Transcript

Aristotle said that the best activities are the most useless.

This is because such things are not subordinated to a further end, but rather done entirely for their own sake.

Thus, watching a baseball game is more important than getting a haircut, and cultivating a friendship is greater than making money.

The game and the friendship are goods that are excellent in themselves, while the haircut and the money-making are in service of something beyond them.

Now the liturgy is the most useless thing of all, which means it's the most important.

The liturgy is what we do utterly for its own sake, simply because it's good and beautiful.

This is why the great liturgical theologian Romano Guardini compared the liturgy to a kind of play.

But this play is very serious business because, by this play, we become rightly ordered.

The theologian Dietrich von Hildebrand, in his book Liturgy and Personality, said that in the very act of giving right praise to God, we achieve an inner harmony.

The Mass, the liturgy, is a kind of Noah's Ark.

It's a place where a microcosm of God's good order is preserved in the midst of a sinful world.

But more than all this, the Mass is our participation in and anticipation of the great heavenly liturgy, the right praise given to God by the saints and the angels.

For these reasons and others besides, Vatican II referred to the liturgy as the source and the summit of the Christian life.

In the course of this episode, I'll walk through the Mass, presenting the various aspects of this great heavenly and earthly play.

Thank you.

In a certain sense, the Mass commences with the manner in which the people who participate in it gather.

They come from all walks of life, from different social and educational backgrounds, from a variety of economic strata, with differing levels of moral excellence, and from both genders.

They all form the community gathered around the altar of Christ.

The fallen world is marked by division, separation, stratification, and we sinners are intensely interested in questions of priority and exclusivity.

Who's in and who's out?

Who is up and who is down?

But as Paul told us, in Christ there is no Jew or Greek, no slave or free, no man or woman; all are members of the mystical body.

When Dorothy Day was considering her conversion to Catholicism, she would attend Sunday Mass.

She was deeply impressed by the fact that both the rich and the poor, both the educated and the uneducated, both the housekeeper and the grande dame attended kneeling side by side.

And the Catholic historian Christopher Dawson, upon telling his mother that he was converting to the Catholic faith from his native Anglicanism, was met with this response: It's not so much the doctrines that concern me; it's now that you'll be worshipping.

Both Dorothy Day and Mrs. Dawson intuited the properly subversive nature of the way Catholics gather for prayer.

Once gathered, we sing.

Singing at the Mass should not be construed as merely decorative or incidental, for the harmonizing of the many voices as one is an embodied expression of how we, as children of God, ought to live.

The ritual of the liturgy proper begins with the sign of the Cross and the priest's intonation of the words In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.

By this gesture and this simple phrase, we announce that we belong to the Triune God.

Modern secularism is predicated upon the assumption that we essentially belong to no one; that we are self-determining and self-directed pursuers of happiness according to our own lives.

But Paul told Christians long ago, We do not live to ourselves, we do not die to ourselves.

If we live, we live to the Lord; and if we die, we die to the Lord.

So then, whether we live or whether we die, we are the Lord's. In contradistinction to modernity, biblical people say your life is not about you, and the liturgy signals this at the very beginning with the sign of the Cross.

But there is more.

To speak of the Cross is to reference the great act by which the Father sent the Son into God-forsakenness in order to gather us, through the Holy Spirit, into the divine life.

Because the Son went all the way down, He was able, in principle, to bring even the most recalcitrant sinner back into fellowship with God.

Thus, when we invoke the Cross at the beginning of the liturgy, we signify that we are praying in God and not merely to God.

Just after the sign of the Cross, the priest greets the people, not in his own name, but in Christ: The Lord be with you.

Garbed in vestments that cover his ordinary clothes and hence symbolically his ordinary identity, the priest of the liturgy is operating in the person of Christ and not in his own person.

Therefore, his gestures, words, and movements are expressive not of his own perspectives and convictions, but of Christ.

