Fr Peter’s newsletter notes - March 2007
Posted on March 1st 2007 in Weekly messages
Sunday 4th March 2007
To understand the work of Christ at Easter requires reflection on the nature of God and man.
I am sure that most of us would agree that as Catholics we begin Lent wishing to give something up before first asking the question why. The season of Lent can easily just become an opportunity to kick start a diet, by giving up sugar, chocolate, snacks, etc. This modest form of self-denial might be a good place to start but our efforts must not end there. The Church has always linked fasting with prayer and almsgiving as the three activities most appropriate for this season. However it might be better still to take another step backwards and reflect on what is the real purpose of all our efforts? I think the Dominican priest, Fr Victor White, put it succinctly when he asked rhetorically, ‘what is the question to which the Cross is the answer’. This reaches to the heart of Holy Week, and so to its preparation, the time of Lent. The priest answered his own question by explaining the meaning of the word, ‘atonement’ which is the classical description of the result of Jesus Christ’s death and resurrection.
The ‘atonement’ is one of those Church expressions that probably leaves most people baffled, but it does explain what Jesus Christ achieved on the Cross, as literally the ‘at-one-making’ between God and humanity. The death of Jesus on the Cross brought peace as it bridged the infinite gap between the invisible, all holy God and sinful humanity. Only God could achieve this, but the method chosen, the death of Jesus on the Cross, shows that the motivation was not some cold act of divine necessity but nothing other than His extra-ordinary love for his fallen creation, humanity included. For many years theologians forgot the richness of this explanation, and restricted the understanding of the atonement to satisfaction alone. This juridical concept emphasises the penal consequences of sin alone. The infinite God could only be appeased by the sacrifice of His Son who has paid the debts of sin to jealous God.
The Church’s vision is far broader, and indeed St Thomas Aquinas, the mediaeval theologian, makes the atonement the over-riding principle of his systematic work of theology. The proper understanding of this ‘at-one-making’ requires a knowledge of Christ who reconciles, and then of the two parties being made ‘at-one’, namely God the Father and humanity. St Thomas divides his great work into three parts, first, an analysis of the nature of God; secondly, the condition of fallen man and the consequences of sin; and finally, the work of Christ. This is the academic way of the teacher. Every believer starts with the encounter with Christ, which of its nature reveals something of God and something of oneself, but the tri-partite division remains valid.
As the focus of Lent is the work of the ‘at-one-ment’ of Easter, becomes a good time to purify our understanding of God, and to recognise how mercy and justice unite together. God is just, and therefore restitution must be made for wrongdoing, but God is also full or mercy. On this higher level something greater has happened, life is being restored to fallen humanity. Justice and mercy are not in opposition to each other because God took the initiative and made peace through His Son. The Cross is therefore our reconciliation with God, achieved at His expense.
To look at the Cross from the human perspective is therefore to see it as our redemption, which frees us from the slavery of sin, both individual wrong-doing and every false understanding of being human. Men and women were created to love and serve God, and therefore our destiny is greater than our own efforts can provide. The Good News is that though Jesus identifies with this infinite desire, He provides a way of satisfying it. To understand Christ fully, all our Lenten practices should point towards God and humanity.
Sunday 18th March 2007
A ‘learned silence’ accepts the compatibility of God’s love with the existence of evil
The counsel to silence is not something most of us are very good at maintaining, but in front of issues of life and death, it may sometimes be the best course. This is most acute, I believe, when confronted with terminal illness. Why does God allow such terrible illnesses to overtake someone we love? Silence does not mean remaining agnostic, nor of failing to try to understand, but it is rather the recognition that ultimately the connection between God and evil remains unknowable this side of death. This silence might be described as a ‘learned silence’. It is not the admission of complete ignorance.
This ‘learned silence’ may be grasped in the answer given by Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. This prayer reveals the inadequacy of the humanist rejection of God as all-powerful, and the contemporary understanding of a God who suffers on the one side, and the denial of the reality of evil on the other. This continuous prayer of Jesus kneeling down and sweating drops of blood takes place in a location Judas knows well. The content brings together His intimacy with the Father, His knowledge of the Father’s goodness and power as well as the reality of evil. The prayer begins with the recognition and affirmation of God as His father and the extent of His power…(‘Father, if you are willing…’).
The first request, ‘take this cup away from me’, shows that Jesus does not want to suffer. He openly explains this to the Father and does not hide His real thoughts. The second request follows quickly, ‘Let your will be done, not mine’. Jesus recognises that His impending arrest, and the violent consequences which followed, are not simply the causal connection of a set of historic circumstances (Judas plus the clash of authority between Jewish and Roman authorities) but must be the will of God. Jesus, as the Son of the Father, allows their communion to guide Him. This constant obedience demonstrated in His public life is a reflection of the eternal procession of the Son from the Father, that forms the heart of the Christian understanding of the Trinity.
