Scroll down for the following instalments. The date attaching to each section indicates the Newsletter in which it was published.
CATECHESIS ON THE MASS
1. Introduction.
The Structure of the Mass
To understand the Mass properly, we have to understand it structure and how it got that structure.
First there was the Last Supper, at which Our Lord took bread, blessed it, broke it and gave it to his disciples saying: “Take this and eat it, for this is my body.” When supper was ended he took the cup, and said, “this is the cup of my blood”. This was the first Mass. Then He said, “You do this as a Memorial of me.”
So the Apostles and disciples did this in their homes: they said Jesus’ words over the bread and wine; then they broke the Bread and distributed it and the Chalice among themselves. They called this earliest form of the Mass “the Breaking of the Bread” Today we would call it the “Liturgy of the Eucharist”. The Liturgy of the Word still had to be formed.
And this is how the Liturgy of the Word (the Readings) came about and how it came to precede the Breaking of the Bread:
In these earliest days, the Christians were still going to the Jewish Synagogue for the readings of the Scriptures, the singing of the Psalms, and a weekly sermon.
With anti-Christian feeling building, they were very soon banned from the Synagogue. Not to be outdone, they took the essence of the synagogue service with them and used it as preparation for and introduction to their Mass at home. Before they consecrated the Bread and Wine, they read from the Old Testament and sang the Psalms, just as they had done at Synagogue.
Then St Paul started writing his letters to the Churches. These letters were read at the Breaking of the Bread. So the Mass now consisted of: Reading from the Old Testament Scripture followed by the singing of a Psalm (the Synagogue service) followed by a reading from one of St Paul’s letters.
This was usually followed by an eyewitness account of something Jesus had said or done. One of the Apostles would stand up and recall the event. But as the years passed and those who were contemporaries of Jesus died out, there was no one to remember what Jesus had said and done. But by this time, the Gospels had been written. So instead of an eye-witness account, they read from one of the Gospels. The Bishop or Priest would then comment on the Gospel, thus adding the Homily to the Mass. So, the shape of the Mass, as we know it today, was formed.
PART ONE.
THE INTRODUCTORY RITES
2. The Sign of the Cross
The earliest sign of the Cross used in the Church was made with the thumb on the forehead. This form has survived down the centuries in the practice of the Liturgy and we find it to this day it in the Sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation and Anointing, as well in the ceremonials of Ash Wednesday. The Sign of the Cross was put on us at our Baptism as a kind of indelible label denoting what we are and who we are, a brand mark identifying us as sheep of Christ’s flock; and all our subsequent use of the Sign of the Cross takes us back to that moment of Baptism when we first became Christ’s.
We were baptised “in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit”, the very same words we use when making the Sign of the Cross. Those words, with the pouring of the water, as Christ stipulated, initiate us into the mystery of Christ. In Baptism, as St Paul repeatedly teaches us, we die with Christ and we rise with him to new life. We are mystically united with his death: with “all the pains and sufferings he endured for us”. And we are equally united mystically with his new life: we are changed inwardly and carry about in our bodies, as St Paul teaches, that Risen Life of Jesus.
This is precisely why baptism links with the Eucharist, (why the baptismal font is in the sanctuary). In Baptism we are united with the death and resurrection of the Lord; in the Mass we celebrate the death and resurrection of the Lord. So, the Sign of the Cross is the most appropriate and most wonderful prayer with which to start our celebration of the Eucharist.
We make the Sign of the Cross so often that we can easily forget what we are professing when we make it. We confess, first of all, our belief in the Blessed Trinity, that the one true God is in fact three Persons of equal power and majesty, who, though Three, is in essence One. This is the mystery which underpins the whole of our Faith; the mystery too big for the human mind to comprehend; the inner, revealed, nature of God. We believe it because it has been revealed to us by Christ. The Sign of the Cross is therefore as profound an act of faith in the one true God as it is humanly possible to make.
As we confess our belief in the Mystery of the Blessed Trinity, we trace the shape of Christ’s Cross on our body. By doing this we profess our faith that God, yes God the Almighty and ever-living One, actually took a human body like ours and, “for us men and for our salvation”, as we say in the Creed, took a wooden Cross, carried it up Calvary and died on it. Yes, God died on a Cross for us.
Now, if you can believe that, you can believe anything! Who could accept that? And the answer is: “No one, without the grace of God”. But when God gives us the grace to believe this, then everything both in life and in death falls into place and has meaning. This is what St Paul meant when he said: “We preach Christ crucified; a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Greeks, but to those whom God has called, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.” 1 Cor 1:23-24. So, when we make the sign of the Cross we proclaim publicly by our words and gestures our belief that “God (the Father) so love the world that he gave his one and only Son (to die on the Cross) so that those who believe in him (you and I, through the gift and grace of the Holy Spirit) shall not perish but have eternal life” John 3:16
3. The Greeting
This is precisely why the response has changed from “And also with you”. “And with your spirit” seems unnatural to our ears; we would not normally respond to someone’s greeting in such a way. But “Et cum spiritu tuo” (the Latin original) means exactly what the new translation says, and would have been equally odd to the ears of those who spoke Latin as their mother tongue in those early days of the Church when this response was originally composed. The inclusion of the word “spirit” is precisely to remind the people of the ministry the priest holds, the ministry that God bestowed on him when he gave him the Spirit of the Priesthood. The greeting therefore reminds us that this is no ordinary encounter between priest and people: the Mass is on a different plane.
A greeting also implies the beginning of a dialogue; you don’t greet yourself! The liturgical greeting at the beginning of Mass reminds us that we are about to engage in a dialogue, but a dialogue engaged at several different levels at the same time.
First there is the dialogue between Priest and People. That dialogue goes on all the time. This is one of the main reasons why the altar was turned round in the 60s so that the priest could face the people: you don’t normally talk to a person’s back.
Then there is the dialogue between Priest/People and God. Apart from a couple of prayers before Holy Communion, every major prayer in the Mass is addressed to the Father.
But every major prayer is addressed to the Father “through Jesus Christ our Lord”. The dialogue that is going on is not just between Priest/People and God but between Jesus Christ/Priest/People and God. Jesus Christ, in all of us as High Priest through the Sacrament of Baptism and in the Priest in a special way through the Sacrament of Orders, prays to his Father with us in the Mass. The dialogue between Priest/People and God is raised to an extraordinary plane.
Within this sublime context, there is also the dialogue going on within us, between our individual soul and God, “the Spirit breathing where he will”. This is the dialogue we are most aware of, but the other dimensions of our communication with God in the Mass are of equal, if not greater, importance. It is at Mass especially that the Church is realised. When God’s People assemble for Mass, the Church becomes visible and tangible, the “Whole Christ” at prayer to the Father, with each of us a member of that Mystical Body.
4. The Penitential Rite
At our celebration of the Mass, the first thing that comes home to us is that we have entered into this presence of God, we who are mere dust and ashes, and sinful dust and ashes at that, and He, the Lord God, purer than the transparent heavens. Instinctively we become aware of our sinfulness in this presence of the Holy One. This is why the Penitential Rite follows immediately on the Priest’s greeting, at the very beginning of the celebration.
The forms of the Penitential Rite have changed somewhat in their format, but these changes need no explanation. What we will notice most, I think, is the return of the Confiteor to something like its old format, with the striking of the breast three times and the accompanying words: “through my fault, through my fault, through my most grievous fault”. This change has been made not only that the prayer may stick more closely to the original Latin, but, principally I think, to bring back home to us the seriousness of our offending God.
Because we have never seen God and because we cannot begin to imagine his greatness and goodness as they really exist in Him, we can never really appreciate the seriousness of offending Him. Earlier generations could not appreciate it either; but we, in our generation, seem to have lost sight of sin in our lives almost completely. You see it writ large throughout society; so long as you don’t get caught, feel free! This loss of awareness of good and evil, of a good and just God lies, I believe, at the heart of many of the woes and ills of our society.
To lose sight of sin and its seriousness before God is to make Christ and his Death and Resurrection virtually redundant. I could go further and say that to lose sight of sin and its seriousness before God is to render Christianity itself almost meaningless. It was precisely because we are sinners in need of reconciliation with God that Christ came among us as a man and paid with his life the penalty of our own personal misdeeds.