This is why the people respond, And with your spirit, for they are addressing not the individual man, but the Jesus in whose person the priest is operating.

Immediately after the greeting, the priest invites everyone in attendance to call to mind his or her sins.

This simple move is of extraordinary importance.

G.K. Chesterton said, There are saints in my religion, but that just means men who know that they are sinners.

For the great English apologist, the relevant distinction is not between sinners and non-sinners, but between those sinners who know it and those who don't. The great heroes of our faith, the saints, are those who have ordered their lives toward God, and therefore they are most keenly aware of how far they fall short of the ideal.

St. John of the Cross compared the soul to a pane of glass.

As long as that pane of glass is pointed away from the light, well, its imperfections don't appear.

But now turn it toward the light, and now all the smudges and marks become visible.

This helps to explain the high paradox that it's precisely the saints who often say, I'm the worst of sinners.

They have directed their lives toward the light of God; therefore, they are more—not less—aware of their sin.

As the liturgy commences and we are bathed in the light of the Trinitarian God, we mimic the saints in admitting that we are sinners.

In doing so, we offer a corrective to a pervasive cultural tendency toward exculpation.

I'm okay, and you're okay, we tell ourselves.

But to subscribe to such a naive sentiment is ipso facto to prove that one is facing away from the clarifying light of God.

Now, the calling to mind of sins is but a preparation for the Kyrie prayer—the cry of Lord, have mercy.

Christ, have mercy.

Lord, have mercy.

There’s no room for self-aggrandizing and self-deception.

We know that we are incapable of saving ourselves, that we are beggars before the Lord.

Compelled by the liturgy into this correct and finally liberating attitude, we hear the words of the priest: God has no interest whatsoever in making us grovel before Him in self-reproach; He wants to forgive.

But it is imperative that we realize we have something in us that needs forgiving.

After the Kyrie, there comes the Gloria, which is one of the most magnificent prayers in our liturgical tradition.

One could read out of the Gloria practically the whole of Catholic theology, but I will focus only on the first line: Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to people of goodwill.

This is a kind of formula for a happy life.

When we give God the highest glory, when He is clearly the supreme value for us, then our lives become harmoniously ordered around that central love.

Peace, as it were, breaks out among us when God—and not pleasure, money, or power—is given glory in the highest.

Our term worship comes from an older English word worthship, designating what we hold dear.

The liturgy is a place where we act out our worship, where we demonstrate by word and gesture what is of greatest worth to us, and this is why it is essential to peace.

It would be helpful in this context, once again, to invoke Aristotle.

The great philosopher commented that a friendship will endure only in the measure that the two friends fall in love, not so much with each other, but together with a transcendent third.

In saying or singing the Gloria, the gathered community is expressing their shared love of God's glory, and if Aristotle is right, this will deepen their friendship with one another.

“On earth, peace to people of goodwill.”

The next major move in the liturgy is the proclamation of the Word of God, usually involving a reading from the Old Testament, a selection from one of the twelve epistles, and then a selection from one of the Gospels.

Now, why do we read these texts at the liturgy?

We do so in order to be drawn into the peculiar texture of the biblical world.

J.R.R. Tolkien's masterpiece, The Lord of the Rings, commences with a lengthy description of Bilbo Baggins' birthday party.

Now, those who have been told that The Lord of the Rings is a rollicking adventure story might be forgiven for wondering when the action begins.

Tolkien explained he had to draw his reader into the peculiar world that he was creating—one involving wizards, elves, and orcs; one with its own distinctive topography, weather, customs, and language.

In a similar way, we have to be drawn into the even stranger world of the Bible.

After the first two readings, the priest rises to proclaim the Gospel and preach.

I mentioned earlier that the priest at the liturgy is acting in the person of Christ and not in his own person.

This opening up of a deeper identity becomes especially clear, at least in principle, during the homily.

For the preacher is not meant to share his private convictions about politics or culture or even religion.

He's supposed to speak the mind of Christ.

