him; He wanted His love to go further than the ingratitude and malice of man; He wanted to outlive man’s sacrilegious malice.

He knew beforehand the lukewarmness of His followers: He knew mine; He knew what little fruit we would derive from Holy Communion. But He wanted to love just the same, to love more than He was loved, more than man could make return for.

Is there anything else? But is it nothing to have adopted this state of death when He has the fullness of life, a glorified and supernatural life? Is it nothing to be treated and considered as one dead? In this state of death Jesus is without beauty, motion or defense; He is wrapped in the Sacred Species as in a shroud and laid in the tabernacle as in a tomb. He is there, however; He sees everything. He submits to everything as though He were dead. His love casts a veil over His power, His glory, His hands, His feet, His beautiful face and His sacred lips; it has hidden everything. It has left Him only His Heart to love us and His state of victim to intercede in our behalf.

At the sight of so much love of Jesus Christ for man, who is so thankless for it, the devil seems triumphant; he mocks Jesus. “I give man nothing that is true, good, or beautiful,” he says. “I have not suffered for his sake, and I am more loved, more obeyed, and better served than Thou.”

Alas! It is but true; our coldness, our ingratitude are Satan’s triumph over God!

Oh! How can we forget our Lord’s love, a love that cost Him so much and is so lavish of everything!

*read Leviticus chapters 16–17