Blessed Feast Day
Corpus Christi
Posted on 06/18/2006 5:06:01 AM PDT by NYer
Catholics don’t just go to church on Sunday, like other Christians. They go to Mass. Christmas, New Years, weddings, funerals. It seems that we just can’t seem to do anything important without this ceremony which some regard as a sacrifice and others as a fellowship meal and still others as “the real presence.”
So which is it–sacrifice, supper, or “real presence” and why the fixation upon it?
Like most things in the New Testament, it is really impossible to understand this fully without some serious knowledge of what we now call the Old Testament.
When I first read the account of Moses asking Pharaoh to “let my people go,” I thought that Moses was using a God-sanction ruse when he told Pharaoh that the reason he wanted to take the people and their flocks out of Egypt was that they could offer a sacrifice to their God in the desert.
But that was indeed the real reason after all. God liberated them from slavery to Pharaoh so that they could be free to enter into an exclusive, intimate relationship with Himself, a covenant. He gave them the law that would be the condition of this covenant on Mt. Sinai, and, after they said “I do,” they sealed the deal through a rather strange ritual. It was strange, by the way, even for them. Oh, sacrifice was normal enough. You offer the best animals you have to God. Sometimes you poured out their blood to God, then burned the entire animal. Other times you offered a perfect animal to God as atonement for sin, with the blood and fat going to God and the choicest portions going to feed the priests, God’s representatives. Most often, though, the blood and fat went to God, and the rest of the animal was solemnly eaten by those offering the sacrifice (often called a “Peace Offering”) in a special thanksgiving meal, a sign of communion with God, who was considered to be present at the meal (Ex 18:12). For after all, what more universal sign of sharing a common life is there than taking a meal together?
But the sacrifice to seal the first covenant was different. Half of the blood of the sacrificed animals was poured out to God at the base of the altar. The other half was sprinkled upon the people. Blood equaled life in the mind of the ancient Israelites, and it was forbidden to consume blood, since all life belonged to God. Here Israel and God are bound by a blood ceremony, becoming intimate kin, a family. Then Moses and the elders further celebrated their new blood relationship with God by eating the sacrificed animals in God’s presence, on the Holy Mountain (that’s what Ex 24:11 means–after seeing God, they could still eat and drink).
In the New Covenant, God takes things a step further. The liberation is not just from the drudgery of Pharaoh’s building projects, but from sin, Satan, and even death. To win this prize, God the Son becomes man and offers his body as the ultimate sacrifice that takes away sin and creates a degree of fellowship between God and man hitherto inconceivable. Not only is his blood poured out at the base of the altar of the cross, as an offering of his life to the Father, but it is given to his disciples to drink, under the sacramental form of wine. This is a symbol that actually is what it symbolizes, and transmits what it contains–the immortal life of the God-man, which binds us to God like nothing else ever could, and empowers us to be like him, live like him, indeed become him. You are what you eat. The Body and blood of Christ are given as our food that we may become the Body of Christ and his very life coursing through our veins.
Real presence? Fellowship Meal? Sacrifice? Yes, absolutely. All three, or none at all.
Hahn begins by describing the first mass he ever attended.
"There I stood, a man incognito, a Protestant minister in plainclothers, slipping into the back of a Catholic chapel in Milwaukee to witness my first Mass. Curiosity had driven me there, and I still didn't feel sure that it was healthy curiosity. Studying the writings of the earliest Christians, I'd found countless references to "the liturgy," "the Eucharist," "the sacrifice." For those first Christians, the Bible - the book I loved above all - was incomprehensible apart from the event that today's Catholics called "the Mass."
"I wanted to understand the early Christians; yet I'd had no experience of liturgy. So I persuaded myself to go and see, as a sort of academic exercise, but vowing all along that I would neither kneel nor take part in idolatry."
I took my seat in the shadows, in a pew at the very back of that basement chapel. Before me were a goodly number of worshipers, men and women of all ages. Their genuflections impressed me, as did their apparent concentration in prayer. Then a bell rang, and they all stood as the priest emerged from a door beside the altar.
