The Cross is the new tree of Life and the Mass is its fruit

God’s plan for the human family was disrupted by eating!

When Adam and Eve, giving into the devil’s temptation, ate the forbidden fruit from the tree of good and evil, they disobeyed God. That was original sin.

By eating that fruit, they expressed and enacted their desire to live by their own standards, not by God’s. But cutting themselves off from God was a very bad idea. Without God, we are nothing. He is our Creator and the source of all good things. So, when the human family rebelled against Him through original sin, we expelled ourselves from paradise and put ourselves at the mercy of darkness, selfishness and evil That’s why the world is so full of misery, conflict, death and suffering.

Eating the forbidden fruit also introduced death into the human family. God’s original plan was for us to eat of the tree of life, which would preserve us from death. But after original sin, the tree of life was off limits; death becomes our constant companion and our inevitable destination. But, if God’s plan was disrupted by eating, it is also restored by eating.

Since we had run away from paradise and could no longer eat of the tree of life, God came up with a brilliant alternative: He brought the tree of life out to us. That was the mission of Jesus His son. By dying on the cross, He repaired the damage done by original sin, suffering in our place and untying the knots of our disobedience.

In this way, the cross of Jesus became the new tree of life.

And this tree is heavily laden with supernatural fruit: the Mass, the Body and Blood of our Lord. When we eat of this fruit, we express our repentance and our desire to return from our rebellion, to be united to Christ. This supernatural fruit is the antidote to the poison of the forbidden fruit. It is our medicine, gradually healing our selfishness and sinfulness, and nourishing Christ-like generosity, wisdom, courage, faith, and love.

This is what we celebrate joyfully in this weekend’s Solemn Feast of Corpus Christi, the Real, Living Presence of Jesus for us, Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity.

Fr David Jones OLW