St Peter reminds us, we are a “people set apart”; whatever the others do or do not do, we as Christians must take God seriously into account and recognise our accountability before Him. We recognise that we are sinners in need of his forgiveness and reconciliation. Thus the Penitential Rite.
But the Church has always insisted that this Penitential Rite is not the Sacrament of Reconciliation. Confession is that unique sacrament instituted by Christ on the evening of Resurrection Sunday whereby He remains an abiding Presence in the Church in his capacity as Healer, ready to meet each one of us individually with his love and reconciliation.
When you consider that Christ came among us principally to reconcile mankind to God, the neglect of the Sacrament of Penance is amazing. This neglect is connected with that loss of the sense of God in society; we, as much as anyone else, are influenced by the trends of the world. But I don’t think that will stand as much of an excuse when we, like Geronsius, stand before the judgement seat of God, that moment no words can describe. The regular Penitential Rite at Mass should remind us of the need for that special encounter with Christ, the Sacrament of Reconciliation, which sends us away walking on air.
5. The Gloria
So this much loved hymn has been around almost as long as Christianity itself, and is used not only by ourselves, but also by the Orthodox Christians and many of the Protestant churches. It has been set to music by most of the great composers and enjoyed many beautiful settings in the original plainsong of the Church. The version we use at present is a truncated version of the original, and it is with great joy that we welcome back a translation that is faithful to the original.
It begins with the song of the Christmas angels, as recorded by St Luke: Glory to God in the highest and on earth peace to people of good will. No wonder Pope Telesphorus used it at his Midnight Mass. The revised translation makes this connection clearer, enabling us to link our fundamental faith in the Incarnation of Christ with the Paschal Mysteries of our Lord’s Death and Resurrection which we are about to celebrate in the Mass.
What the translators of the present version cut out and what the new translation restores is the almost breathless praise that comes at the beginning of the hymn: We praise you, we bless you, we adore you, we glorify you, we give you thanks for your great glory. I use the word “breathless”: it is as if the person praying cannot find words enough to praise the Lord, nor adequate expressions to portray what he wants to say.
This in itself is very significant: we cannot ever praise God as he deserves to be praised; we can never express in human language adequate praise of the Lord God, heavenly King, almighty Father. Not the Gloria, not any one of us can do this; only Christ can, the Only Begotten Son. And this is the Mass. In the Mass we give God all honour and glory because, and only because, we are latching on to Christ; it is He, by making his Sacrifice and Resurrection a living reality in the Eucharist, who gives his Father adequate praise, and we, only by being united to Him.
The Gloria, written as it was in the second century, is a triumphant hymn of praise to the Blessed Trinity, with emphasis on the fact that Jesus is God and on the equality he enjoys with the Father. In those days the Church was struggling against the heresy called Gnosticism, a weird heresy drawing bits and pieces together from different religions, and therefore having some very strange explanations as to who Jesus really was. The Gloria was a kind of profession of faith in Jesus as God’s Only Begotten Son as well as being a majestic hymn of praise.
Prayers express what we believe; that is why it is so important that liturgical prayers express our faith clearly and correctly. This is another reason for the revised texts which we await. Some of the present translations are not sufficiently accurate in their expression of the Catholic Faith; or rather, they can be open to misinterpretation.
So let the Gloria be for us an expression of our unshakable faith in who Jesus is and a breathless effort to praise God as well as we humanly can.
6. The Collect (Opening Prayer)
It’s a bit, just a bit, like that when we come to Mass. We greet the good Lord (“our Friend and Brother”), tell him how sorry we are at the penitential rite for not having been more attentive to what he expects of us; praise him in the Gloria for his wonderful world and more wonderful Self; and then, finally, get around to telling him what we really want.
The first petition, asking, comes in the prayer we know as the Opening Prayer or the Collect. Though there are other petitions embedded in the Eucharist Prayer, the main thrust of the Mass is not asking, but thanking (the very meaning of the word Eucharist). It is a more noble form of prayer to praise God for his greatness and to thank Him for his kindness than to ask him for the things we need or think we need.
We should always remember this and make sure that our daily prayers are not all asking. But we should not go overboard like some snooty Christians do, who tell you they ask nothing of God but simply trust Him. This is wonderful when it is true, but it can be a smokescreen for not really believing in the power of prayer, for not really being confident in God always answering us. Humble petition is good for the soul. It makes us recognise that we are not sufficient of ourselves, that we need God. It keeps us humble; keeps our feet firmly on the ground; and expresses our real faith in our Father-God.
The Latin Collects, with the wisdom of the ages behind them, were masterpieces of poetry and prose, expressing beautifully our deepest human needs and aspirations. The present translation literally butchered them; and if there was any part of the Mass that needed re-translation it was the Collects. The revised translation goes some little way towards putting into English the glory that was once the Latin Collect.
The Collect is the first part of the Mass which we call proper, proper because it belongs to this Mass and not to any other. The parts of the Mass which occur always are called the common parts. So we have the Proper and the Common of the Mass. The collect is proper because it changes with the day, the season, the feast. It sums up the general theme of the Mass.
It is called the Collect because it collects together the prayers of the congregation. The Priest introduces it by saying Let us pray. There follows a pause. This pause is the important bit. It is the moment of silence when we formulate in our minds our own personal petitions before the priest gathers all the prayers, hopes and fears in the hearts and minds of the congregation and offers them to God in the Opening Prayer.
The Collect always ends Through our Lord Jesus Christ…. This reminds us of the all important fact that our prayers cannot reach Almighty God unless they are borne there by Jesus Christ. He is the Mediator between God and Man. All our prayers and good works go to God through Him, and through Him comes down upon us God’s blessings, the answer to our prayers of faith.
7. BODY LANGUAGE
Our series, Catechesis on the Mass, has been occasioned by the forthcoming changes in the English texts. But we communicate not only by the written and spoken word, we express ourselves also by body language. When we stand, sit or kneel we are making a statement.
Getting down on our knees usually means that we are about to scrub the floor or do something else that necessitates our being in close contact with the ground. The Latin for ground is humus, from which we get the word humility. Being on our knees is a sign of humility, a sign that we recognise the presence of something or someone greater than ourselves. This is why we go down on our knees during the Eucharistic Prayer when the miracle of transubstantiation takes place and bread and wine become the real presence of God. But when it comes to the history of the Mass, kneeling is a very recent practice.
The awareness of the divine presence which sends us to our knees would have put the ancient Jews flat on their faces. This is how it would have been with Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. This ancient posture of adoration has been preserved in the Church’s liturgy only in two places: when the deacon, prior to the moment of his actual ordination to the priesthood, lies flat on his face before the altar; and when the priest prostrates himself before the stripped altar on Good Friday.
When the Collect has been said, we sit down to listen to the Word of God. At that moment, the first major part of the Mass begins, the Liturgy of the Word. Being seated is our normal posture for being on the receiving end of something, when we are taking something in. We sit to read, watch television, attend a lecture, have a meal. We sit down and make ourselves comfortable so that we can concentrate on what we are receiving. We sit at this point in the Mass to take in what God is saying to us, as he speaks to us through his sacred Word. We are in receptive mode.
So, why do we stand for the Gospel? Out of respect, I hear you answer. Yes, but not entirely. Our standing up here is body language expressing our belief that Jesus, who now speaks to us through his Gospel, has stood up out of death. Christ now stands among us as our Risen Lord.
Standing was the normal posture for prayer among the Jews and this ancient habit has survived in the Mass. You notice that, apart from during the first two readings, the Priest stands throughout the entire Mass. He stands, most of the time, with arms outstretched to heaven.
This is exactly the way they used to pray, exactly the way Our Lord would have prayed to his Father. In many part of the Church this gesture is coming back among the faithful, and it is good to see it among some of our own congregation. In the Catacombs in Rome, where the walls are often illustrated with biblical scenes, the figure of the Orans, the praying man with uplifted arms, appears frequently. The practice of joining our hands for prayer is of relatively recent origin.
Talking of Rome, if you go to any of the great basilicas, you will find that the nave is completely empty of pews, like a great dance-hall. This is because the normal way of attending Mass was to stand throughout. Around the walls, and often built into the walls, there are/were benches where people, feeling the strain to too much standing, could retreat to in the course of the Mass. This is origin of our English phrase to go to the wall.