Unsure of myself, I remained seated. For years, as an evangelical Calvinist, I'd been trained to believe that the Mass was the ultimate sacrilege a human could commit. The Mass, I had been taught, was a ritual that purported to "resacrifice Jesus Christ." So I would remain an observer. I would stay seated, with my Bible open beside me.
As the Mass moved on, however, something hit me. My Bible wasn't just beside me. It was before me - in the words of the Mass! One line was from Isaiah, another from Psalms, another from Paul. The experience was overwhelming. I wanted to stop everything and shout, "Hey, can I explain what's happening from Scripture? This is great!" Still, I maintained my observer status. I remained on the sidelines until I heard the priest pronounce the words of consecration: "This is My body . . . This is the cup of My blood."
Then I felt all my doubt drain away. As I saw the priest raise that white host, I felt a prayer surge from my heart in a whisper: "My Lord and my God. That's really you!"
I was what you might call a basket case from that point. I couldn't imagine a greater excitement than what those words had worked upon me. Yet the experience was intensified just a moment later, when I heard the congregation recite: "Lamb of God . . . Lamb of God . . . Lamb of God," and the priest respond, "This is the Lamb of God . . ." as he raised the host. In less than a minute, the phrase "Lamb of God" had rung out four times. From long years of studying the Bible, I immediately knew where I was. I was in the Book of Revelation, where Jesus is called the Lamb no less than twenty-eight times in twenty-two chapters. I was at the marriage feast that John describes at the end of that very last book of the Bible. I was before the throne of heaven, where Jesus is hailed forever as the Lamb. I wasn't ready for this, though - I was at Mass!
The Church Rocks.
Mass Mobilization
Saturday April 29th 2006, 7:15 am
Getting ready for Sunday Mass? Think about what you’re doing. Think for a moment: What did it mean to be a Christian in the time of the Fathers?
What set those first believers apart from their neighbors? What was the single act that best defined their life in Jesus Christ?
For the first Christians, to be a believer meant to go to Mass. The Eucharist was then, as it is now, the source and summit of Christian life.
We see this clearly in the Church’s earliest history, the Acts of the Apostles. “They devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers.” “Day by day,” the author goes on, the Jerusalem Christians shared a common life of worship, “attending the temple together and breaking bread in their homes” (Acts 2:42,46).
In Troas with Paul, Luke recounts, “On the first day of the week . . . we were gathered together to break bread” (Acts 20:7).
Wherever the first Christians assembled, they “broke bread.”
This was no ordinary meal. It was, rather, the fulfillment of the command of Jesus Christ at His Last Supper. “He took bread, and when He had given thanks He broke it and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ ”
Jesus himself performed the first “remembrance” on the day of His resurrection. After His famous walk to Emmaus with two incredulous disciples, “When He was at table with them, He took the bread and blessed, and broke it, and gave it to them. And their eyes were opened and they recognized Him; and He vanished out of their sight. . . . He was known to them in the breaking of the bread” (Lk 24:30-31,35).
To be faithful to Jesus, then, was to follow His command and His example. To keep faith was to give thanks and break bread in His memory. These actions, collectively, took their name from Jesus’ own words, “giving thanks,” in Greek, eucharistia — Eucharist.
More than a memorial
What did this thanksgiving mean to those founders of the Christian Church? It was a memorial, but it was more than that. The passage from Acts uses the Greek word “koinonia,” which can be translated “fellowship,” “sharing,” or “participation,” but “communion” is the preferred English term. The “thanksgiving” of the early Christians was a communion of persons — a communion of the believers with Christ and with one another.
St. Paul wrote to the Church in Corinth, around A.D. 51: “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a communion in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a communion in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread” (1 Cor 10:16-17).
The first Christians knew holy Communion as something more than symbolic. It was a mingling of bodies and souls. The closest analogy they could find was in the union of a married couple. Thus, the Book of Revelation refers to the Mass, mystically, as “the marriage supper of the Lamb” (Rv 19:9).
Jesus himself had foretold His Eucharist in the most graphic, physical terms. “I am the living bread which came down from heaven; if any one eats of this bread, he will live for ever; and the bread which I shall give for the life of the world is My flesh” (Jn 6:51).