To be sure, he ought to use all of the resources of the Church's theology, spirituality, and biblical interpretation, and he ought certainly to apply the Scriptures to the present cultural situation.

But he's not speaking in his own voice or out of his own private convictions.

The preacher, in surrendering to the divine voice, actually finds his own most authentic voice, and in conforming himself to the attitude of Christ, he discovers his own most authentic attitude.

When the homily is complete, the people stand for the recitation of the Creed.

They can use the ancient and simple formula called the Apostles' Creed, but customarily they pray the great statement of faith which emerged from the Council of Nicaea in 325. In reciting these lyrical lines from the Creed—God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten, not made, consubstantial with the Father—the Church rehearses its victory in a very ancient struggle: the struggle against Arius.

Arius was a 4th-century priest of the Church of Alexandria who had denied the full divinity of Jesus.

Consubstantial, one in being, those are English renderings of the Greek word homoousios, a technical term used at Nicaea to express the fact that Jesus shares fully in the divinity of the Father.

What they sensed at Nicaea was that this was a standing or falling point for Christianity.

If the divinity of Jesus is denied, Christianity devolves in short order into one more mythology or moral system.

What I find so moving is that 1,700 years later, Sunday after Sunday, the Church rises to declare once again the victory over Arius.

There is something properly subversive about the opening declaration of the Creed: I believe in one God, since it precludes any other pretender to ultimacy, be it country, culture, political party, or charismatic leader.

Hence, those who state their faith in the one God are standing resolutely athwart all forms of idolatry, both ancient and contemporary.

When the recitation of the Creed is over, the community offers prayers for the living and the dead.

These prayers of the faithful, to give them their liturgical name, are expressive of the inescapable interdependence of the members of Christ's mystical body.

We pray for one another precisely because we are implicated in one another, connected by the deepest bonds in Christ.

One member of the body cannot coherently say to another, Your concern is not mine, for we are not a club, but an organism.

As we act out our faith in reciting the Creed, so we act out our mystical identity.

As we pray for one another with the prayers of the faithful, the first part of the Mass, called the Liturgy of the Word, comes to an end and the second part, the Liturgy of the Eucharist, commences.

It might be helpful at this juncture to think of the Mass as a kind of encounter.

In most cultures, very much including our own, a formal encounter with another person usually involves two basic moves: first, conversation; secondly, a meal.

Think of a banquet, a party, or a reception.

We receive our guests, and we spend a substantial amount of time talking to them, and then we sit down to eat.

But what is the Mass but an encounter with Christ?

It’s a formal and ritualized staying with the Lord, and so we follow the two basic moves in the Liturgy of the Word.

We listen as He speaks to us in the Scriptures.

Then in our songs and responses, we speak back to Him; we converse.

And then in the Liturgy of the Eucharist, we sit down to eat at a meal that He Himself prepares for us.

A fundamental biblical principle is that in a world gone wrong, there is no communion without sacrifice.

This is true because sin has twisted us out of shape, and therefore intimacy with God will involve a twisting back into shape—a painful realignment, a sacrifice.

In an animal sacrifice, a person took one small aspect of God's creation and returned it to its source in order to signal his gratitude for the gift of his own existence and indeed the existence of the world.

Mind you, God has no need of these sacrifices; God has no need of anything at all.

The point is that we need sacrifice in order to reorder us and thereby restore communion with God.

What is given back to God, sacrificed to Him, breaks, so to speak, against the rock of the divine self-sufficiency and returns for the benefit of the one who has made the offering.

Sacrifice produces communion.

This is the distinctive logic that undergirds the Liturgy of the Eucharist.

At the commencement of the second part of the Mass, small offerings of bread, wine, and water are brought forward so that the priest can offer them to God.

To say bread and wine is to imply wheat and vine, and to say wheat and vine is to imply earth, soil, water, wind, and sunshine.

To say earth, soil, water, and wind is to imply the solar system and indeed the cosmos itself.

