THE INTERIOR LIFE. (2)
Oblation.
"Sacrifice and oblation Thou wouldest not, but a Body Thou hast fitted to Me. Holocausts for sin did not please Thee. Then said I: Behold I come. In the head of the book it is written of Me, that I should do Thy Will, O God."
(Heb. x. 5-7).
1st. Prelude. "Thy holy Tabernacle, which Thou hast prepared from the beginning" (Wisdom ix. 8).
2nd. Prelude. Grace to be generous.
Point I. The oblation of JESUS.
As soon as the Word had taken possession of His earthly home, He began to live His new life—a life in all its fulness of knowledge and of grace and which will ever remain at its highest point, a life of infinite worth, a life lived for others, a life abounding in merits and satisfactions, a life of contemplation and yet of activity, a life to be studied carefully by all who seek to live an interior life and specially by those who for the love of their Incarnate God hide themselves in the cloister.
This new life was before everything else a life of oblation. The first act of the Word Incarnate was to offer Himself to His Father: Here I am; I have come to do Thy Will and I have come to do it not for Myself but for all creation; I offer Myself to do what it cannot do and to satisfy Thy claims. He made Himself, then, from the first moment of His existence a Victim—a Victim laid on the altar. This was His first posture, and He will keep it not only during this first stage of His life, but all through His life and all through His Sacramental life, whether the Host is offered to God at the Holy Mass or is living Its life of a Victim in the Tabernacle; and in Heaven He will still be "the Lamb as it had been slain."
With the oblation of Himself, so acceptable to the Father, the Victim offers all that concerns Him, all for which He has come to this earth, all His designs for man's salvation. He submits all His plans for His great building, the Holy Catholic Church, of which He offers Himself to be the Chief Corner-stone, dwelling in it as its life throughout all time. He offers Himself also to bear all the effects of His oblation and to drink the chalice to the dregs. He offers Himself as a Surety for the whole human race and for it He offers all His merits and satisfactions. He keeps nothing back—the whole of the life just begun is offered for the glory of God and the salvation of the world. It is a whole burnt-offering, a holocaust offered at its very beginning to Him Who "spared not even His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all." (Rom. viii. 32).
Point II. The Oblation of Mary.