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Pope Benedict
XVI- Writings as Cardinal |
THEOLOGY
OF LITURGY
H.H. Pope Benedict XVI
A lecture by His Eminence Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Prefect of
the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, delivered during the
Journees liturgiques de Fontgombault, 22-24 July 2001.
The Second Vatican Council defined the liturgy as "the work of
Christ the Priest and of His Body which is the Church.”
The work of Jesus Christ is referred to in the same text as the work
of the redemption which Christ accomplished especially by the
Paschal Mystery of His Passion, of His Resurrection from the dead
and His glorious Ascension.
"By this Mystery, in dying He has destroyed our death, and in rising
He has restored life." At first sight, in these two sentences, the
phrase "the work of Christ" seems to have been used in two different
senses. "The work of Christ” refers first of all to the historical,
redemptive actions of Jesus, His Death and His Resurrection; on the
other hand, the celebration of the liturgy is called "the work of
Christ.”
In reality, the two meanings are inseparably linked: the Death and
Resurrection of Christ, the Paschal Mystery, are not just exterior,
historic events. In the case of the Resurrection this is very clear.
It is joined to and penetrates history, but transcends it in two
ways: it is not the action of a man, but an action of God, and in
that way carries the risen Jesus beyond history, to that place where
He sits at the right hand of the Father. But the Cross is not a
merely human action either. The purely human aspect is present in
the people who led Jesus to the Cross. For Jesus Himself, the Cross
is not primarily an action, but a passion, and a passion which
signifies that He is but one with the Divine Will – a union, the
dramatic character of which is shown to us in the Garden of
Gethsemane. Thus the passive dimension of being put to death is
transformed into the active dimension of love: death becomes the
abandonment of Himself to the Father for men. In this way, the
horizon extends, as it does in the Resurrection, well beyond the
purely human aspect and well beyond the fact of having been nailed
to a cross and having died. This element additional to the mere
historical event is what the language of faith calls a "mystery" and
it has condensed into the term "Paschal Mystery" the most innermost
core of the redemptive event. If we can say from this that the
"Paschal Mystery" constitutes the core of "the work of Jesus," then
the connection with the liturgy is immediately clear: it is
precisely this "work of Jesus" which is the real content of the
liturgy. In it, through the faith and the prayer of the Church, the
"work of Jesus" is continually brought into contact with history in
order to penetrate it. Thus, in the liturgy, the merely human
historical event is transcended over and over again and is part of
the divine and human action which is the Redemption. In it, Christ
is the true subject/bearer: it is the work of Christ; but in it He
draws history to Himself, precisely in this permanent action in
which our salvation takes place.
1. Sacrifice called into question
If we go back to Vatican II, we find the following description of
this relationship: "In the liturgy, through which, especially in the
divine Sacrifice of the Eucharist, ‘the work of our Redemption is
carried on’, the faithful are most fully led to express and show to
others the mystery of Christ and the real nature of the true
Church.”
All that has become foreign to modern thinking and, only thirty
years after the Council, has been brought into question even among
catholic liturgists. Who still talks today about "the divine
Sacrifice of the Eucharist"? Discussions about the idea of sacrifice
have again become astonishingly lively, as much on the catholic side
as on the protestant. People realize that an idea which has always
preoccupied, under various forms, not only the history of the
Church, but the entire history of humanity, must be the expression
of something basic which concerns us as well. But, at the same time,
the old Enlightenment positions still live on everywhere:
accusations of magic and paganism, contrasts drawn between worship
and the service of the Word, between rite and ethos, the idea of a
Christianity which disengages itself from worship and enters into
the profane world, catholic theologians who have no desire to see
themselves accused of anti-modernity. Even if people want, in one
way or another, to rediscover the concept of sacrifice,
embarrassment and criticism are the end result. Thus, Stefan Orth,
in the vast panorama of a bibliography of recent works devoted to
the theme of sacrifice, believed he could make the following
statement as a summary of his research: "In fact, many Catholics
themselves today ratify the verdict and the conclusions of Martin
Luther, who says that to speak of sacrifice is "the greatest and
most appalling horror" and a "damnable impiety": this is why we want
to refrain from all that smacks of sacrifice, including the whole
canon, and retain only that which is pure and holy." Then Orth adds:
"This maxim was also followed in the Catholic Church after Vatican
II, or at least tended to be, and led people to think of divine
worship chiefly in terms of the feast of the Passover related in the
accounts of the Last Supper." Appealing to a work on sacrifice,
edited by two modern catholic liturgists, he then said, in slightly
more moderate terms, that it clearly seemed that the notion of the
sacrifice of the Mass – even more than that of the sacrifice of the
Cross – was at best an idea very open to misunderstanding.