Standing was the normal posture for prayer, that is why we stand up for a considerable portion of the Mass and whenever the Priest says Let us pray. It was the way the Jews prayed, but for us Christians it has taken on the further significance of being body-language for faith in the resurrection of Our Lord Jesus Christ from the dead.
PART TWO
THE LITURGY OF THE WORD
8. THE FIRST READING
Try saying to yourself The Word of the Lord. Say it twice: the first time with you voice dropping a tone or two on the word Lord; then with your voice rising a couple of notes on the same word. You will notice that the first time you are making a statement; the second time you are asking a question. Statement/Question—this is precisely why the change has been made. The same is true of the words used at Holy Communion: The Body of Christ(?)…The Blood of Christ(?).
As a statement: The Word of the Lord equals This is the word of the Lord. The Reader is saying: what you have just listened to is not my word but the Word of God, God has just spoken to you. But you could also hear his words as a question. In which case the Reader is saying to you: Do you really believe that this is the Word of the Lord and not my word? —a challenge to your faith, just as your faith is challenged by the words: The Body, Blood of Christ(?).
Question: what are the grounds for this assertion and for this challenging, this questioning of my faith? Answer: The Church’s faith in the Inspiration of Sacred Scripture.
The Jews believed that their Sacred Scriptures were inspired by God. The Early Church inherited these writings as being the written expression of the first stage of God’s revelation of Himself to man and accepted them as inspired.
Christ made such an impact on his contemporaries that many took it upon themselves to write accounts of what had happened. The Church, subconsciously aware of what later generations would call the charisma of infallibility, declared, on the authority of Christ, that some writings were inspired and acceptable and some were not. Those she accepted she added to the canon of the Jewish Scriptures, giving the world and the Church what we know it today as the Bible.
Inspiration, of course, comes from the Latin word inspirare which originally referred to the gods breathing something into someone and, for that reason, was a religious word from the start. But today we use the word and its derivatives regularly: we inspire other people with enthusiasm or new ideas; we die when we expire, or breathe our last.
To say that the Scriptures are inspired is to assert that God has breathed his Spirit into them, the Spirit of Truth. So how did God achieve this, without making the human author a mere puppet or robot? Did the human authors of these Scriptures lose their freedom while God took over their minds? Or did God dictate his very own words, as the Muslims believe of their Koran?
God respects our freedom and our human nature too much to subject it to any treatment which would demean it. He would never treat us as a mere automated robot, losing all our freedom; not even to provide us with his Word. Nor did He choose to dictate. This is obvious from the fact that each book reveals the human qualities of its author: you can recognise the education and sophistication behind the Gospel of St John and the writings of St Paul; equally, the lack of refinement and elegance in the Gospel of St Mark. So John wrote as John; Paul as Paul; Mark as Mark; and so with all the sacred authors of the Old and New Testaments. But God was there too. But where, exactly?
It’s hard to understand, but inspiration means that an inspired person is so in tune with God that what the human author wants to write, God wants to write. Like two violins playing the same note; both notes are created by the skill of the player, both are individual and independent, but both are totally attuned to each other, producing one sound. The two become one. So the Church reached the conclusion that the Scriptures have two genuine authors at the same time, One divine and one human . This has huge implications for our approach to the Scriptures and to the way we should pray. We will deal with these next.
9. SCRIPTURE AS PRAYER
He speaks to his people assembled to worship Him at Mass. What a privilege that God Himself deigns to converse with us in this way! This is the principal reason why we should listen; inattention must surely be insulting to Him.
And listening is the operative word. St Paul says that “faith comes through hearing”. We should not be reading our hand missals when God is speaking to us. Of course, if the public address system is not much cop or the reader hasn’t been properly trained, then a case could be made for using a missal. But generally, we should let God speak directly to us; the printed page is a totally unnecessary medium that just gets in the way. A hand missal is excellent for reflecting on the scriptures afterwards in the light of the homily, or to prepare us for Mass. It can also be a very useful tool for praying the Scriptures at home and keeping ourselves in tune with the mind and the mood of the Church, as she moves from season to season and from feast to feast.
Every Sunday Mass has a scriptural theme (this does not apply to weekday Masses) and the theme is determined by the Gospel. The first reading, which almost always comes from the Old Testament, has been so arranged by the Church that it ties in with the Gospel, throwing light on the Gospel, and, in its turn, being itself illuminated by the Gospel.
Christ is the focal point, Beginning and End, of both the Old Testament and the New; every part of the Bible speaks in some way of Christ. This link between the first reading and the Gospel helps us to appreciate this.
To take these two readings (and the psalm, which we shall study later) as the basis for our weekly prayer, spending perhaps twenty minutes every day reflecting and meditating on them, works spiritual wonders. St Ignatius of Loyola tells us that it is important to go back to meditations we have already made, gathering more and more of the spiritual fruits available for us there. Linger; take your time.
Spiritual books, like The Imitation of Christ or the lives of the saints (as the Holy Father has so recently reminded us) can be of enormous benefit, but, for our companion in prayer, there can be no competitor with the Scriptures. The reason is obvious.
Scripture is literally the Word of God. When we read a passage of Scripture, God himself speaks to us; he is its Speaker and Jesus is his Word. When we listen to a conversation, the human message finds a place in our minds and stays there; when we listen to the Word of God, who is Christ, the same happens. Scriptures makes Christ present to us in a way very similar to the Sacraments. The Word of God comes and makes his home in us; a kind of parallel with what happened to Mary: the Word was made flesh and dwelt amongst us.
Praying the Scriptures, therefore, turns prayer into what it should be: a dialogue between God and us, not a monologue, as it usually is, with us doing all the talking. Give God space to speak to you as He wants to. Don’t read quickly through the whole passage of Scripture when you are praying it. Go slowly; very slowly. Let every word percolate in your mind. As water percolates through coffee becoming coffee itself in the process, so let the Word of God percolate in your mind as you repeat the word or phrase over and over again. Stay with any word or phrase that seems to be speaking to your especially; rest in it; return to it; remember it.
But most of all, as you read or repeat the words, recognise the voice speaking in your mind as the Voice of Christ, for that is what it truly is. Listen attentively to that Voice. Slowly it will transform you from the inside into a more perfect likeness of Itself, God’s beloved Word, Jesus Christ. Christ will increase in you, as St John the Baptist said, as he came to recognise Christ’s voice, Christ must increase, I must decrease. And you will come to understand what the Psalmist meant when he said, Your word O Lord is a light to my path.
10. THE PSALMS – SONGS FOR THREE VOICES
The Psalms are the Prayer Book of the Jews, the Prayer Book of the People of God as they prayed their way through those long centuries leading up to the coming of their promised Messiah. Most pious Jews would have known the Psalms off by heart; Our Lady certainly, as also her Son. They are often described as the most beautiful prayers ever written–and as they have God for their divine Author, no wonder! With the coming of Christ, they passed smoothly into the patrimony of the Church. They are now the Church’s Prayer
Book too.
Their human author was King David ( though many of the Psalms were written by others). They were written in the context of every kind of human situation: when David was in fear of his life; when he was repentant for the sins he had committed; when he was filled with hatred for his enemies; when he was exulting in the sense of the beauty of God and his creation. Every human sentiment is there; sometimes shockingly there, as when one Psalm prays that the heads of their enemy’s babies be smashed against a rock! The kind of sentiment which would hardly be allowed expression today even after the nine o’clock watershed!
Whatever mood you may find yourself in, you will find a Psalm to fit it perfectly. But the Psalm of the Mass, or the Psalm you find yourself praying at home, may well not fit your mood. You may be feeling one thing, the Psalm saying something quite different! You may be full of the joys of spring while the Psalm you are reading is in a fuming mood! This is precisely what puts people right off the Psalms.
How do you handle that? By remembering that the Psalms speak/sing in a trio of voices.
The Psalms were the outpouring of David’s heart to God. There was no beating about the bush with him; he called a spade a spade, even to Almighty God. These expressions of his own raw emotions became the prayers of both Jews and Christians: we too can feel anger, joy, resentment, love, peace, turmoil. We need to be honest before God; He doesn’t want us telling Him we are full of sweetness when we are in fact full of anger.
Here then is the First Voice of the Trio: mine, speaking honestly to my God.