The tiny gifts are therefore symbolically representative of the entirety of creation.

Taking these gifts in hand, the priest speaks the Barakah prayer: Blessed are You, Lord God of all creation, for through Your goodness we have received the bread and wine we offer You.

The bread and wine offered to the God who doesn't need them will return to the offerers immeasurably elevated as the Body and Blood of Jesus.

After the Barakah, the priest moves into the climactic prayer of the Mass: the Eucharistic Prayer, in the course of which Christ becomes really, truly, and substantially present.

Just before the beginning of the prayer proper, he invokes the song of the heavenly community: And so, with the angels and all the saints, we declare Your glory, as with one voice we acclaim.

It's most important to see that this is not simply a bit of pious decoration.

I mentioned that the Mass on earth links us to the eternal liturgy of heaven, the praise of the angels and saints.

Therefore, as the gathered people sing, Holy, Holy, Holy Lord God of hosts, heaven and earth are full of Your glory; Hosanna in the highest, they are like the angels and saints giving glory to God in the highest and hence actually realizing the unity that God desires for them.

The prayer itself commences with a word of gratitude to the Trinitarian God for the sheer grace of His creation and redemption: You are indeed holy, O Lord, and all you have created rightly gives you praise; for through your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ, by the power and working of the Holy Spirit, you give life to all things and make them holy.

He then beckons the Father to send down the Holy Spirit for the sanctification and transformation of the bread and wine.

Therefore, O Lord, we humbly implore you: by the same Spirit graciously make holy these gifts we have brought to you for consecration, that they may become the Body and Blood of your Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.

He then continues with what is termed the Institution Narrative, which is to say an abbreviated form of the Gospel account of what Jesus said and did at the Last Supper.

He recalls how Jesus took bread and gave thanks, and then he moves from third-person description to direct quotation, speaking the very words of Jesus: Take this, all of you, and eat of it, for this is my Body which will be given up for you.

The priest does just the same in regard to the cup of wine, first recounting how Jesus gave thanks and passed the chalice to his disciples, and then moving into first-person quotation: This is the chalice of my Blood, the Blood of a new and eternal covenant, which will be poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.

The faith of the Church is that, by the power of these words, the bread and wine are transformed into the Body and Blood of Christ.

Jesus becomes really, truly, and substantially present to His people under the appearance of the Eucharistic elements.

I'm standing in the ruins of a 4th-century synagogue.

It was built on the site of the synagogue in Capernaum where Jesus Himself taught.

After the multiplication of the loaves and fishes, after walking across the sea, He came here.

The people followed Him, and He said, Don't seek for bread that perishes, but seek for the food that lasts unto eternal life.

And then He said, I myself am the living bread come down from heaven; my flesh is food for the life of the world.

Well, it would be hard to imagine anything that was more theologically problematic—and if I can be blunt, more disgusting—for a first-century Jew than those words.

Throughout the Old Testament, there are prohibitions against the eating of an animal's flesh with blood.

Here’s a human being saying, I want you to eat my body and drink my blood.

When they protest, as they did, Jesus had every opportunity to render His language more spiritual, more metaphorical—to say, Well, what I mean is something very symbolic.

He didn’t. He said, Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood, you have no life in you.

And the words in Greek are interesting; He used the word trogein, not phagein.

Phagēn is the usual word for human beings eating; trogēn was the way an animal would eat, like nongen.

Unless you gnaw on the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His blood.

In other words, when they object to the physical realism of it, He intensifies it.

It says that many of His disciples went away; that teaching was too much to bear.

He turned to His own inner circle, the Twelve, and He asks, Are you going to leave me too?

It’s as though this teaching of what we in the Catholic Church call the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist is a standing or falling point.

It has been from that moment, from this sermon here to today, a dividing point.

It’s Peter who speaks up: Lord, to whom shall we go?

You have the words of everlasting life.

Peter confesses the truth of the Real Presence, and the Church has followed him ever since.

