The Holy Week Retreat - The Sacrifice of Abel - Station 1

Experience the ultimate Holy Week Retreat!

Join Fr. Jonathan Meyer (and Catholics across America!) on an epic journey through the Stations of the Eucharist. This incredible retreat will guide you through fourteen stations from Genesis to Revelation that will reshape the way you see the rest of your life. Get ready to break open the Scriptures, immerse yourself in the story of salvation history, and consider the sacrifice of Jesus Christ like never before. 

This year’s Holy Week Retreat is simple to follow. Each day, you’ll receive two reflections that will help you meditate on two of the fourteen stations. You can watch them both together, or space them out as morning and evening reflections. We’ll cover all fourteen stations by Holy Saturday so you can have the best Easter of your life!

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Transcript

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The first station of the Eucharist, the sacrifice of Abel. O sacrament was holy, O sacrament divine, all praise and all thanksgiving be every moment thine. We all know this story. Cain kills his brother Abel. And because of that, for generations we've been teaching people: don't kill your brother. Don't hurt other people. Love your brother. Love your siblings. Love your family. And yet, what if there's another message here? If we ask the question, why did Cain kill Abel? Cain and Abel were both offering a sacrifice to the Lord. And in fact, in all of sacred scripture, this is the first time that man ever offers a sacrifice to God. Think about that just for a moment. Adam and Eve's first children are the first to ever offer a sacrifice to God. So why did Cain kill Abel? Well, Cain offered vegetables. He offered some of his harvest to the Lord. Abel, what did he offer? Abel offered a lamb. In fact, he offered the best lamb of his flock. Why is it that God didn't accept Cain's offering, but he did accept Abel's offering? Well, Abel's offering, which is the first sacrifice to ever be accepted by God, needed to be a symbol, a foreshadowing, a foretaste, a prefigurement of Jesus, who will be the only and perfect sacrifice, the last sacrifice to be offered on the altar of the cross, on Calvary, on Golgotha, to save you and me. And it just turns out that Abel's sacrifice symbolized that. And so Abel's sacrifice was accepted. In Abel, in this fourth chapter of Genesis, offering matters. What we offer to the Lord matters. What we give to the Lord matters. I think a great question for all of us is: what do I offer to the Lord? What do I give to the Lord? At every single Mass, one of the most powerful moments for me is when I turn to the people and I say, pray, brothers and sisters, that my sacrifice and yours, what offering do you bring to the Mass? What do you come to Mass with to give to the Lord? Hopefully you're there with your attentiveness and your presence. Hopefully you're there with a Sunday envelope or you've made the decision to give online, right? But no, what do you really give to the Lord? And I mean that. Praise God if you financially support your parish, but do you come with prayer, with intentions, and with offerings? And are those in many ways a symbol of Jesus? Do you come with sacrifices? Do you come with your sufferings? Do you come with your trials and your burdens? And do you offer them? And when the priest says, pray, brothers and sisters, that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable, as was the sacrifice of Abel's acceptable. One thing I encourage people to do at my parish is to ask a powerful, life-changing question. The question is really simple. What's one thing going on in your life that I can pray for? In fact, before every Mass begins, I walk out into the church, I go to the Ambo, I give some weekly announcements, then I invite everyone in the church to turn to their neighbor and to ask that question. Ask your neighbor what's one thing going on in your life that I can pray for? And then I encourage them to take that prayer intention and to unite it to the bread and to the wine, to unite it to Jesus, made truly present, who then is offered to the Father at every Mass. Isn't that why we're there? Is to unite our offering to Jesus, who is the offering that is acceptable before God the Father. This first station of the Eucharist is about offering. Jesus is the perfect, unblemished, spotless Lamb who the Father accepts on our behalf. I want to encourage you today. I want to encourage you this week. In fact, I want to encourage you throughout your whole life to think about offering. What am I offering to the Lord and how am I like able who is offering a beautiful, perfect sacrifice? Let's pray for the grace to be a person of offering who gives to the Lord. Amen.