Days of Milk and Honey

Fr. Mark meditates upon the mystery of joy, saying:

In the book of Exodus these words are spoken by Moses to the people; in the liturgy, they are spoken by our new Moses, our leader and true liberator, Christ. They hearken back to the events of the great Vigil. The passover, the cross-over, the transitus, the liberation has indeed taken place. The promised land flows with milk and honey! The milk is the Word of God by which the neophytes are to grow strong and solid in the faith. In the honey, they recognize an allusion to the psalm that, in the ancient Church, always accompanied the Communion procession, “O taste and see that the Lord is sweet” (Ps 33:8). Thus do we find, in today’s Introit, as we shall find it in Wednesday’s Gospel of Emmaus, the fundamental pattern of Christian worship: word (milk) and sacrament (honey).