I certainly don’t need to say that I am not one of the "numerous
Catholics" who consider it the most appalling horror and a damnable
impiety to speak of the sacrifice of the Mass. It goes without
saying that the writer did not mention my book on the spirit of the
liturgy, which analyses the idea of sacrifice in detail. His
diagnosis remains dismaying. Is it true? I do not know these
numerous Catholics who consider it a damnable impiety to understand
the Eucharist as a sacrifice. The second, more circumspect,
diagnosis according to which the sacrifice of the Mass is open to
misunderstandings is, on the other hand, easily shown to be correct.
Even if one leaves to one side the first affirmation of the writer
as a rhetorical exaggeration, there remains a troubling problem,
which we should face up to. A sizable party of catholic liturgists
seems to have practically arrived at the conclusion that Luther,
rather than Trent, was substantially right in the sixteenth century
debate; one can detect much the same position in the post conciliar
discussions on the Priesthood. The great historian of the Council of
Trent, Hubert Jedin, pointed this out in 1975, in the preface to the
last volume of his history of the Council of Trent: "The attentive
reader ... in reading this will not be less dismayed than the
author, when he realizes that many of the things - in fact almost
everything – that disturbed the men of the past is being put forward
anew today." It is only against this background of the effective
denial of the authority of Trent, that the bitterness of the
struggle against allowing the celebration of Mass according to the
1962 Missal, after the liturgical reform, can be understood. The
possibility of so celebrating constitutes the strongest, and thus
(for them) the most intolerable contradiction of the opinion of
those who believe that the faith in the Eucharist formulated by
Trent has lost its value.
It would be easy to gather proofs to support this statement of the
position. I leave aside the extreme liturgical theology of Harald
Schützeichel, who departs completely from catholic dogma and
expounds, for example, the bold assertion that it was only in the
Middle Ages that the idea of the Real Presence was invented. A
modern liturgist such as David N. Power tells us that through the
course of history, not only the manner in which a truth is
expressed, but also the content of what is expressed, can lose its
meaning. He links his theory in concrete terms with the statements
of Trent. Theodore Schnitker tells us that an up-to-date liturgy
includes both a different expression of the faith and theological
changes. Moreover, according to him, there are theologians, at least
in the circles of the Roman Church and of her liturgy, who have not
yet grasped the full import of the transformations put forward by
the liturgical reform in the area of the doctrine of the faith. R.
Meßner’s certainly respectable work on the reform of the Mass
carried out by Martin Luther, and on the Eucharist in the early
Church, which contains many interesting ideas, arrives nonetheless
at the conclusion that the early Church was better understood by
Luther than by the Council of Trent.
The serious nature of these theories comes from the fact that
frequently they pass immediately into practice. The thesis according
to which it is the community itself which is the subject of the
liturgy, serves as an authorization to manipulate the liturgy
according to each individual’s understanding of it. So-called new
discoveries and the forms which follow from them, are diffused with
an astonishing rapidity and with a degree of conformity which has
long ceased to exist where the norms of ecclesiastical authority are
concerned. Theories, in the area of the liturgy, are transformed
very rapidly today into practice, and practice, in turn, creates or
destroys ways of behaving and thinking.