But the Psalms are not just prayers like anyone else’s prayers; they are inspired; they are the word of God; and that Word of God is Christ. When I say a Psalm, that Word becomes alive and active in me, Christ praying to his Father in me and through me. Listen to that Voice in your mind as you read the text and recognise it for what it is. When the text is the Scriptures generally, it is the Voice of Christ speaking within me and revealing his Father to me. When the text is the Psalms, it is the same Voice of Christ, but now he is praying in me, for me and for the whole Church.
Thus the Second Voice in the Trio of Voices: Christ’s, a voice that lifts my prayer to unimaginanable heights.
St Augustine speaks frequently about the “whole Christ”, the Christ whom Jesus speaks of in his parable of the Vine and the Branches, where He is the whole vine and we the branches; the Christ whom Paul speaks of as the (Mystical) Body where Christ is the Head and we the members. The Whole Christ is the Word who became flesh, who joined himself to us, to each and every one of us who are baptised into Him.
And here we have the Third Voice of the Trio; the Church, not only raising my prayer to unimaginal heights, but widening it to unimaginable horizons.
So, when I pray the Psalms Christ prays too; but he prays as the Whole Christ on behalf of the entire Church, which is his Body. And this explains why I can sincerely say an angry Psalm when I am feeling happy, or a joyful one when I am feeling sad. If I am happy and the Psalm I am saying is angry, I pray with Christ on behalf of the millions of people in the Church who are angry. If I am feeling contented with myself and the Psalm I am saying is filled with woe, then I pray with Christ for the millions of my brothers and sisters who are distraught, poverty stricken, at their wits’ end or on their death bed. So when I say a Psalm which doesn’t fit my mood, I must remember that it most certainly does fit the mood of millions of my brother and sisters for whom Christ is praying to his Father in me and through me. I need to practise saying the Psalms making a sustained effort to be aware of these three voices in which I am speaking. I need to make the Book of Psalms (the Psalter) my Prayer Book too.
What a magnificent trio of voices reaches the Father’s ears when I pray the Psalms in this way! I am praying with Christ and with the whole Church for every man, woman and child, whatever their human condition. I am, with Christ, mystically entering into their joy and sorrow, being compassionate, “as our heavenly Father is compassionate, who makes his sun shine on the just and unjust alike”.
11. THE SECOND READING
Paul wrote one letter to the Christians in Rome; three to the Church at Corinth (one of which has got lost); one to the Churches at Galatia, Ephesus, Philippi, Colossae, and two letters to the Church at Thessalonica. He wrote personal letters to Timothy and Titus, his converts whom he was training up to succeed him as Bishop; and one to Philemon, the master of a run-away slave whom Paul sends back with this letter asking for clemency. The New Testament also contains two letters from St Peter, a letter from St James, three from St John and one from St Jude. The Letter to the Hebrews, a wonderful meditation on the Priesthood of Christ, was written by an unknown author. The Church declares all these letters to be inspired, though in some cases she is not sure they were written by the Apostle whose name they carry. But that is not our concern here.
Also in the New Testament there are two other writings which often appear in our Second Reading at Mass: the Acts of the Apostles and the Revelation of St John (often referred to as the Apocalypse). The Acts of the Apostles was written by St Luke as the continuation of his Gospel; it takes the story of the Church beyond the Resurrection (c. AD 33) to the imprisonment of St Paul at Rome (c AD 62). It is an invaluable thirty year history of the early Church.
The Apocalypse is the work of St John, the Apostle and fourth Gospel writer, sharing with his persecuted fellow Christians a vision he received from Jesus on the Island of Patmos where, as an old man now, he had been exiled for his preaching of the Faith. It is written in coded language which the Christians could understand but which the persecuting Romans could not.
All these writings, along with the Four Gospels, were accepted by the Church into her Canon of Scripture and declared inspired. All of them appear at some time or other in the Second Reading of our Sunday Masses. When there is no Second Reading, as at a weekday Mass, they can appear as the First Reading.
These readidngsfrom the New Testamentwill reward careful attention and prayerful meditation. Paul was divinely inspired with a superhuman wisdom on that day when he was so unceremoniously knocked off his high horse on his way to Damascus. St Peter himself acknowledges that Paul’s letters can sometimes be hard to understand, but they are immensely deep and rewarding.
The other Apostles speak with a wisdom which derives equally from Christ, but not coming to them out of the blue like a lightning strike, as it did with Paul, but rather from long hours spent in one to one conversation with their Lord and Teacher. The Gospels record how Jesus would speak to the crowds in parables but afterwards would carefully explain their meaning to his chosen Apostles. He carefully and thoroughly prepared them to be the Leaders of his Church and the Teachers of his people. They continue to instruct us in the art of being Christian through these wonderful letters, as well as through the general teaching of the Church which still depends upon them as upon twelve foundation stones.
12. THE GOSPEL
The Gospel, when it was proclaimed to these peoples, appeared as sheer liberation: liberation from the life-long tyranny of these gods; liberation from the fear of death which had nothing to promise but their continued company. Now God is revealed as the Source of all
goodness and love, promising eternal life and blessedness to all who would accept it. Would that we could recapture the excitement and sense of liberation of those who had lived under the oppression of those gods and who heard for the first time the message of the Gospel! How old Simeon’s words in the Temple came true: A Light to enlighten the Gentiles.
Conditioned by a mindset formed by over two thousand years of Christianity, we cannot begin to imagine the impact the first preaching of the Gospel had. Even up to the time when our English language was forming, the dominant definition of Christianity was Good News. And this is precisely where our word Gospel comes from. It means Good News, deriving from the Old English words good and spel; good meaning good and spel meaning news. Because of the likeness of the word good to god, the words fused into Godspel, and finally became Gospel. The original Greek word euangelion, used at the very beginning of Christianity, means exactly the same: good news, (from eu- “good” and angellein “to announce”: angelos-angel means messenger). This is the root of the Welsh word efengyl and the English word evangelise.
But, sadly, we still live to a certain extent under the tyranny of those gods. Despite two thousand years of Christianity we have still not quite shaken them off. Just as the pagans created all these divine beings in their own image and likeness, so have we a tendency to do the same; and, breaking the First Commandment, worship and serve them without really realising what we are doing. Too easily we put ourselves and our lives to the service of the created things of this world: wealth and power and influence, gods who promise but do not deliver. So we can never stop listening to the Gospel. If we listen with ears that hear, the Gospel will always be good, exciting,
challenging and liberating news for us too.
The Liturgy loads the Gospel with various honorary signs to emphasise its importance, to show its primacy within the Liturgy of the Word. It is the climax of the Liturgy of the Word. The Word that speaks to us in this part of the Mass is the Word that became
flesh and dwelt amongst us and, as the very Revelation of God, revealed the true God to us, banishing the darkness of paganism. The Gospel is the earthly story of that Word made Flesh.
The Gospel Book is therefore given great honour in the Liturgy. Solemnly it is carried aloft in the entrance procession, the Word of God leading us, a light to our path, as the Psalmist says. It is laid on the Altar where it remains until the Priest or Deacon retrieves it and, accompanied by acolytes, proceeds solemnly to the lectern. Recognising it to be the living Word of the Risen Lord, we all stand, singing our Alleluias as a joyful expression of thanks for what the Gospel brings to us and welcoming the One who speaks behind the human voice.
The priest says the Gospel–or even sings it. This is a venerable tradition within the Church, again expressing the joy of the Good News, and we should prepare ourselves (or brace ourselves) for the possibility of this tradition returning. The candles which led the procession flank the Priest as he proclaims it, themselves reminding us that here the Light of the World continues to enlighten his people, delivering us from darkness and bringing us into his own wonderful light. Before proclaiming the Gospel, the Priest or Deacon solemnly incenses it, reminding us that the words we are
about to hear are holy; a Reading from the Holy Gospel, he says. In fact, here is the Risen Christ Himself addressing his beloved People. And when the Priest has finished, he kisses the book, recognising this presence of Christ and showing due reverence and love for his word.
One of the new Eucharistic Prayers which we will soon become more familiar with speaks of the “challenge of the Gospel”. A challenge dares us to do something, invites us to investigate within ourselves whether we are capable of something more than we are, stimulates us to look beyond the comfortable horizons within which we live.
The Gospel is all this.
