The First Station of the Eucharist, the Sacrifice of Abel. "Oh Sacrament most holy, Oh Sacrament Divine, All praise and all thanksgiving, Be every moment thine." The fourth chapter of Genesis speaks to us about two brothers, Cain and Abel.

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 of 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 the Sunday envelope or you've made the decision to give online, right? But 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, and 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 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.

The Second Station of the Eucharist, the Offering of Melchizedek. O Sacrament most holy, O Sacrament divine. All praise and all thanksgiving be every moment thine.

In Genesis 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. On 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 12 tribes of Israel. He has the 12 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. 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. Or 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 priests. I'm thankful for the priests that hear my confession, 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, the priests that have made us who we are today. Let's have gratitude in our hearts. Let's be thankful. Amen.