Still backtracking on Brother Bill's excellent presentations on Eucharist from yesterday afternoon and this morning. Here are a few more of his theses that hit me like a spiritual bullet, making their mark but causing no pain, only enlightenment.
1. The Catholic Church is presently undertaking a recovery of the meaning of the Eucharist as sacrifice. This is leading the Church into choppy waters, but it can be an opportunity to gain something of value. Sacrifice may lose something of its disturbing edge and gain more of a luminous character if it is imagined not so much as an action that confers holiness as an action that acknowledges holiness. Sacrifice, literally "make holy" or "holy making," has to do with things becoming sacred or holy. Something "becomes" holy if it takes you back to God. That is sacrifice at its simplest.
2. Many things are sacrifices, that is, they become holy things. When people are led back to God, they become holy, and so they become sacrifices.
3. How do humans become holy? Through a radical dependence on God -- through a doing and being that relies totally on God for its beginning, its progress, and its completion.
4. Jesus is a mirror of God in the world. As the Gospels testify, especially in John, Jesus' life is radical dependence on God. He does everything only because God does it in him. The life of Jesus Christ is radical dependence on God; his life is holy, and therefore it is a sacrifice in its basic meaning.
5. Today, the followers of Jesus Christ believe the totality of Jesus, his life and death, is a sacrifice because it is a radical dependence on God, done not of his own will, but God's. Followers of Jesus Christ, from the days of the apostles to ours, also believe that we are to become holy as Christ is holy, and that means to live in sacrifice -- to be a holy offering, a holy making that shows others the presence of the living God and all that is holy.
6. There is a distinction between real personal sacrifice, an offering of ourselves, made by ourselves; and ritual sacrifice, a holy making that is offered by a priest on behalf of others. Both are done in acknowledgment of a radical dependence on God. The intrinsic connection between radical dependence on God and sacrifice may not severed without a loss of meaning or participation in the sanctification.
7. What is the relationship between the sacrifice of Jesus Christ and the sacrifice of the Church in the celebration of the Lord's Supper? Jesus Christ is the real priest and the real sacrifice. What he did was a real action and not ritual. What the Church does in its celebration of the Eucharist is not a new real personal sacrifice, but a ritual sacrifice that is the sacrament, or symbol, of the once-for-all real personal sacrifice of Jesus Christ. The sacrifice offered at the Mass has power because it points to and has a share in the sacrifice of Christ. The sacrifice of Jesus Christ, which is believed to have real redemptive power, is available sacramentally, symbolically, in the ritual sacrifice of the Mass.
8. Why is the language of sacrifice valuable? It speaks to God's promise of who we are to become and the invitation to do as Jesus has done. If we are called to communion, then we share from the holy making of Christ and become empowered personally to also make holy. As Christ offers a real and personal sacrifice in his life, we who follow Jesus bring our personal life to God. In the ritual context of the Eucharist, our real and personal offerings are taken up to God by Christ, as an offering of praise, which is made holy by God in Christ. The ritual sacrifice of the Eucharist creates a mighty awareness that enables the Church, the people of God, to enter into their own adventure of making holy.
Okay, time to go to Eucharist for Brother Bill's teaching Mass.
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