Meanwhile the problem has been aggravated by the fact that the most
recent movement of ‘enlightened’ thought goes much further than
Luther: where Luther still took literally the accounts of the
Institution and made them, as the norma normans, the basis of his
efforts at reform, the hypotheses of historical criticism have, for
a long time, been causing a broad erosion of the texts. The accounts
of the Last Supper appear as the product of the liturgical
construction of the community; an historical Jesus is sought behind
the texts who could not have been thinking of the gift of His Body
and Blood, nor understood His Cross as a sacrifice of expiation; we
should, rather, imagine a farewell meal which included an
eschatological perspective. Not only is the authority of the
ecclesiastical magisterium downgraded in the eyes of many, but
Scripture too; in its place are put changing pseudo-historical
hypotheses, which are immediately replaced by any arbitrary idea,
and place the liturgy at the mercy of fashion. Where, on the basis
of such ideas, the liturgy is manipulated ever more freely, the
faithful feel that, in reality, nothing is celebrated, and it is
understandable that they desert the liturgy, and with it the Church.
2. The principles of theological research
Let us return to the fundamental question: is it correct to describe
the liturgy as a divine sacrifice, or is it a damnable impiety? In
this discussion, one must first of all establish the principle
presuppositions which, in any event, determine the reading of
Scripture, and thus the conclusions which one draws from it. For the
catholic Christian, two lines of essential hermeneutic orientation
assert themselves here. The first: we trust Scripture and we base
ourselves on Scripture, not on hypothetical reconstructions which go
behind it and, according to their own taste, reconstruct a history
in which the presumptious idea of our knowing what can or can not be
attributed to Jesus plays a key role; which, of course, means
attributing to him only what a modern scholar is happy to attribute
to a man belonging to a time which the scholar himself has
reconstructed.
The second is that we read Scripture in the living community of the
Church, and therefore on the basis of the fundamental decisions
thanks to which it has become historically efficacious, namely,
those which laid the foundations of the Church. One must not
separate the text from this living context. In this sense, Scripture
and Tradition form an inseparable whole, and it is this that Luther,
at the dawn of the awakening of historical awareness, could not see.
He believed that a text could only have one meaning, but such
univocity does not exist, and modern historiography has long since
abandoned the idea. That in the nascent Church, the Eucharist was,
from the beginning, understood as a sacrifice, even in a text such
as the Didache, which is so difficult and marginal vis-à-vis the
great Tradition, is an interpretative key of primary importance.
But there is another fundamental hermeneutical aspect in the reading
and the interpretation of biblical testimony. The fact that I can,
or cannot, recognize a sacrifice in the Eucharist as our Lord
instituted it, depends most essentially on the question of knowing
what I understand by sacrifice, therefore on what is called
precomprehension. The pre-comprehension of Luther, for example, in
particular his conception of the relation between the Old and the
New Testaments, his conception of the event and of the historic
presence of the Church, was such that the category of sacrifice, as
he saw it, could not appear other than as an impiety when applied to
the Eucharist and the Church. The debates to which Stefan Orth
refers show how confused and muddled is the idea of sacrifice among
almost all authors, and clearly shows how much work must be done
here. For the believing theologian, it is clear that it is Scripture
itself which must teach him the essential definition of sacrifice,
and that will come from a "canonical" reading of the Bible, in which
the Scripture is read in its unity and its dynamic movement, the
different stages of which receive their final meaning from Christ,
to Whom this whole movement leads. By this same standard the
hermeneutic here presupposed is a hermeneutic of faith, founded on
faith’s internal logic. Ought not the fact to be obvious? Without
faith, Scripture itself is not Scripture, but rather an ill-assorted
ensemble of bits of literature which cannot claim any normative
significance today.
3. Sacrifice and Easter
The task alluded to here far exceeds, obviously, the limits of one
lecture; so allow me to refer you to my book on "The Spirit of the
Liturgy" in which I have sought to give the main outlines of this
question. What emerges from it is that, in its course through the
history of religions and biblical history, the idea of sacrifice has
connotations which go well beyond the area of discussion which we
habitually associate with the idea of sacrifice. In fact, it opens
the doorway to a global understanding of worship and of the liturgy:
these are the great perspectives which I would like to try to point
out here. Also I necessarily have to omit here particular questions
of exegesis, in particular the fundamental problem of the accounts
of the Institution, on the subject of which, in addition to my book
on the liturgy, I have tried to provide some thoughts in my
contribution on "The Eucharist and Mission.”