It is a dare. We could go on living the way we are – no problem. But are we getting the most out of being a human person, a creature made in the image and likeness of God, a creature elevated to divine sonship through the sacrament of Baptism? Christ opens before our eyes a new vision of what it really means to be human. But what he proposes is usually diametrically opposite to where our natural inclinations prompt us, diametrically opposite to what we and society take for granted as being the normal way of living, diametrically opposed to the gods we have created for ourselves. If you want to be rich, give your things away; if you want to be powerful, get down on your knees, wash the feet of the poor and be content with the lowest place of all; if you want to be truly clever, become a fool in the eyes of the world, so foolish as to believe that the one true God loved the world so much that he not only became one of us, but even stretched out his arms on a Cross and died for us. It is only when we believe Christ so absolutely as to rise to this challenge that we find the horizons of our life broadening, discover that we are made of sterner stuff than we first thought, and find the true freedom of the children of God.
13. THE HOMILY
I understand that the Church decided to refer to the sermon as a homily to differentiate it from the kind of pulpit-bashing oratory of old, all hell fire and brimstone, as some of us well remember. Getting away from that kind of oratory, the Church wanted its ministers to speak to their congregations as a father speaks to his family.
In which case, we may ask: Are children bored by their parents’ conversation? Teenagers will tell you how out of touch their parents are, but are they bored with them? Angry, maybe, but bored? Yet their almost unanimous response to the homily, no matter the efforts of the priest, is boredom. And how wonderful it would be if it were only the teenagers! I have known people leave the parish because the homily down the road was a few minutes shorter!
May be it is because we have heard the message before, countless times. When you listen to or view something over and over again, like a record or a video, it eventually gets stale, no matter how enthusiastic you were about it at the start. But between listening to a record repeatedly and listening to a homily, there is something fundamentally different, and it is because we fail to recognize this difference that we find the homily boring.
A clue to what this something is lies in the vestments the priest wears for Mass. We haven’t yet in this series mentioned the Mass vestments. They are not worn simply to add colour to the proceedings, though the Church does want priest and people to cooperate in making the Mass a beautiful happening, using all available talent, movement, music and art for the glory of God. The ancient cathedrals which were built precisely to house the Mass are eloquent witnesses to this.
There are many reasons why the priest wears the vestments and doesn’t celebrate Mass in his suit like a nonconformist minister. The bottom line is that the vestments put the priest in disguise. They hide the man and point to Christ. While the priest remains himself, using his own particular talents in the celebration of the Mass, the real focus is on Christ who is speaking and working through him.
When it comes to the homily, the priest preaches as best he may, but behind his human efforts is the power of Christ. It is He who is ultimately addressing his family. By failing to recognize this, we miss the “many splendored thing”; it’s not the Priest, it’s Christ. And Christ is never boring.
Our Lord frequently presents himself as the Sower, sowing seeds in all sorts of terrain, with some seeds taking root and others falling on barren ground. So important did He take this image of himself that he meticulously explains this parable to the apostles. The seed is his word; the soil is our hearts, the sower is Christ. In the homily Christ is sowing seed. The terrain before him is as mixed as anyone could imagine, men, women and children from every conceivable background and with every imaginable potential. The word He speaks may strike good soil in your heart and leave mine barren; or vice versa. Occasionally it is something that the priest throws out as an aside that Christ uses to touch the heart of a particular listener. I remember once meeting a young priest who told me that he became a priest because of something I had said in a sermon. I knew what he meant, though equally I knew that his vocation was not my doing; my words had triggered off something, but that something had been brewing for years in his inner self. But it took that sermon to trigger it. Only Christ can do that sort of thing.
So, approach the homily with expectation. Recognise that Christ is speaking to you. Expect to be somehow enlightened, challenged. Something in the midst of all that boredom will strike you. What exactly is Christ saying to you? What does he want of you? Sense the excitement of it: God is addressing you.
This frequently happens to me, even when it is I who am doing the preaching. And for every inspiration I recognize, I am sure there are umpteen others I don’t. We have to train our ears. “Blessed are your ears for they hear”, Our Lord says. And, frequently, “Listen, you who have ears to hear”.
We all have ears, but only those who have received the Spirit have ears to listen to the Voice of the Son of God. We all hear the sermon, but do we listen to it? Hearing and listening are different. If we only hear, we will be bored . If we listen, we give Christ and the Spirit the opportunity they are looking for. While the preacher is doing his job in the pulpit, the Holy Spirit is doing his job in our hearts. It is divine co-operation: Christ and the Spirit.
In every sermon, no matter what it is about, no matter how long or short it is, no matter the priest who is delivering it, there is seed that Christ wants to sow in your heart. Yes, your heart specifically. Christ doesn’t insult us by speaking to us as a crowd, he speaks to us individually, he knows each of us better even than we know ourselves. Remember Newman’s motto: Cor ad cor loquitur – heart speaks to heart. In the homily it happens.
14. THE CREED
to it being explained and expounded in the homily; now we tell God that we believe it. We stand and say the Creed.
The first thing to say about the Creed is that it is one of many.
From the very beginning, the Church has always felt the need to
put down on paper a succinct expression of what she believes and then to use it as a proclamation of her faith. This is particularly necessary for people being received into the Church.
The very early creeds were, therefore, all associated with the
rite of Baptism and formulated accordingly. They respond to Christ’s
final command to his Church: Go and make disciples of all nations,
baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the
Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything I have commanded you.” Consequently, all the creeds have a trinitarian formulation: they express in turn belief in the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, proceeding thence to declare faith in the Church, which issues from the Spirit and of which the catechumen is about to become a member. (Catech umen was the ancient name given to a person preparing for Baptism).
As the years progressed and the Church came to understand more deeply what exactly Christ’s revelation was, so the creeds became longer and more detailed. The Creed we usually use at Mass is called the Nicene Creed, which gets its name from a Council held at Nicaea (the present town of Iznik in Turkey). The council was held there in the year 325.
Up to this date, councils of bishops had met in various regions of the world to thrash out local problems, but the Council of Nicaea was the first council to represent the whole Catholic Church. It is therefore the first Ecumenical Council (the word ecumenical originally means universal). There have been nineteen since, the Second Vatican Council in the 1960s being the twentieth and the last one so far. Since Nicaea, all the councils are known by the name of the place where they were held.
Because Jesus gave the power of “binding and loosing” (“I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” (Matt 16:19) not only to Peter individually but, on another occasion (Matt 18:18) to the whole college of Apostles gathered around Peter, the Church believes that a council of bishops representing not just a region but the whole Catholic Church is also infallible, provided it conducts its business along with the successor of Peter, the contemporary Pope. The Council of Nicaea was the first council to fulfill these criteria, being of world-wide representation and meeting with the Pope’s approval and authority.
This summary of the Faith, or Creed, is therefore regarded by the Church as infallible; Christ stands by the promise he made to the apostles and ensures that what they proclaim to be true is true; in other words that the Council had got it right. This Creed is held by virtually the whole of Christendom, Catholic, Orthodox, Protestants and most other Christian sects (though, it must be said, that, apart from the Orthodox and ourselves, these other churches do not always understand it in the way the Council Fathers (the usual term to describes the Pope and Bishops of a Council) intended it to be understood (and, therefore, their recitation of it does not mean that their faith is necessarily orthodox and authentic).
The other Creed which may be used at Mass is the familiar Apostles’ Creed. This is the Creed most of us learnt as children, but which we get mixed up with now because of our weekly recitation of the Nicene Creed! Unlike the Nicene Creed, this one did not issue from an ecumenical council, but developed over the years in the very early Church at Rome. It too was associated principally with the rite of Baptism, as we have already explained, and, like the others, is based on the Lord’s great commission at the end of his earthly life.
15. THE CREED (2)
ONE GOD
Faith is the fundamental virtue on which all other virtues depend, as does our whole relationship with God. It is a gift, an invitation from God and it comes to us individually. The response to this invitation to believe is a leap into God’s hands. This leap puts us immediately into a certain fellowship with God and with our fellow Christians, but the act of faith itself is something you can only do on your own, in the depth of your own soul. Therefore I rather than We must be the subject of the verb. We profess our faith together in community; but we profess it first
and foremost as an individual human being responding to God.
According to the trinitarian formula the Creed follows, it first professes faith in the One God.
It took hundreds of years for God to get it into the heads of his chosen people that He was the one and only God. In common with all ancient peoples, the early Israelites believed in a plurality of gods. It would seem that a sense of God is born with us, an awareness that there is a power or powers over and above us, controlling us and the universe. We do not need a teacher to tell us, it is innate knowledge. What does not come naturally is whether this Being is one or many. Sensing the existence of God and not knowing anything about him or them, the ancient peoples created for themselves gods (idols), concocting their characteristics in the image and likeness of themselves and of the animals.