In 1263, a priest named Peter of Prague was making his way to Rome on pilgrimage.

He stopped in a little Italian town of Bolsena to celebrate Mass.

Now, Peter of Prague had been entertaining doubts about the Church's doctrine of the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist.

Just after the words of consecration, blood began to run from the host onto his hands and down onto the corporal on the altar.

So confused was he that he came directly to Orvieto, where the Pope was—Pope Urban IV. He confessed his sin of unbelief.

The Pope sent a delegation immediately back to Bolsena; they returned with the corporal stained with that blood.

You can see it right here behind me.

The Pope was so impressed that he inaugurated a new feast in the Church called Corpus Christi, the Body of Christ.

He turned to a Dominican friar who was in his entourage here in Orvieto, Thomas Aquinas, and asked him to compose an office for the feast.

That means a series of prayers and hymns.

Thomas responded with one of the most beautiful poetic works of the Middle Ages.

We still sing these great hymns, Tantum Ergo, Adoro Te Devote, from that office of Corpus Christi.

Thomas Aquinas loved the Eucharist; he said Mass every day, then immediately after he would assist at a second Mass.

It’s said he rarely got through the liturgy without copious tears, so identified was he with the Eucharistic mystery.

They say when Thomas was struggling with an intellectual issue, he’d go into the tabernacle, rest his head against it, and beg for inspiration.

Toward the end of his life, he wrote a wonderful treatise on the Eucharist.

When he finished, he was still unconvinced that he had done justice to this great sacrament, so he placed the text at the foot of the Cross and prayed.

A voice came from the Cross: Bene scriptisti de me.

Thomas, of course, heard Jesus speaking Latin.

You’ve written well of me, Thomas.

What would you have as a reward?

Aquinas responded, Nil nisi te, meaning, I will have nothing except You.

In that treatise that he placed at the foot of the Cross, Thomas discussed the Eucharist under the rubric of transubstantiation.

He said that at the consecration, the total substance of the bread becomes the substance of the Body of Christ; the total substance of the wine becomes the substance of the Blood of Christ, even as the accidents of bread and wine remain unchanged.

If those terms seem odd to us, we could very legitimately translate them simply as this: reality and appearance.

The deepest reality of the bread and wine changes into the Body and Blood of Christ, even as the appearance of the bread and wine remains unchanged.

You know that distinction between appearance and reality is referenced in the philosophies of the world, both ancient and modern.

It’s also part of our common experience.

Most often, appearance and reality coincide; things are as they seem.

But we all know that’s not always the case.

You look up into the sky on a clear winter's night, and you seem to see all the stars.

Well, we know in fact that you’re looking back into the past; it’s taken that long for that light to reach your eyes.

You’re not looking at the stars that are there but the stars that were there.

Appearance and reality are different.

It certainly seems as though the sun moves across the sky, but we know in fact it doesn’t. Appearance and reality don’t come together.

Use a more psychological example: you might meet somebody, and he gives a very bad first impression.

You say, I don’t like him, but someone who knows him better says, I know he seems that way, but he really is different.

Appearance and reality don’t always coincide.

And so the Church says that in the case of the Eucharist, what appears to be ordinary bread and wine has, in fact, changed at the deepest level of its reality.

Now, I’ve made that distinction, but you still might wonder, how does this happen?

Consider for a moment the power of words.

Words not only describe reality; words, under the right circumstances, can change reality.

Suppose I walked up to you at a party and said, You’re under arrest.

Well, you’d assume I was telling a joke; those words have no power over you.

But suppose a properly deputized officer of the law said to you, You’re under arrest.

Well, whether you like it or not, whether you’re guilty or innocent, you are in fact under arrest.

Those words have changed reality.

Suppose you’re at Wrigley Field watching a baseball game.

One of the Cubs comes around second base; he slides head first into third.

You’re there in the stands and you say, Safe.

Does that change reality?