The early Church took Jesus at His word and always spoke of the Eucharist with the same flesh-and-blood realism. Belief in Jesus’ Real Presence was essential to a Christian’s profession of faith. To hold a different doctrine was an act of infidelity. “For anyone who eats and drinks without discerning the body,” wrote St. Paul, “eats and drinks judgment upon himself” (1 Cor 11:29).
That judgment held in the subsequent generations. St. Ignatius of Antioch, a disciple of St. John the Apostle, wrote around A.D. 107 that a distinguishing mark of a heretic was the denial of the Real Presence. “From the Eucharist and prayer they hold aloof, because they do not confess that the Eucharist is the flesh of our Savior Jesus Christ.”
Eucharist fed the faith
All of this was the faith of the Church, before there were New Testament Scriptures, long before there were church buildings. The books of the New Testament were likely not completed until A.D. 90-100. The official list of the books of the Bible was not approved for the universal Church until 419. But the earliest liturgical manual we have, The Didache, was probably set to parchment around 48 A.D. (I follow Enrico Mazza in the dating of The Didache. His arguments are very persuasive.)
Moreover, Christianity arose long before the printing press. Few people had access to books of the various Gospels and letters that were in circulation.
Few people could read them anyway, as literacy was rare in many parts of the world.
Yet the faith endured because Christians received the Word and the sacrament within their eucharistic assemblies. Indeed, Word and sacrament were inseparable realities. As the early Christians read the books of the New Testament, they found not just isolated references to the Eucharist, but a sacramental motif pervasive from the very beginning of Jesus’ life. He was born, after all, in Bethlehem, which in Hebrew means “House of Bread.”
When Jesus multiplied the loaves, believers saw a foreshadowing of the Eucharist. When Jesus changed water into wine, He prefigured the transformation of wine into His blood. It is the overwhelming judgment of the Fathers of the Church that when Jesus instructed us to pray for “our daily bread,” He taught us to pray for the Eucharist. In third-century Africa, St. Cyprian wrote: “We ask that this bread should be given to us daily, that we who are in Christ and daily receive the Eucharist for the food of salvation, may not, by the obstacle of some heinous sin, be kept back from receiving Communion, from partaking of the heavenly bread, that we may not be separated from Christ’s body.”
St. Cyprian, like his scriptural forebears, spoke with precision here. For to be “excommunicated” meant literally to be excluded from Communion, which for believers is a sentence of death (see 1 Cor 11:30).
Indeed, the Eucharist was life itself for the Church, and believers preferred death to missing Mass. The martyrs of Abitina, in third-century Africa, told their accusers, “Without fear of any kind we have celebrated the Lord’s Supper, because it cannot be missed. . . . We cannot live without the Lord’s Supper.”
Those martyrs had drawn deeply from three centuries of devotion — and more. For Christ did not invent the Eucharist whole cloth, but rather presented it as a fulfillment of the Old Covenant sacrifices. His Last Supper took place, after all, at a sacrificial meal, the Passover. Over time, many of the prayers of ancient Israel would be taken up into the Mass. Hear, for example, the cup blessing of the Passover liturgy: “Blessed are you, Lord God, creator of the fruit of the vine.”
The service of the synagogue repeats the words from Ezekiel (which appear again in Revelation): “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory.” The Dead Sea Scrolls hint at other Jewish sources of Christian ritual: “When the table has been prepared for eating, and the new wine for drinking, the priest shall be the first to stretch out his hand to bless the first-fruits of the bread and new wine.”
Household churches
The early Christians must have had a vivid experience of the close communion of the Church. For, until the legalization of Christianity in 313, the Church owned no buildings. As we saw in the Acts of the Apostles, the faithful assembled for the Eucharist in family homes. Sometimes, when wealthy families converted, they turned over substantial estates for liturgical use. The Basilica of San Clemente in Rome may have been built upon just such a household. Another “house-church” was excavated, somewhat intact, in Syria. Late last year, a construction crew dug up yet another in Megiddo, near Jerusalem.
Still, though the first Christians were “at home” with the Eucharist, they were never casual in their practice. Their reverence was profound. In the third century, the Scripture scholar Origen of Alexandria wrote: “You who are accustomed to take part in the divine mysteries know, when you receive the body of the Lord, how you protect it with all caution and veneration lest any small part fall from it, lest anything of the consecrated gift be lost.”