The example of Christ’s prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane provides the right order in which to begin to reconcile through a ‘learned silence’ the love of God and the existence of evil. For anyone who has ever found himself or herself trying to explain the connection between the pain of terminal illness and the love of God knows that the attempt must founder in the sand. The desire to have the cup taken away is natural. No one should want to or have to suffer just for the sake of it, and therefore it is correct to address our real feelings, even our anger, to God, with the intensity of someone wishing to reject the need to suffer. For the sufferer, the final step to reconciliation with the Father’s mysterious will may well take a lifetime, or it may take a few weeks, days even. Others may have to repeat the prayer time after time to discover this ‘learned silence’ as their own experience of the world seems constantly at variance with their initial understanding of God’s goodness. Those who bear witness to the suffering of others need only answer with the example of their lives, and the ‘learned silence’ of their convictions will ‘speak’ more eloquently through actions, presence and love than through words alone.
Sunday 25th March 2007
The simplicity of the Gospel message that ‘God loves’ surpasses all other proposals for humanity.
Towards the end of his Confessions, St Augustine reflects that ‘I have met many who wanted to deceive, but none who wanted to be deceived’. After years spent on the fringes of pagan philosophy and esoteric sects, and prior to his conversion to Christianity, Augustine could see that the desire to know requires an anchor in God. In a culture of travelling thinkers and itinerant public speakers the temptation to make money from the gullible must have been irresistible. The same is true today with those who make the most outlandish claims. Such conspiracy theorists will always find a ready audience. The birth of the internet has spawned thousands of websites and domains dedicated to different plots, cover-ups and make-believe. In a strange way these sites confirm that basic insight, articulated by Aristotle, that ‘all people desire to know’, but also the sad reality that this desire is easily led astray.
The desire to know the truth needs to go further both in a sense of purification, and in the need to seek what is good. The search for truth requires a prior moral obligation to adhere to the truth once it is discovered. One may express this another way and ask, is there anyone out there willing to become a martyr to the claims of the da Vinci Code? The constant absorption in cover-ups, media outrages, and the musings of minor celebrities on each other depicts a culture that has detached itself from the search for the wider truth about human existence, and with the moral implications that are necessarily attached to this search.
The Christian vision with regard to this seeming complexity and ceaseless trivia is utterly simple. All the Church teaches is that ‘God loves’. It is the simplicity of boundlessness that is mysterious, not the contrived complexities of limitation. Too many of the complexities of our lives are needless and unhappy additions: all the added difficulties that divorce and separation create, the infeasible career path, the search for the perfect body.
The love of God has been revealed in a historical person, Jesus Christ, whose life may be described as a ‘life for others’. The truth about God can be found in Jesus Christ, which at the same time becomes the truth about oneself. This ‘life for’ can potentially take on many forms, and indeed should become the guiding principle of our own lives. This life of Christ helps to answer the questions in one’s own life, especially the meaning of suffering, and for what ends one may legitimately hope? The love of God enters a broken world, and therefore is primarily experienced as forgiveness and spiritual healing. The woman caught in the act of adultery, the subject of Sunday’s Gospel, is symbolic of all those caught in the web of harsh judgements made by the secular world, which fails to see the full picture, as one presumes it takes two to commit adultery. The Gospel alternative is utterly simple, the offer of forgiveness and the command to commit to moral change; to live in this world the life of divine simplicity. This is something for which, as Jesus Christ died on the Cross to achieve it, we can legitimately hope.
The Rite of Baptism (CCC 1337- )
Jesus consciously wished to celebrate the Passover one last time with His disciples, and to leave them with a pledge of the love that he exhibited throughout His life, especially that of the washing of the feet. He took the Passover meal, and turned it into the Eucharist whereby the disciples might share in His destiny and live in His presence. The passing over of Jesus to the Father through His death and resurrection is anticipated at the Last Supper. The Eucharist now fulfils the Passion, by making the resurrected Jesus present, and now anticipates the final passing over of the Church into the kingdom at the end of time. The command to celebrate the Eucharist constitutes the apostles as priests, so the Last Supper also contains an implicit ordination, which the Church recognises in the rubrics for the Mass of the Lord’s Supper.