There is, however, a remark which I cannot refrain from making. In
the bibliographic review mentioned, Stefan Orth says that the fact
of having avoided after Vatican II, the idea of sacrifice, has "led
people to think of divine worship in terms of the feast of the
Passover related in the accounts of the Last Supper." At first sight
this wording appears ambiguous: is one to think of divine worship in
terms of the Last Supper narratives, or in terms of the Passover, to
which those narratives refer in giving a chronological framework,
but which they do not otherwise describe. It would be right to say
that the Jewish Passover, the institution of which is related in
Exodus 12, acquires a new meaning in the New Testament. It is there
that is manifested a great historical movement which goes from the
beginnings right up to the Last Supper, the Cross and the
Resurrection of Jesus. But what is astonishing above all in Orth’s
presentation is the opposition posited between the idea of sacrifice
and the Passover. The Jewish Old Testament deprives Orth’s thesis of
meaning, because from the law of Deuteronomy on, the slaughtering of
lambs is linked to the temple; and even in the earliest period, when
the Passover was still a family feast, the slaughtering of lambs
already had a sacrificial character. Thus, precisely through the
tradition of the Passover, the idea of sacrifice is carried right up
to the words and gestures of the Last Supper, where it is present
also on the basis of a second Old Testament passage, Exodus 24,
which relates the conclusion of the Covenant at Sinai. There, it is
related that the people were sprinkled with the blood of the victims
previously brought, and that Moses said on this occasion: "This is
the blood of the Covenant which Yahweh makes with you in accordance
with all these provisions." (Ex. 24:8) The new Christian Passover is
thus expressly interpreted in the accounts of the Last Supper as a
sacrificial event, and on the basis of the words of the Last Supper,
the nascent Church knew that the Cross was a sacrifice, because the
Last Supper would be an empty gesture without the reality of the
Cross and of the Resurrection, which is anticipated in it and made
accessible for all time in its interior content.
I mention this strange opposition between the Passover and
sacrifice, because it represents the architectonic principle of a
book recently published by the Society of St. Pius X, claiming that
a dogmatic rupture exists between the new liturgy of Paul VI and the
preceding catholic liturgical tradition. This rupture is seen
precisely in the fact that everything is interpreted henceforth on
the basis of the "paschal mystery," instead of the redeeming
sacrifice of expiation of Christ; the category of the paschal
mystery is said to be the heart of the liturgical reform, and it is
precisely that which appears to be the proof of the rupture with the
classical doctrine of the Church. It is clear that there are authors
who lay themselves open to such a misunderstanding; but that it is a
misunderstanding is completely evident for those who look more
closely. In reality, the term "paschal mystery" clearly refers to
the realities which took place in the days following Holy Thursday
up until the morning of Easter Sunday: the Last Supper as the
anticipation of the Cross, the drama of Golgotha and the Lord’s
Resurrection. In the expression "paschal mystery" these happenings
are seen synthetically as a single, united event, as "the work of
Christ," as we heard the Council say at the beginning, which took
place historically and at the same time transcends that precise
point in time. As this event is, inwardly, an act of worship
rendered to God, it could become divine worship, and in that way be
present to all times. The paschal theology of the New Testament,
upon which we have cast a quick glance, gives us to understand
precisely this: the seemingly profane episode of the Crucifixion of
Christ is a sacrifice of expiation, a saving act of the reconciling
love of God made man. The theology of the Passover is a theology of
the redemption, a liturgy of expiatory sacrifice. The Shepherd has
become a Lamb. The vision of the lamb, which appears in the story of
Isaac, the lamb which gets entangled in the undergrowth and ransoms
the son, has become a reality; the Lord became a Lamb; He allows
Himself to be bound and sacrificed, to deliver us.