In the fourth century, St. Cyril of Jerusalem exhorts his people to take the same care: “Tell me, if anyone gave you grains of gold wouldn’t you hold them with all care, on your guard against losing any? Won’t you keep watch more carefully, then, that not a crumb fall from you of what is more precious than gold and jewels?”
Just a few years later, St. Jerome — the greatest biblical scholar of the ancient Church — would write of the need “to instruct by the authority of Scripture ignorant people in all the churches concerning the reverence with which they must handle holy things and minister at Christ’s altar; and to impress upon them that the sacred chalices, veils and other accessories used in the celebration of the Lord’s passion are not mere lifeless and senseless objects devoid of holiness, but that rather, from their association with the body and blood of the Lord, they are to be venerated with the same awe as the body and the blood themselves.”
This is the reverence the early Christians gave to the sacrament they received. It was not reverence for the sake of ceremony. It arose naturally because they knew that here, under the appearance of bread and wine, was Emmanuel, God-with-us. It welled up within them because the Lord’s Supper was a meal they could not live without. They loved the sacrament as true lovers — because they were at the marriage supper of the Lamb.
And this reverence was more than a sometime thrill, the emotional response to beautiful liturgy. Reverence for the Eucharist was the foundation of a culture — a kingdom — that was thoroughly Christian.
According to one of the most ancient liturgical texts, our reverence for the Eucharist must be extended to the poorest of the poor: “Let widows and orphans be revered like the altar.”
Mike Aquilina
Awesome! Thanks for posting that. Mike Aqualina is one of my favorite theologians.
THE COMMUNION
"I thirst."-John 19:28.
OUR Blessed Lord reaches the communion of His Mass when out from the depths of the Sacred Heart there wells the cry: "I thirst."
This was certainly not a thirst for water, for the earth is His and the fullness thereof; it was not a thirst for any of the refreshing droughts of earth, for He calmed the seas with doors when they burst forth in their fury. When they offered Him a drink, He took it not. It was another kind of thirst which tortured Him. He was thirsty for the souls and hearts of men.
The cry was a cry for communion-the last in a long series of shepherding calls in the quest of God for men. The very fact that it was expressed in the most poignant of all human sufferings, namely, thirst, was the measure of its depth and intensity. Men may hunger for God, but God thirsts for men. He thirsted for man in Creation as He called him to fellowship with divinity in the garden of Paradise; He thirsted for man in Revelation, as He tried to win back man's erring heart by telling the ecrets of His love; He thirsted for man in the Incarnation when He became like the one He loved, and was found in the form and habit of man.<{> Now He was thirsting for man in Redemption, for greater love than this no man hash, that he lay down his life for his friends. It was the final appeal for communion before the curtain rang down on the Great Drama of His earthly life. All the myriad loves of parents for children, of spouse for spouse, if compacted into one great love, would have been the smallest fraction of God's love for man in that cry of thirst. It signified at once, not only how much He thirsted for the little ones, for hungry hearts and empty souls, but also how intense was His desire to satisfy our deepest longing.
Really, there should be nothing mysterious in our thirst for God, for does not the hart pant after the fountain, and the sunflower turn to the sun, and the rivers run into the sea? But that He should love us, considering our own unworthiness, and how little our love is worth-that is the mystery! And yet such is the meaning of God's thirst for communion with us.
He had already expressed it in the parable of the Lost Sheep, when He said He was not satisfied with the ninety-nine; only the lost sheep could give Him perfect joy. Now the truth was expressed again from the Cross: Nothing could adequately satisfy His thirst but the heart of every man, woman, and child, who were made for Him, and therefore could never be happy until they found their rest in Him.
The basis of this plea for communion is Love, for Love by its very nature tends to unity. Love of citizens one for another begets the unity of the state. Love of man and woman begets the unity of two in one flesh. The love of God for man therefore calls for a unity based upon the Incarnation, namely, the unity of all men in the Body and Blood of Christ.