This command to repeat the action of Jesus is not just an act of remembrance but makes present the ‘memorial of Christ’; His life, death and resurrection, and current intercession with the Father. The Church has always remained faithful to the commandment on the first day of the week.
The main elements for Mass became fixed very early in the Church’s tradition. The earliest extant description dating from AD155 explains that the community meets to read the memoirs of the apostles which are followed by a sermon, prayers of the faithful, the offertory and Eucharistic prayer, communion and final prayer. This structure has remained the same to the present day.
Each Sunday, every community gathers in the Church with Christ as its invisible head. The Parish priest acts in the person of Christ as head, but everyone present has an active role in the prayers, the offering of bread and wine, and in saying Amen at the end of the Eucharistic prayer.
The Eucharist: The outline of Mass (CCC 1349-1355 )
The heart of Mass has remained constant throughout the history of the Church owing to the commandment given by Jesus to ‘do this in remembrance of me’. The earliest accounts of the Eucharist which date from the early 2nd century refer to practises already long established. The ‘Liturgy of the Word’ always preceded the ‘Liturgy of the Eucharist’. The Gospels, described as the memoirs of the apostles, and the books of the Old Testament were read, and these in turn were followed by a homily and intercessions. These bidding prayers included both the concerns of the community itself, and for the wider Church and world.
The Offertory is the presentation of the bread and wine, which are symbols of creation, and they are given in the name of Jesus Christ. Bread and wine, as symbols of peace, were given to Abraham by the King-priest Melchizedek. At the same time a collection is taken for the running of the Church and for distribution amongst the poor. This comes from the earliest tradition of the Church as mentioned in the letters of St Paul.
The Eucharistic prayer begins with the preface which is structured so that the Church gives thanks to the Father through Christ and by the power of the Holy Spirit. The prayer finishes with the community joining in the continuous praise of the heavenly Church (Holy, Holy, Holy). The Eucharistic prayer is written as though Christ speaks through the priest who prays to the Father, first to send down the Holy Spirit to transform the bread and wine into the body and blood, and then, through the words of institution, the bread and wine are changed into the body and blood. The priest repeats the words of Christ spoken at the Last Supper. The Eucharistic prayer concludes with the remembrance of the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus as the offering which makes peace with God. Every Eucharist is celebrated with the whole Church in mind, and thus the prayer concludes with intercessions for the Church, visible and invisible. Special mention is made here of those who have died. The Mass concludes with communion when the faithful receive the body and blood of Christ. To receive communion requires baptism, and so an adequate faith in action of Christ at Mass, and a life of commensurate morality.
The Eucharist: The sacrifice of the Mass (CCC 1356-1372)
After the sections on the historical origins of the Eucharist and the structure of Mass, the Catechism now turns its attention to the nature of the sacrifice that takes place at Mass. The Catechism explains the Eucharistic prayer through the work of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit. The sacrifice of the Mass is first a thanksgiving to God for our salvation made possible through Jesus’ death on the Cross. This thanksgiving embraces all His creation. Our thanksgiving is united to that of Christ who offered His life to the Father.
The command given by Jesus Christ at the Last Supper, ‘Do this in memory of me’, is fulfilled in celebrating the ‘memorial’ of His sacrifice. This memorial takes verbal form of prayers during and after consecration. These are not simply a historical memory, but their proclamation makes their power present to those celebrating the Eucharist. The celebration of Passover recalls a specific historic event, the crossing of the Red Sea, and escape from slavery. So too with the Eucharist which recalls the definitive, ‘once and for all’ Passover of Jesus from death into eternal life.
This ‘memorial’ is a sacrifice, because the words of consecration emphasise this. Each statement over the bread and wine ends ‘for you’. This specific intent of Jesus Christ establishes every Mass as making present the sacrifice of Calvary. Jesus Christ is not re-sacrificed time and again, as the Reformers believed was the teaching of the Catholic Church. In fact, as the Council of Trent clearly stated, ‘the victim is the one and the same’. Jesus, who then offered himself on the Cross, is the same as the One now offered through the ministry of priests; only the manner of the offering is different.
Since the Eucharist is the sacrifice of Christ, it also embraces that of the Church, the Body of Christ. Hence at each Mass the lives of the community are united with that of Christ. This embraces the whole Church, both visible and invisible. Hence the Eucharistic prayer includes the Pope as the visible head of the Church and the diocesan Bishop as head of the particular Church, the Diocese. The prayer includes the faithful departed who too benefit from the fruits of Jesus’ sacrifice. Our Lady and the saints in heaven form the backdrop to every Mass, and are standing perpetually in front of the Lamb, symbol of the Cross, in the heavenly liturgy.