At first the Israelites thought that their God was bigger and stronger than the other gods (my daddy is bigger than your daddy syndrome); and saw Him as one of a pantheon of gods. But as God’s revelation of Himself progressed over the centuries, and as he demonstrated his power and wisdom before their very eyes, they came to realize that their God was indeed the one and only God, the idols of the pagans being mere nothings. When the 2000 years of revelation had run their course and the time for Christ to come had arrived, the Jews alone on the face of the earth were a monotheistic people, the only nation believing in one God. Civilizations on every side of them, far more powerful, intellectual and developed than themselves, still believed in a host of warring and amoral gods and goddesses who ruled the heavens and the earth.
With 2000 years of Christian history behind us, it seems pretty ovbious now; but it took God that same length of time to get into our heads. I believe in one God.
16. THE CREED (3) FATHER
As baptized Christians reciting the Creed, we have greater warrant for addressing God as Father. The Sacrament of Baptism has given us a new birth with his own life. We have become children of God in as strict a sense as we are children of our own parents, for we have received his very own life in the Person of the Holy Spirit. Addressing God as Father, which we do constantly throughout the Liturgy, is an indirect affirmation of our own special relationship with God, our greatest claim to fame.
This relationship with God, created by Baptism, forms the Church. Children of the same parents are family. The Church is, quite literally, the Family of God.
The Creed goes on to describe our Father as almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.
When we use the word “maker” to describe God, we need to take care what we mean. The Apostles’ Creed prefers the word
“Creator”. In our everyday conversation the words are interchangeable: we talk about the maker of a computer and the creator of a computer programme. But theology has a stricter use of the words.
Someone who makes something makes it out of materials available:
the carpenter makes his table out of wood, the computer boffin makes his product from electronic circuit boards which someone else has already made. But a Creator makes something out of nothing; and the only person capable of this is God. That’s the difference.
The Book of Genesis gives its account of Creation in story form. A story is a means of transmitting a truth: it wraps that truth up in the kind of colourful detail which everyone will remember, and in remembering the colour they will remember what was coloured. We use stories all the time; life could not go on without them. And not only children’s stories, but also the kind we all enjoy telling one another, watching in films and plays, reading in books. Even advertisers on the television these days manage to cram their message into a story of half a minute duration (and as these advertisers are out to make lots of money, this is a powerful proof of the efficiency of storytelling!)
The seven days in the first account of creation in Genesis 1 are only the building blocks, not the essence, of the story. Anyone who tries to see it otherwise makes a fool of himself. The truth of the story is that God created the Universe out of nothing; the seven days are the colourful wrappings. Whether He created it with the click of a divine finger or whether, which we know now to be the case, He created it over billions of years, wisely presiding over the slow process of evolution, is of no consequence to what the story is conveying.
And the object of his creation was heaven and earth, according to the Apostles’ Creed, or heaven and earth and all things visible and invisible, according to the Nicene Creed, the invisible world of angels and archangels and the spirit of man, just as really as the material universe which surrounds us. All things issue from his creative mind and his creative hand. And because he made all things out of nothing, he holds them in being. The carpenter can turn and leave his table unattended and it will be there when he returns; God cannot leave his creation unattended without it reverting to what it was – nothing. This is what we mean by Providence, that God holds every atom of creation in being every moment of every day.
The Creator God has left a trail behind Him which He challenges us
to follow. Every new discovery of science is a further pointer to, a further revelation of God, our creative Father.
17. CREED (4) CONSUBSTANTIAL
AND INCARNATE
The earlier Apostles’ Creed simply says: I believe…in Jesus Christ his only Son, our Lord. who was conceived of the Holy Spirit and born of the Virgin Mary. This leaves itself wide open to Arius’ interpretation of who Christ was.
Thus the Council of Nicaea expanded the Apostles’ Creed to read: I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the Only Begotten Son of God, born of the Father before all ages, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the father; through him all things were made.
Begotten, not made. The Son is born of the Father, but He is not a creature.
Consubstantial with the Father. We will be repeating these words every Sunday for the rest of our lives. We don’t want to be saying them parrot-fashion without understanding their meaning, so let us take a moment now to try to figure out why this word consubstantial is used and what exactly it means.
Consubstantial was a key word in the Council (homoousion in the Greek) and much time and energy was spent arriving at it. In fact, the Council coined it, as there was no existing word in Greek or Latin which expressed exactly what they wanted to say. The text of the Creed from which we are now moving away translated it correctly as of one being with the Father. But it is too important a word, both historically and theologically, for it not to appear in its own right.
Con, the first syllable of the word, simply means, in this context, of the same.
Substance in Greek philosophy had a very specialized meaning and only vaguely corresponds to what we understand by the same word today. We might say that the substance of a man is flesh and bone; the Greek philosophers (whose terminology the Council used) would say it is “manness”: what a man is essentially. So when they say that the Son is con-substantial with the Father they are saying that what God is so the Son is; he is of the same being. Therefore He is God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God.
If our heretical Arius had had his way, he would have robbed Christianity of its very soul, and the Faith would never have survived. He would have robbed the Crucifixion and the Redemption of all its power and meaning. That Christ is really and truly God, and not just the most gifted, charismatic and closest-to-God human being that ever lived, is the essence of Christianity, the truth that makes our Faith the most compassionate religion on the face of the earth, and utterly unique. There are modern Ariuses today in abundance who try to water down the Faith to make it more acceptable to the modern sceptic mind. But Christianity is as it is, or it is nothing at all.
The most compassionate religion on the face of the earth because it alone proclaims that God (Christ is consubstantial with the Father) was incarnate of the Virgin Mary and became man. God entered our human condition and experienced it for Himself. He experienced for Himself what human life can mean: the distress of betrayal, the agony of psychological terror, the pang of pain, and even the trauma of human death. This gives the Crucifixion infinite power and infinite value: God died for me.
We can only make sense of this by returning to that central tenet of revelation expressed by St John: God is Love. We know well the lengths human love will go to when challenged; only infinite Love could go this far– God taking on Himself the sins of the world and dying on a Cross for the sake of his friends.
Consubstantial with the Father, Jesus is really and truly God in our human flesh: incarnate for us.
18. THE CREED (5).
THE HOLY SPIRIT
The third part of the Creed deals with the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity, the Holy Spirit. It is common usage in theologi al language to speak of the First, Second and Third Persons of the Blessed Trinity, but we need to keep carefully in mind that this sequen ce does in no way imply that the Second and Third Persons are in any way inferiorto the First.
The Creed describes the Holy Spirit as the Lord, the Giver of life, who proceeds from the father and the Son, who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified, who has spoken through the prophets.
When God revealed his name Yahweh to Moses at the Burning Bush, the Jews, too respectful even to pronounce that sacred name, substituted for it the word Lord. When you see the word LORD printed in capitals in your Bible, you know that behind that word, in the original text, is the Divine Name. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, therefore, the word Lord is equivalent to God.
The earliest Christians applied the title Lord to Jesus, and in doing so deliberately affirmed his divinity. So, St Paul could declare that no-one can call Jesus Lord unless he is under the influence of the Holy Spirit. “Jesus is the Lord” was the earliest Christian Creed. ‘If you confess with your mouth and believe with your heart that “Jesus is Lord”…you will be saved.’ (Rom 10:9)
To give the Holy Spirit the title Lord is, therefore, to declare Him divine and equal in every respect to the Father and the Son. To hammer home the point, the Creed adds: who with the Father and the Son is adored and glorified.
The Spirit the Giver of Life. The Creed goes on to call the Spirit the Giver of Life. By him the Incarnate Christ was conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary. Through Him the Church was born when the Risen Christ sent the Spirit upon the Apostles and Our Lady on that first Pentecost. Like the sap in the Vine of which Our Lord speaks, like the soul of the Body of which St Paul speaks, the Spirit is the life of the Church. He is all this because He is Himself the very life of God.