All this has become very foreign to contemporary thought. Reparation
("expiation") can perhaps mean something within the limits of human
conflicts and the settling of guilt which holds sway among human
beings, but its transposition to the relationship between God and
man can not work. This, surely, is largely the result of the fact
that our image of God has grown dim, has come close to deism. One
can no longer imagine that human offences can wound God, and even
less that they could necessitate an expiation such as that which
constitutes the Cross of Christ. The same applies to vicarious
substitution: we can hardly still imagine anything in that category
– our image of man has become too individualistic for that. Thus the
crisis of the liturgy has its basis in central ideas about man. In
order to overcome it, it does not suffice to banalise the liturgy
and transform it into a simple gathering at a fraternal meal. But
how can we escape from these disorientations? How can we recover the
meaning of this immense thing which is at the heart of the message
of the Cross and of the Resurrection? In the final analysis, not
through theories and scholarly reflections, but only through
conversion, by a radical change of life. It is, however, possible to
single out some things which open the way to this change of heart,
and I would like to put forward some suggestions in that direction,
in three stages.
4. Love, the heart of sacrifice
The first stage should be a preliminary question on the essential
meaning of the word "sacrifice." People commonly consider sacrifice
as the destruction of something precious in the eyes of man; in
destroying it, man wants to consecrate this reality to God, to
recognize His sovereignty. In fact, however, a destruction does not
honour God. The slaughtering of animals or whatever else, can’t
honour God. "If I am hungry, I will not tell you, because the world
is mine and all it contains. Am I going to eat the flesh of bulls,
shall I drink the blood of goats? Offer to God a sacrifice of
thanksgiving, fulfill your vows to the Most High," says God to
Israel in Psalm 50 (49); 12-14. What then does sacrifice consist of?
Not in destruction, not in this or that thing, but in the
transformation of man. In the fact that he becomes himself conformed
to God. He becomes conformed to God when he becomes love. "That is
why true sacrifice is every work which allows us to unite ourselves
to God in a holy fellowship," as Augustine puts it.
With this key from the New Testament, Augustine interprets the Old
Testament sacrifices as symbols pointing to this sacrifice properly
so called, and that is why, he says, worship had to be transformed,
the symbol had to disappear in favour of the reality. "All the
divine prescriptions of Scripture which concern the sacrifices of
the tabernacle or of the temple, are figures which refer to the love
of God and neighbour" (City of God X, 5). But Augustine also knows
that love only becomes true when it leads a man to God, and thus
directs him to his true end; it alone can likewise bring about unity
of men among themselves. Therefore the concept of sacrifice refers
to community, and the first definition which Augustine attempted, is
broadened by the following statement: "The whole redeemed human
community, that is to say the assembly and the community of the
saints, is offered to God in sacrifice by the High Priest Who
offered Himself" (Ibid X,6). And even more simply: "This sacrifice
is ourselves," or again: "Such is the Christian sacrifice: the
multitude – a single body in Christ" (Ibid X, 6).Sacrifice consists
then, we shall say it once more, in a process of transformation, in
the conformity of man to God, in His theiosis, as the Fathers would
say. It consists, to express it in modern phraseology, in the
abolition of difference – in the union between God and man, between
God and creation: "God all in all" (1 Cor. 15; 28).
But how does this process which makes us become love and one single
body with Christ, which makes us become one with God, take place;
how does this abolition of difference happen? There exists here
first of all a clear boundary between the religions founded on the
faith of Abraham on one hand, on the other hand the other forms of
religion such as we find them particularly in Asia, and also those
based, probably, on Asiatic traditions – in the plotinian style of
neoplatonism. There, union signifies deliverance as far as finitude
(self awareness) is concerned, which in the final analysis is seen
to be a façade, the abolition of myself in the ocean of the
completely other which, as compared to our world of façades, is
nothingness, which, nonetheless, is the only true being. In the
Christian faith, which fulfils the faith of Abraham, union is seen
in a completely different way: it is the union of love, in which
differences are not destroyed, but are transformed in a higher union
of those who love each other, just as it is found, as in an
archetype, in the Trinitarian union of God. Whereas, for example in
Plotinus, finitude is a falling away from unity, and so to speak the
kernel of sin and therefore at the same time the kernel of all evil,
the Christian faith does not see finitude as a negation but as a
creation, the fruit of a divine will which creates a free partner, a
creature who does not have to be destroyed, but must be completed,
must insert itself into the free act of love. Difference is not
abolished, but becomes the means to a higher unity. This philosophy
of liberty, which is at the basis of the Christian faith and
differentiates it from the Asiatic religions, includes the
possibility of the negative. Evil is not a mere falling away from
being, but the consequence of a freedom used badly. The way of
unity, the way of love, is then a way of conversion, a way of
purification: it takes the shape of the Cross, it passes through the
Paschal Mystery, through death and resurrection. It needs the
Mediator, Who, in His Death and in His Resurrection becomes for us
the way, draws us all to Himself and thus fulfils us (Jn. 12; 32).