In order, therefore, that God might seal His love for us, He gave us to Himself in Holy Communion, so that as He and His human nature taken from the womb of the Blessed Mother were one in the unity of His Person, so He and we taken from the womb of humanity might be one in the unity of the Mystical Body of Christ. Hence, we use the word "receive" when speaking of communion with our Lord in the Eucharist, for literally we do "receive" Divine Life, just as really and truly as a babe receives the life of its mother.
All life is sustained by communion with a higher life. If the plants could speak they would say to the moisture and sunlight, "Unless you enter into communion with me, become possessed of my higher laws and powers, you shall not have life in you."
If the animals could speak, they would say to the plants: "Unless you enter into communion with me, you shall not have my higher life in you." We say to all lower creation: "Unless you enter into communion with me, you shall not share in my human life."
Why then should not our Lord say to us: "Unless you enter into communion with Me, you shall not have life in you"? The lower is transformed into the higher, plants into animals, animals into man, and man, in a more exalted way, becomes "divinized," if I may use that expression, through and through by the life of Christ.
Communion then is first of all the receiving of Divine Life, a life to which we are no more entitled than marble is entitled to blooming. It is a pure gift of an all-merciful God who so loved us that He willed to be united with us, not in the bonds of flesh, but in the ineffable bonds of the Spirit where love knows no satiety, but only rapture and joy.
And oh, how quickly we should have forgotten Him could we not, like Bethlehem and Nazareth, receive Him into our souls! Neither gifts nor portraits take the place of the beloved one. And our Lord knew it well. We needed Him, and so He gave us Himself.
But there is another aspect of Communion of which we but rarely think. Communion implies not only receiving Divine Life, it means also God giving human life. All love is reciprocal. There is no one-sided love, for love by its nature demands mutuality.God thirsts for us, but that means that man must also thirst for God. But do we ever think of Christ receiving Communion from us? Every time we go to the Communion rail we say we "receive" Communion, and that is all many of us do, just "receive Communion."
There is another aspect of Communion than receiving Divine Life, of which St. John speaks. St. Paul gives us the complementary truth in his Epistle to the Corinthians. Communion is not only an incorporation to the life of Christ; it is also an incorporation to His death. "As often as you shall eat this bread, and drink the chalice, you shall shew the death of the Lord, until He come."
Natural life has two sides: the anabolic and the katabolic. The supernatural also has two sides: the building up of the Christ-pattern and the tearing down of the old Adam. Communion therefore implies not only a "receiving" but also a "giving." There can be no ascent to a higher life without death to a lower one. Does not an Easter Sunday presuppose a Good Friday? Does not all love imply mutual self-giving which ends in self-recovery?
This being so,should not the Communion rail be a place of exchange, instead of a place of exclusive receiving? Is all the Life to pass from Christ to us and nothing to go back in return? Are we to drain the chalice and contribute nothing to its filling? Are we to receive the bread without giving wheat to be ground, to receive the wine and give no grapes to be crushed? If all we did during our lives was to go to Communion to receive Divine Life, to take it away, and leave nothing behind, we would be parasites on the Mystical Body of Christ.
The Pauline injunction bids us fill up in our body the sufferings wanting to the Passion of Christ. We must therefore bring a spirit of sacrifice to the Eucharistic table; we must bring the mortification of our lower self, the crosses patiently borne, the crucifixion of our egotisms, the death of our concupiscence, and even the very difficulty of our coming to Communion. Then does Communion become what it was always intended to be, namely, a commerce between Christ and the soul, in which we give His Death shown forth in our lives, and He gives His Life shown forth in our adopted sonship? We give Him our time; He gives us His eternity. We give Him our humanity; He gives us His divinity. We give Him our nothingness; He gives us His all.
Do we really understand the nature of love? Have we not sometimes, in great moments of affection for a little child, said in language which might vary from this, but which expresses the idea, "I love that child so much, I should just like to possess it within myself?" Why? Because all love craves for unity. In the natural order, God has given great pleasures to the unity of the flesh. But those are nothing compared to the pleasure of the unity of the spirit, when divinity passes out to humanity, and humanity to divinity-when our will goes to Him, and He comes to us, so that we cease to be men and begin to be children of God.