He enlivens us through the Sacraments. All the Sacraments operate through the Power of the Spirit and exist to give us life and make us holy. He is the Power that came down upon Jesus at his Baptism and worked through him in parable and miracle throughout his life. The same Spirit changes the bread and wine of the Eucharist and forgives sin in the Sacrament of Reconciliation; the same Spirit is Consecration in Priesthood, and Divine Love in the binding of the marriage bond. The Holy Spirit is the Power that preaches the Gospel to this very day, who still “speaks through the prophets”. He is the Power of Christ constantly at work in the Church and the world.
The Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son. The Creed further declares of the Holy Spirit that he proceeds from the Father and the Son. This is perhaps the most famous “and ” in history, and perhaps the most tragic! Partly because of this and, the great eastern Orthodox Churches are separate from Rome to this day.
Filioque, is the key word in the story of this, the Church’s greatest tragedy, the split between East and West. Two Latin words rolled into one. Filio is the ablative case of Filius, meaning Son, and the ablative case makes it mean from the Son. The que is a Latin word meaning and which, instead of coming before the word it applies to, tags onto it. So Filioque means and from the Son.
What it is all about is too complex by far to handle in this sort of series, but, as intelligent Catholics, we ought to know something about this “Filioque” affair, what it means and why it is part of the baggage which still separates the Orthodox Churches from Rome.
It occurred when the early Church was trying to understand and express, as far as it is humanly possible to understand and express, the inner life of the Blessed Trinity.
Here are the bones of the dispute. If you can’t make head or tail of it, be assured that it is my inability to explain rather than your inability to understand!
Before the declaration of the Nicene Creed in 325AD, several of the Fathers of the Church had frequently expressed their belief in the fact that within the Life of the Blessed Trinity, the Holy Spirit proceeds (that’s the technical word) from the Father and the Son. But when the Council of Nicaea proclaimed its Creed, it simply said that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father. (It didn’t say that the Holy Spirit doesn’t proceed from the Son, but simply that He does proceed from the Father).
As it had been the accepted belief in the Church that the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son, Pope Leo I, in 346, declared that this understanding of the inner life of the Blessed Trinity was in accordance with the ancient faith of the Church, and subsequently the word filioque was added to the Creed. The Eastern half of
the Catholic Church was not pleased.
East and West. It is often said that the Church has two great lungs: the east and the west. The Eastern Church, with its natural intense interest in spirituality (witness people still travelling east to find their gurus), has a passionate interest in the role of the Spirit – within God, within the Church and within the soul of each of us. The Western part of the Church, on the other hand, with its tradition and mindset formed (as they still are) by the ancient Roman Empire, has a more legalistic frame of mind. The two parts of the Church are like twin sisters brought up in different cultures, each a blood sister to the other, but each with a different way of thinking.
This contributed greatly to the Two Sisters falling out and not being able to sing from the same hymn sheet. Though, to carry the analogy further, if there were a hundred hymns on that sheet, there would be perhaps only two which they cannot now sing in harmony–filioque and the position of the Pope. As for the other ninety-eight, they are in complete accord.
Because of their different upbringing, the two Sisters do things differently – but what they do is the same! In terms of Liturgy and Church management, the Orthodox Churches operate in a very different way from us. Their liturgy of the Mass, for example, is very difficult for us to follow, but in essence their Mass is exactly the same as ours. What the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Churches believe (excepting the filioque clause and the role of the Pope) is the same. The Catholic Church recognizes the Holy Orders of the Bishops, Priests and Deacons of the Orthodox Churches, acknowledging that, unlike the Churches of the Reformation, they have not broken the line of Apostolic Succession.
If the Holy Orders are valid, the Sacraments are valid too. There is,
therefore, inter-communion between us and them, allowing us to receive Holy Communion at their Mass and they at ours. The Egyptian Coptic Orthodox Church at the end of St Mary’s Road has as valid a Priest and as valid a Mass as we do here at Our Lady’s.
The Pope. As the Pope was responsible (and rightly) for defining what the ancient Catholic Faith had always believed and for putting the Filioque clause into the Creed, it was his authority which the Eastern Church rejected – not immediately but ultimately, in the great and tragic split between East and West, which eventually happened in the eleventh century.
The Orthodox position today is to regard the Pope of Rome as a primus inter pares, a first among equals, recognizing the primacy of the Roman See, but not acknowledging the papal charismas which the Catholic Church has accepted sincethe time of Peter.
It was the one thing Pope John Paul II failed to achieve. Above all, he longed for reconciliation between the two Great Churches, and indeed it was the deepest desire of his heart. Our present Holy Father, Pope Benedict, likewise strives for the same end and we must share that concern. Let us pray that the Holy Spirit, over whom the Two Twin Sisters initially fell out, may be the force that will ultimately bring them together again.
19.CREED (6)
CHURCH IS ONE
The Church we should see as our greatest asset, greater even than wife or husband, children or grandchildren; and infinitely more valuable than any possession we may hold. We should love the Church more than all these, for Christ has commanded us to; and because what comes to us through our membership of the Church cannot be compared with anything else. The Church gives us God as our Father, Brother, Spirit; fills us with the divine presence and puts us into a communion with God, closer even than the blood relationships we have with our very own family. This is hard to believe, harder still to live by, but it is Gospel truth.
The Creed, having spelt out the Church’s faith in the Holy Spirit, goes on to profess what the Church believes about herself. This is summed up in four adjectives: one, holy, catholic and apostolic.
She is ONE. The Church is one in many ways, but first and foremost she is one in herself.
(Notice the ancient habit of speaking of the Church in female terms. You will see that the new translations reintroduce this tradition. The Church, like a mother, brings us to birth at the Baptismal font [often referred to as the womb of the Church], she educates us, feeds us, cares for us and forgives, just as any mother would her child. The New Testament also sees the Church as the Bride of Christ).
She is one in herself, for it is evident that Christ did not found many churches but one; he did not found the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church and the Anglican Church and the Baptist Church and the rest of them; he founded one Church, which he built on Peter and which he promised would endure for ever with his abiding help.
The Catholic Church believes that the Church Christ founded subsists (to use Vatican II’s word from the Constitution on the Church) in the Catholic Church alone. In other words, all that Christ intended his Church to be and to have are preserved only in the Catholic Church.
The other churches over the centuries have lost some of the essential elements Christ intended his Church to have. We saw in the last section how the Orthodox Churches which have retained so much of the deposit of faith left by Christ and kept utterly faithful to it (thus deserving the name of Orthodox), have lost touch in the course of history with that central authority and rock of stability and unity which Christ gave to his Church in the person of Peter and his successors. The Churches of the Reformation have lost much more of that original core and at times, lacking the infallible guidance of Peter, have actually altered the content of the Faith. The bottom line is that the Catholic Church alone retains the fullness of the faith Christ committed to the Apostles. This is not so much a matter of theology but a plain fact of history.
On the positive side, we must always bear in mind that the elements these Churches have retained are good and wholesome, elements like the Sacred Scriptures and the Sacrament of Baptism, elements that belong to the original Church Christ founded. These elements put these Christians into a partial communion with the Catholic Church and therefore with each of us, her members. The Christians who attend these Churches and believe in their doctrines are often better Christians by far than many a Catholic. We must always show them the greatest reverence and respect. True ecumenism is not to pretend that one church is as good as another, but to face the facts of history in an attitude of Christian love.
To sum up, therefore: Christ founded one Church, and that Church today is found in its fullness only in the Roman Catholic Church.
The Catholic Church is one in other respects too. It is her commission to bring the world into unity, making nations and individuals at one with God and at one with one another. She preaches one faith the world over; celebrates everywhere the same Sacraments, and enjoys unity under the leadership of the Bishop of Rome.
20. CREED (7)
HOLY AND CATHOLIC
She is HOLY. As Christ is both human and divine, so the Church, which is his Body, is also human and divine. Every scandal in the Church bears witness to her human dimension. But she is also divine; she is Christ amongst us. She has all the qualities of Christ. She speaks a holy Word; she administers Sacraments which are the veiled working of Christ in the world, giving divine life, nurturing that divine life, forgiving sin and uniting us to God. All these activities are directed to one aim: holiness. The Church is essentially holy and has, according to Vatican II, a vocation to make everyone holy.
She is CATHOLIC. We so easily see this word “Catholic” as an adjective whose main purpose is to differentiate us from the “Protestants” or other Christians. But it is not so. The word has a history and a meaning of its own; it expresses an essential quality of the Church, just as the word Holy does.