Let us cast a glance back over what we have said. In his definition:
sacrifice equals love, Augustine rightly stresses the saying, which
is present in different variations in the Old and in the New
Testament, which he sites from Hosea: "it is love that I want, not
sacrifices" (6,6; St. Augustine, City of God X, 5). But this saying
does not merely place an opposition between ethos and worship – then
Christianity would be reduced to a moralism. It refers to a process
which is more than a moral philosophy – to a process in which God
takes the initiative. He alone can arouse man to start out towards
love. It is the love with which God loves, which alone makes our
love towards Him increase. This fact of being loved is a process of
purification and transformation, in which we are not only open to
God, but united to each other. The initiative of God has a name:
Jesus Christ, the God Who Himself became man and gives Himself to
us. That is why Augustine could synthesise all that by saying: "Such
is the sacrifice of Christians: the multitude is one single body in
Christ. The Church celebrates this mystery by the sacrifice of the
Altar, well known to believers, because in it, it is shown to her
that in the things which she offers, it is she herself who is
offered” (Ibid. X, 6). Anyone who has understood this, will no
longer be of the opinion that to speak of the sacrifice of the Mass
is at least highly ambiguous, and even an appalling horror. On the
contrary: if we do not remember this, we lose sight of the grandeur
of that which God gives us in the Eucharist.
5. The new temple
I would now like to mention, again very briefly, two other
approaches. An important indication is given, in my opinion, in the
scene of the purification of the temple, in particular in the form
handed down by John. John, in fact, relates a phrase of Jesus which
doesn’t appear in the Synoptics except in the trial of Jesus, on the
lips of false witnesses, and in a distorted way. The reaction of
Jesus to the merchants and money changers in the temple was
practically an attack on the immolation of animals, which were
offered there, hence an attack on the existing form of worship, and
the existing form of sacrifice in general. That is why the competent
Jewish authorities asked Him, with good reason, by what sign He
justified an action which could only be taken as an attack against
the law of Moses and the sacred prescriptions of the Covenant.
Thereupon Jesus replies: "Destroy (dissolve) this sanctuary; in
three days I will build it up again" (Jn. 2, 19). This subtle
formula evokes a vision which John himself says the disciples did
not understand until after the Resurrection, in remembering what had
happened, and which led them to "believe the Scripture and the word
of Jesus" (Jn. 2; 22). For they now understand that the temple had
been abolished at the moment of the Crucifixion of Jesus: Jesus,
according to John, was crucified exactly at the moment when the
paschal lambs were immolated in the sanctuary. At the moment when
the Son makes himself the lamb, that is, gives himself freely to the
Father and hence to us, an end is made of the old prescriptions of a
worship that could only be a sign of the true realities. The temple
is "destroyed". From now on His resurrected body – He Himself –
becomes the true temple of humanity, in which adoration in spirit
and in truth takes place (Jn. 4, 23). But spirit and truth are not
abstract philosophical concepts – He is Himself the truth, and the
spirit is the Holy Spirit Who proceeds from Him. Here too, it thus
clearly becomes apparent that worship is not replaced by a moral
philosophy, but that the ancient worship comes to an end, with its
substitutes and its often tragic misunderstandings, because the
reality itself is manifested, the new temple: the resurrected Christ
who draws us, transforms us and unites us to Himself. Again it is
clear that the Eucharist of the Church – to use Augustine’s term –
is the sacramentum of the true sacrificium – the sacred sign in
which that which is signified is produced.
