The Holy Week Retreat - The Offering of Melchizedek - Station 2

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

SPEAKER_00 0:27

The second station of the Eucharist, the offering of Melchizedek. O sacrament is holy, O sacrament divine, all praise and all thanksgiving be every moment divine. In Genesis chapter 14, we encounter an amazing character. His name is Melchizedek. I love Melchizedek, and I really don't know much about him. I mention Melchizedek's name almost every day as a Roman Catholic priest when I pray the Eucharistic prayer. Melchizedek is a man who appears in the Old Testament and then disappears. He reappears in the book of Psalms and the book of Hebrews, but only in reference to the fact that he is a priest forever and that Jesus is a priest like Melchizedek. So who is Melchizedek? This is what we know about him. He's known as the King of Peace. He offers a sacrifice, not of a lamb, but a sacrifice of bread and wine. And he has no ancestry. He has no relatives. He just is. All three of these things are things that we can say about Jesus. Jesus is the King of peace. He's the Prince of Peace. And through his sacrifice on Mount Calvary, he brings salvation to the whole world and anyone who chooses to want to be a part of his kingdom. He offers a sacrifice of bread and wine. And the night before Jesus died, of course, in that upper room, he offered the Holy Eucharist. He also has no beginning and end. We refer to Jesus as the Alpha and the Omega, the first Greek letter of the alphabet and the last Greek letter of the alphabet, meaning that he has no beginning and no end. He is the eternal son of the Father. So those things are all ways that we can associate Melchizedek with Jesus, but there's also something deeply profound. In the book of Hebrews, when it refers to Jesus being in relationship to Melchizedek, it does so in the fact that Jesus has a priesthood that does not end. A priesthood that is not dependent on bloodlines. You see, in the Old Testament, you have Israel, you have Jacob, who becomes the father of the twelve tribes of Israel. He has the twelve sons. Each of those tribes is named after one of his sons. One of his sons was Levi. And that son and all of his heirs became the priests, the Levitical priests. We can look throughout Scripture in the Old Testament, and it's pretty clear that once that was established, no other priesthood was acceptable. And anyone who is not a Levitical priest who desired to act as a priest, his sacrifices weren't accepted. Only those from the tribe of Levi were true priests. So here comes the interesting thing. Jesus, he's not from the tribe of Levi. Jesus is from the tribe of Judah, which means he can't be a priest, unless he associates himself with a completely different priesthood, which is why the book of Psalms and the references to the book of Hebrews are so important. Because Jesus is now associated with not the priesthood of the Levites, but the priesthood of Melchizedek. And thus this mysterious character, the king of peace who offers a sacrifice of bread and wine, who has no beginning and no end, this is the priesthood. You are a priest forever in the order or the line of Melchizedek. You are a priest forever in the line of Melchizedek. That words, those words from the book of Psalms are what we now say about Roman Catholic priests. Roman Catholic priests are not from a hereditary bloodline. Praise God for that. My brother priests, who I know all around the world and all around the country, the priests that I call on the phone every single day, like they're not my blood relatives. Because Christ was establishing a priesthood that would span the whole world. And isn't that the case? Isn't that the reality that we live in right now? For us as Roman Catholics, we can go to Mass in any country in the world. And there's priests there. And sometimes even in our own country, there's priests from other nations, from other languages, from other tongues that are offering the holy sacrifice of the Mass. And whether that priest is from America or from Vietnam or from Africa or from Burma or from India or from China, it's our priest, it's our Father. Because Jesus established a universal priesthood. A priesthood where a man accepts a call to follow in the footsteps of Jesus, to turn bread and wine to his flesh and his blood, and to offer that to the eternal Father. Praise God for that. And today I want to encourage you to think of the priests in your life that have had an impact on your heart, on your soul, on your family. I want you to think of the priests that have changed your life. Who's the priest who baptized you? What priest gave you your first Holy Communion? What priest formed you either in a Catholic school or in religious education? What priest was a part of your youth group as a child? What priest heard your confession when the weight of sin and the feeling of slavery became a great burden in your life? What priest married you? What priest buried your parents? Or possibly your spouse or even a child? Thanks be to God for the gift of priests. I'm thankful for my brother priest. I'm thankful for the priests that hear my confession. For the priests that encourage me on rough days. For my brother priests who give me hope. For my brother priests that preach amazing homilies that I get inspired by. The second station of the Eucharist is about a priest named Melchizedek. And Jesus chose to associate himself with Melchizedek. Let's take some time today just to have grateful hearts for the priests that have changed our lives, for the priests that have made us who we are today. Let's have gratitude in our hearts, let's be thankful. Amen.