To understand it, we have to take ourselves back into pre-Christian times, back into the world of the Jews as they awaited their promised Messiah, and to remind ourselves that they, among all the peoples of the earth, were the Chosen People. They were chosen by God to bring into the world his Only Begotten Son, to be a light to the nations, to take God’s revealed salvation to every creature under heaven.
Naturally they were very conscious of their calling and of the unique position they held among the nations. But it went sour; it went to their head. Instead of seeing themselves chosen for God’s purposes, they saw themselves chosen for their own sake. They were chosen by God; everyone else simply wasn’t. Thus, in their mind, the world fell into two great segments, us and them: the Jews and the Gentiles (the word Gentiles simply means the (other) peoples).
Now this attitude had been bred into the Jews over centuries. It was simply something they took completely for granted. And that was all very well until gentile peoples sought admittance into the Church; for, remember, at first every single member of the Church was Jewish. Was it conceivable that a gentile could receive the blessings of God that came through Christ? Easy for us to say Yes; but extremely difficult for them.
Paul said Yes, and eventually the other Apostles, gathered in Council, gave their unanimous agreement. The way was now open for Christianity to break the boundary lines of Israel and reach out to the Gentiles. The time had come for God’s purposes to be fulfilled by the Jewish Christians, to take God’s salvation to the ends of the earth.
Then something happened which had never been seen before on the face of this planet. As Christianity spread into the pagan world and men and women embraced it, a family was formed which was different from anything else, ever. Membership of this family did not depend on blood relationships. Nor was it restricted to any one particular nation, language or culture. The slave could belong to it as easily as the master; the rich and powerful as well as the destitute poor; no one was superior, no one inferior. The exiled stranger found a home and the native born discovered a new meaning of homeland. No one was a stranger in this family which was bonded together by the love of Christ. That Family was the Church. It spread like wild fire across the ancient world and was recognized as something completely new. It was fresh and clean, in glaring contrast to the debauched religions of the pagans; it was filled with people so enthusiastic for it that they would willingly die for it, which they did during the Roman persecutions in their hundreds of thousands.
Spontaneously this new phenomenon, this Church, began to be called Catholic, for it knew no boundaries. The word comes from the Greek, which was the dominant language at the time, and it simply meant universal, all-embracing. It described exactly how the Church of Christ had to be. The Church of God in the world could not be a national church: it had to be international, for God is Father of us all, and Jesus Christ our common Saviour. It could not stay, as the Apostles first imagined, confined within the boundaries of Israel.
It could not, for the same reason, be a white church or a black church, nor a church for the rich nor a church for the poor. People have tried at times to make the Church a national church or to restrict its membership to one or other class or colour of people; but those churches cannot survive. The Church has to be Catholic; otherwise it contradicts its very own charter. Catholic describes the very heart of the Church .
The local Catholic Church is a microcosm of the worldwide Church; it encapsulates in miniature all the qualities of the universal Church: same Peter, same faith, same sacraments. So many Catholics from so many different cultures, now fully fledged members of our local parishes, highlight beautifully this wonderful aspect of the Catholic Church.
21 CREED (9)
THE RESURRECTION OF THE BODY AND LIFE EVERLASTING
The resurrection of the body. Do you really mean that my body will rise from the dead? How old will I be? (Spiritualists say 30!) With my arthritis as well? And if everybody is going to rise again, what an overcrowded and unattractive place Heave will be!
That Jesus spoke, and very frequently, about the resurrection of the human body is as plain throughout the Gospels as the nose on your face. That Christ will come again with his Angels at the end of time, when the dead will rise from their tombs to meet him, is his constant teaching.
Few people actually believe this article of faith (until it is explained to them) because their thinking doesn’t go far enough, it usually stops short at the point of a person’s death, when the soul leaves the body and goes before its Maker. Thus far they believe. But this is not far enough, not the end of the story, nor can it be.
To understand why, a dash of philosophy is required! First of all, what exactly are we talking about? What exactly is a human being? Am I just the boss animal in the animal kingdom, or am I essentially something more? I may have a body like the animals which has evolved just as theirs have, but there is more to me than my body. If that were not so, why are the apes not writing the kind of poetry Shakespeare wrote, or the kind of music Beethoven composed, or the kind of fine art Michelangelo achieved; why are the animals not in the space race or performing brain surgery in our hospitals? I am radically different from the ape because I am a spiritual being with a spiritual reasoning soul.
I’m not simply an animal because I have a spirit and I’m not an angel because I have a body. I am a rational animal, a human being. On the scale of things, I am a creature midway between the animal kingdom and the choirs of angels.
If you take my spirit away from me, what’s left is a corpse (which is not a human being); if you take my body away from me, what’s left is a spirit (which is not a human being) Neither body nor spirit individually is ME. For me to be me, I must be both, body and soul; body and spirit bonded together to make one unique creature. And if I am going to live with God for ever, I want it to be ME up there, not an animal nor an angel, but ME, the human being that I am! So, by reason alone we can conclude that my body must rise again if I (the human being that I am) am to keep my identity.
Apart from it not being ME up there without my body, I would be doing a real injustice it if I were to leave my body behind forever. Chwarau teg! Fair play! It is my body that gets me to Heaven as well as my soul! It is on my head that the waters of Baptism flow; on my brow that Christ’s sign is marked with holy chrism; it is my mouth that eats of the Bread of Life and drinks from the Chalice of Salvation. It is my ears that hear the Word of God and my hands and feet that carry out the great commandment of loving my neighbor as myself. In other words, all God’s graces come to me through my body. So, in all fairness to it, my body should to rise from the dead.
And now to that other problem of an overcrowded Heaven. Here too we have to keep our philosophical train of thought chugging along.
We get a very clear understanding of how things will be with us in heaven from the characteristics of Christ’s own risen Body which we see in the Gospel stories. Christ, of course, rose bodily from the dead on Easter Sunday, not principally to prove anything, but so that we too could rise bodily from the dead on that final Easter Sunday “when the trumpet shall sound”. Our resurrection from the dead is the ultimate purpose of all Christ’s redeeming work.
There are lots of stories in the Gospels of the disciples seeing the Risen Christ, but notice, often they didn’t at first recognize him. Take Mary Magdalene; she thought initially he was a gardener! His Body had changed. It had changed; but it was still his Body. To prove this to the astonished disciples, he showed them the marks of the nails in his hands and feet, the wound from the spear in his side. O yes, it was his Body all right, not a freshly created one, or a make-believe one (for he eat bread and fish before their eyes). It was his body but it was changed; it had different qualities from what it had before: it could be in several places at once (while he was appearing to the apostles in the Upper Room he was also talking to the disciples on the road of Emmaus); He could enter rooms which were locked and barred.
So, Jesus’ risen Body was different from the Body he had before the Resurrection. Different, but the same. Risen, he is free of the former restraints of the body, the restraints caused by time and place. Now He is able and free to be in many places at once; free and able to walk through walls. How come? Because he has stepped out of time and place, just as we will.
In Heaven there is no time and no place. I tell you this, but I cannot imagine it any more than you can, bfor the simple reason that from the moment we were conceived in the womb we have always been in time and place. The pumping of our mother’s blood was like a time piece to us; the womb a cosy place to be. We cannot imagine anything which is not in time and place for we have never experienced it. We can understand, but we cannot imagine.
There is no time in Heaven, and Heaven is not a place as we understand the word. At death we step out of time, as Jesus did. We enter eternity: the eternal NOW of God. There is no before and no after. For those who have stepped out of this world of time, there is no interval between death and the coming of Christ on the clouds of heaven, for what is an interval but a period of time?
Because Heaven is not a place as we understand it, our bodies will have to be changed (as Christ’s was). If Heaven is not a place and if our resurrected bodies, like Christ’s, have stepped out of space as well as out of time, they will no longer take up space. Therefore, there can be no overcrowding in Heaven. Overcrowding is a place problem.
Problem solved, but not satisfactorily so! The simple truth is that it is beyond our understanding, so there’s no point in getting worked up about it. The Pharisees put a trick question to Jesus about whose wife in heaven a woman would be who had been married to seven men. He simply said, in effect, “You’re being stupid; it’s not like that”. So, I believe in the resurrection of the body, because Christ told me so and because it makes sense logically and philosophically. But for the life of me, I cannot imagine it. And, the consolation is that St Peter will not be able to say to any one of us: You are a waste of space!