6. The spiritual sacrifice
Finally I would like to point out very briefly a third way in which
the passage from the worship of substitution, that of the immolation
animals, to the true sacrifice, the communion with the offering of
Christ, progressively becomes clearer. Among the prophets before the
exile, there was an extraordinarily harsh criticism of temple
worship, which Stephen, to the horror of the doctors and priests of
the temple, resumes in his great discourse, with some citations,
notably this verse of Amos: "Did you offer victims and sacrifices to
Me, during forty years in the desert, house of Israel? But you have
carried the tent of Moloch and the star of the god Rephan, the
images which you had made to worship" (Amos 5; 25, Acts 7; 42). This
critique that the Prophets had made, provided the spiritual
foundation that enabled Israel to get through the difficult time
following the destruction of the Temple, when there was no worship.
Israel was obliged at that time to bring to light more deeply and in
a new way what constitutes the essence of worship, expiation,
sacrifice. In the time of the Hellenistic dictatorship, when Israel
was again without temple and without sacrifice, the book of Daniel
gives us this prayer: "Lord, see how we are the smallest of all the
nations...There is no longer, at this time, leader nor prophet...nor
holocaust, sacrifice, oblation, nor incense, no place to offer You
the first fruits and find grace close to You. But may a broken soul
and a humbled spirit be accepted by You, like holocausts of rams and
bulls, like thousands of fattened lambs; thus may our sacrifice be
before You today, and may it please You that we may follow You
wholeheartedly, because there is no confounding for those who hope
in You. And now we put our whole heart into following You, to
fearing You and seeking Your Face" (Dan. 3; 37-41).
Thus gradually there matured the realization that prayer, the word,
the man at prayer and becoming himself word, is the true sacrifice.
The struggle of Israel could here enter into fruitful contact with
the search of the Hellenistic world, which itself was looking for a
way to leave behind the worship of substitution, of the immolation
of animals, in order to arrive at worship properly so called, at
true adoration, at true sacrifice. This path led to the idea of
logike tysia – of the sacrifice [consisting] in the word – which we
meet in the New Testament in Rm. 12; 1, where the Apostle exhorts
the believers "to offer themselves as a living sacrifice, holy and
pleasing to God:" it is what is described as logike latreia, as a
divine service according to the word, engaging the reason. We find
the same thing, in another form, in Heb. 13; 15: "Through Him –
Christ – let us offer ceaselessly a sacrifice of praise, that is to
say the fruit of the lips which confess His name." Numerous examples
coming from the Fathers of the Church show how these ideas were
extended and became the point of junction between christology,
Eucharistic faith and the putting into existential practice of the
paschal mystery. I would like to cite, by way of example, just a few
lines of Peter Chrysologos; really, one should read the whole sermon
in question in its entirety in order to be able to follow this
synthesis from one end to the other: "It is a strange sacrifice,
where the body offers itself without the body, the blood without the
blood! I beg you – says the Apostle – by the mercy of God, to offer
yourselves as a living victim.
Brothers, this sacrifice is inspired by the example of Christ, who
immolated His Body, so that men may live...Become, man, become the
sacrifice of God and his priest...God looks for faith, not for
death. He thirsts for your promise, not your blood. Fervour appeases
Him, not murder.”
Here too, it is a question of something quite different from a mere
moralism, because man is so caught up in it with the whole of his
being: sacrifice [consisting] in words – this, the Greek thinkers
had already put in relation to the logos, to the word itself,
indicating that the sacrifice of prayer should not be mere speech,
but the transmutation of our being into the logos, the union of
ourselves with it. Divine worship implies that we ourselves become
beings of the word, that we conform ourselves to the creative
Intellect. But once more, it is clear that we cannot do this of
ourselves, and thus everything seems to end again in futility –
until the day when the Word comes, the true, the Son, when He
becomes flesh and draws us to Himself in the exodus of the Cross.
This true sacrifice, which transforms us all into sacrifice, that is
to say unites us to God, makes of us beings conformed to God, is
indeed fixed and founded on an historical event, but is not situated
as a thing in the past behind us, on the contrary, it becomes
contemporary and accessible to us in the community of the believing
and praying Church, in its sacrament: that is what is meant by the
"sacrifice of the Mass.”