If there has ever been a moment in your life when a fine, noble affection made you feel as if you had been lifted into the third or the seventh heaven; if there has ever been a time in your life when a noble love of a fine human heart cast you into an ecstasy; if there has ever been a time when you have really loved a human heart-then, I ask you, think of what it must be to be united with the great Heart of Love! If the human heart in all of its fine, noble, Christian riches can so thrill, can so exalt, can make us so ecstatic, then what must be the great heart of Christ? Oh, if the spark is so bright, what must be the flame!
Do we fully realize how much Communion is bound up with Sacrifice, both on the part of our Lord and on the part of us, His poor weak creatures? The Mass makes the two inseparable: there is no Communion without a Consecration. There is no receiving the bread and wine we offer, until they have been transubstantiated into the Body and Blood of Christ. Communion is the consequence of the Calvary; namely, we live by what we slay. All nature witnesses this truth; our bodies live by the slaying of the beasts of the fields and the plants of the gardens. We draw life from their crucifixion. We slay them not to destroy, but to fulfill; we immolate them for the sake of communion.
And now by a beautiful paradox of Divine Love, God makes His Cross the very means of our salvation. We have slain Him; we nailed Him there; we crucified Him; but Love in His eternal Heart willed not to be defeated. He willed to give us the very life we slew; to give us the very Food we destroyed; to nourish us with the very Bread we buried, and the very Blood we poured forth. He made our very crime a happy fault; He turned a Crucifixion into a Redemption; a Consecration into a Communion; a death into life everlasting.
And it is just that which makes man all the more mysterious! Why man should be loved is no mystery, but why he does not love in return is the great mystery. Why should our Lord be the Great Unloved; why should Love not be loved? Why then, whenever He says: "I thirst," do we give Him vinegar and gall?
We had a great Corpus Christi procession yesterday around the main plaza here in St. Augustine. We had little girls throwing rose petals, the Knights of Columbus, and of course, our priest in his most beautiful vestments, walking under a gold canopy and carrying the monstrance. Most of the people from the main Mass at the Cathedral followed along, and the tourists were quite impressed. Public Catholicism is very important.
Awesome! Got pix?
I have a couple of photos but they're not very good (I'm short, and tall people kept getting in front of me). However, I'll try to post them later, since the most entertaining thing is that you can see the tourists rushing to take pictures! I go to Spain a lot, and one of the biggest forms of outreach of the Church there is the many processions - for Corpus, for just about any feast. Why we gave them up here I will never understand, because they are a really impressive but at the same time not aggressively personal (ARE YOU SAVED? type of thing) way of calling attention to the Lord.
http://www.unionleader.com/article.aspx?headline=Catholics+petition+God+for+an+end+to+the+priest+shortage&articleId=f3a6e543-3c94-4a68-8dcf-0ab52b9557c1
Here's some coverage of our Seventh Trumpet Mass in Manchester NH - it was in the mid-90's so the crowd was only in the 600-700 range. The procession was awesome; it was made a bit more poignant by our Msgr. Anthony Frontiero's impending assignment to Rome as an official of something-or-other-important there. He's a great parish priest (St. Pius X) and will be greatly missed.
Thanks for the link! No pictures but a great article on increased vocations (which I will promptly post :-)
can anyone tell me where in scripture a priest was needed to change the host in to the eucharist?
I would like to read the verses.
Thanks.
The power was given by Christ to the Apostles, who gave it to the bishops (= episcopoi, "overseers"), who delegated to the priests (=presbyteroi, "elders"). You can see this going on in the Paul's later epistles, where he talks about commissioning Timothy "by the imposition of my hands" and about "appointing elders in every town".
Nobody in the early church thought that just anyone could consecrate the Eucharist. St. Ignatius, who knew Peter, Paul, and John, went so far as to say that celebrating the Eucharist without the bishop's approval (which would certainly include celebrating it without an ordained elder) was no different than devil worship.
I am Sorry; I think you missed something in my question.
I asked if their were any scripture refferances that show that the host is transformed into the Eucharist via a Priest or appostle.
Do any of the house churches in the Acts or Epistles show that a priest was present at all the meatings, in every house to accomplish this every day.
I am seeing that the early church gathered together daily in thier homes to break bread or celebrate communion.
Did you misunderstand my question?
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.