Not at all; it just expresses your opinion.

But right in front of you is a uniformed and deputized umpire of the National League.

He says, You’re out.

Whether you like it or not, whether the player likes it or not, he is in fact out.

Those words of the umpire have changed reality.

Those are our puny human words.

Now consider God’s Word in the Bible.

God creates through the power of His Word: Let there be light, and there was light; Let the earth come forth, and it came forth.

God’s Word does not just describe; it affects what it says.

In the prophet Isaiah, we find this: As the rain and the snow come down from heaven and do not return without watering the earth, so my Word goes forth from me and does not return without accomplishing its purpose.

That’s how it works with the divine Word.

Now, who is Jesus?

Not one figure among many, not one in a long line of prophets; Jesus is the very Logos, the very Word of God made flesh.

The same Word by which God makes the whole cosmos becomes personally present in Jesus, and therefore what Jesus says is, Lazarus, come out!

and he came out; Little girl, get up!

and the dead girl gets up; My son, your sins are forgiven, and by God, they’re forgiven.

What Jesus says is, the night before He died, He took bread and said, This is my Body which will be given up for you.

He took the cup and said, This is the cup of my Blood.

Jesus' Word is the divine Word that does not simply describe, but rather affects, creates, and changes reality in the most radical sense.

When the priest pronounces the words of consecration, he’s not using his own words; he’s using those divine words of Christ, which can affect reality and change reality most profoundly.

At the very beginning of her career, Flannery O’Connor—who would develop into, I think, the greatest Catholic fiction writer of the 20th century—sat down at dinner with Mary McCarthy and a group of other New York intellectuals.

She was so overwhelmed that she barely said a word.

Mary McCarthy, probably feeling sorry for her, made a few nice remarks about the Eucharist, knowing O’Connor was a Catholic.

She said, It’s a very powerful symbol.

O’Connor looked up and, in a shaky voice, she said, Well, if it’s only a symbol, I say to hell with it.

I can’t imagine a better summary of the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence.

At the close of the Eucharistic Prayer, the Jesus who is really present under the forms of bread and wine is offered as a living sacrifice to the Father.

Lifting up the elements, the priest prays, Through Him and with Him and in Him, O God Almighty Father, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all honor and glory is yours forever and ever.

At this moment, the Catholic priest is in the true Holy of Holies, and what he does is analogous to what the high priest did in the Temple on the Day of Atonement.

In ancient times, the priest would enter the Holy of Holies, and there he would sacrifice an animal to Yahweh on behalf of all the people.

Then he would sprinkle some of the blood around the interior of the sanctuary, and the rest he would bring out in a bowl and sprinkle on the people, sealing thereby a kind of blood bond between God and the nation.

The Catholic priest, at the climax of the Mass, offers to the Father not the blood of bulls and goats but the blood of Christ, beyond all price.

Since the Father has no need of anything, that sacrifice redounds completely to our benefit.

If our troubles began with a bad meal—seizing at the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil—our redemption is effected through a properly constituted meal, God feeding His people with His own Body and Blood.

After the congregation has communed and given thanks, they are blessed and sent.

The priest says, Go forth, the Mass has ended.

It’s been said that after the words of consecration, these are the most sacred words of the entire Mass.

Now that the people have gathered as one family, heard the word of God, professed their faith, prayed for one another, offered sacrifice to the Father, and received the Body and Blood of Jesus, they are at least in principle more properly formed and hence ready to go out to effect the transformation of the world.

In his meditations on the story of the visit of the Magi, Fulton Sheen indicated that the three kings, having traversed a great distance, having withstood opposition from King Herod, having found the baby, having opened their treasures for Him, and finally having been warned by an angel, went home by a different route.

Of course they did.

He concluded, for no one comes to Christ and goes back the same way he came.

The liturgy is a privileged communion with the Lord.

It is the source and summit of the Christian life, and therefore those who participate in it never leave unchanged; they never go back the same way they came.