The error of Luther lay, I am convinced, in a false idea of
historicity, in a poor understanding of unicity. The sacrifice of
Christ is not situated behind us as something past. It touches all
times and is present to us. The Eucharist is not merely the
distribution of what comes from the past, but rather the presence of
the Paschal Mystery of Christ, Who transcends and unites all times.
If the Roman Canon cites Abel, Abraham, Melchisedech, including them
among those who celebrate the Eucharist, it is in the conviction
that in them also, the great offerers, Christ was passing though
time, or perhaps better, that in their search they were advancing
toward a meeting with Christ. The theology of the Fathers such as we
find it in the canon, did not deny the futility and insufficiency of
the pre-christian sacrifices; the canon includes, however, with the
figures of Abel and Melchisedech, the "holy pagans" themselves in
the mystery of Christ. What is happening is that everything that
went before is seen in its insufficiency as a shadow, but also that
Christ is drawing all things to Himself, that there is, even in the
pagan world, a preparation for the Gospel, that even imperfect
elements can lead to Christ, however much they may stand in need of
purification.
7. Christ, the subject of the liturgy
Which brings me to the conclusion. Theology of the liturgy means
that God acts through Christ in the liturgy and that we cannot act
but through Him and with Him. Of ourselves, we cannot construct the
way to God. This way does not open up unless God Himself becomes the
way. And again, the ways of man which do not lead to God are
non-ways. Theology of the liturgy means furthermore that in the
liturgy, the Logos Himself speaks to us; and not only does He speak,
He comes with His Body, and His Soul, His Flesh and His Blood, His
Divinity and His Humanity, in order to unite us to Himself, to make
of us one single "body." In the Christian liturgy, the whole history
of salvation, even more, the whole history of human searching for
God is present, assumed and brought to its goal. The Christian
liturgy is a cosmic liturgy – it embraces the whole of creation
which "awaits with impatience the revelation of the sons of God"
(Rom. 8; 9).
Trent did not make a mistake, it leant for support on the solid
foundation of the Tradition of the Church. It remains a trustworthy
standard. But we can and should understand it in a more profound way
in drawing from the riches of biblical witness and from the faith of
the Church of all the ages. There are true signs of hope that this
renewed and deepened understanding of Trent can, in particular
through the intermediary of the Eastern Churches, be made accessible
to protestant Christians.
One thing should be clear: the liturgy must not be a terrain for
experimenting with theological hypotheses. Too rapidly, in these
last decades, the ideas of experts have entered into liturgical
practice, often also by-passing ecclesiastical authority, through
the channel of commissions which have been able to diffuse at an
international level their "consensus of the moment," and practically
turn it into laws for liturgical activity. The liturgy derives its
greatness from what it is, not from what we make of it. Our
participation is, of course, necessary, but as a means of inserting
ourselves humbly into the spirit of the liturgy, and of serving Him
Who is the true subject of the liturgy: Jesus Christ. The liturgy is
not an expression of the consciousness of a community which, in any
case, is diffuse and changing. It is revelation received in faith
and prayer, and its measure is consequently the faith of the Church,
in which revelation is received. The forms which are given to the
liturgy can vary according to place and time, just as the rites are
diverse. What is essential is the link to the Church which for her
part, is united by faith in the Lord. The obedience of faith
guarantees the unity of the liturgy, beyond the frontiers of place
and time, and so lets us experience the unity of the Church, the
Church as the homeland of the heart.
The essence of the liturgy, is finally, summarised in the prayer
which St. Paul (1 Cor. 16; 22) and the Didache (10; 6) have handed
down to us: Maran atha – our Lord is there – Lord, come!" From now
on, the Parousia is accomplished in the Liturgy, but that is so
precisely because it teaches us to cry: "Come Lord Jesus", while
reaching out towards the Lord who is coming. It always brings us to
hear his reply yet again and to experience its truth: "Yes, I am
coming soon" (Apoc. 22; 17, 20).
— Translated by Margaret McHugh and Fr John Parsons
