Built on the Word

It is to the great credit of Vatican II that in its reform of the liturgy the Word of God was reinstated to its rightful prominence in Catholic life.  No longer can any sacrament be attempted without a communal involvement with the Word: scriptural readings now encompass all Catholic ritual.  It is the Word that informs, the Word that creates life, the Word about which we then proceed to “make sacrament” each time.  In terms of the Eucharist, it is no exaggeration to suggest that what we eat in Holy Communion is the Word of God to which we have already listened: we feed on (and taken inside ourselves) the gospel story of Jesus.  When we thus take his life on board, Jesus lives, Jesus is present. This is the most basic meaning of sacramental presence: when we live the Word, he lives! As in the liturgy of Exodus 24, our community’s commitment to live the word is expressed in the community coming forward to drink from the cup.  The readings and the act of coming to Communion are not as unconnected as we may have once thought.  This crucial insight lies at the heart of the liturgical renewal of recent years and it will have far reaching consequences for the shape of public worship in years to come.  In a challenging sense, the Word of God is the sacrament:

The celebration of Mass in which the word is heard and the Eucharist is offered and received form but one single act of divine worship.

An enormity of change in Catholic thinking lies underneath this apparently simple statement, caught in the aftermath of Vatican II’s regeneration of the Sunday ritual, we can easily forget the poverty and minimalism of “the mass” prior to the council. In those days, Catholics would have seen “the sacrament” as very distinct from “the readings”. Indeed, the two readings [in Latin] played something of only a preparatory role for the sacrifice we associated with the Consecration that followed. Catholicism’s focus was with the “sacramental moment” of the Consecration: that was the presence we recognised. When the words of Consecration were spoken by the priest, Jesus came; prior to that moment, he was not really present. We thought of Jesus’ presence in graphic, almost physical terms: Body meant body and Blood meant blood. In a Catholicism that saw the scripture readings as of secondary importance to the moment of Consecration, we would have had little or no experience of the “hearts burning within us” as we “talked together on the road” of the meaning of “the scriptures” for our lives. Having “lost the Word,” our sense of sacrament was impoverished and our reading of “the real presence of Christ” was non-inclusive of ourselves as community.

Happily, Catholic culture has changed and a broader sense of Christ’s presence in the Eucharistic celebration- taken as a whole- is being recovered. The General Introduction to the Lectionary now asserts that, “the Scriptures are the living waters from which all who seek life and salvation must drink”

And in the same text the Church goes even further, stating that:

The more profound our understanding of the liturgical celebration, the higher our appreciation of the importance of God’s word.

What we are dealing with here is a revolution in Catholic thinking and a total reshaping by Vatican II of our recent and deeply ingrained “tradition”. Word and sacrament form the one reality. The “sacrifice of mass” is not something that refers to Jesus alone; it embraces us as well. To take seriously the word of God and to commit ourselves to live it together-this is the Church’s most traditional meaning of the Word “sacrifice”. Unless the word of God becomes the living heart of every Catholic community, we will never grow to appreciate the deepest meaning of this all important word: sacrifice.

Whereas we would once have associated the Word “ sacrifice” with the way Jesus alone gave himself to God [continued at every Mass), we are now confronted by the deeper, more inclusive meaning of he Eucharistic “sacrifice” the gift of ourselves to God as a community striving- as did he- to live the covenant vision of Exodus.  In this striving, it is ourselves we offer, not Jesus.  Yet clothing ourselves in his story of fidelity (the word) we rightly call ourselves “Jesus”.  This is simply the bequest Jesus left us: “Do this- yourselves- in my memory.  Every Mass is Calvary over again (as we used to say), but the issue now concerns who is the contemporary Cross.  It is ourselves- and our suffering brothers and sisters. Living “in Jesus” we are the contemporary sacrifice.  There is no other.  Jesus himself died but once, yet he “was raised from the dead to make us live fruitfully for God (Romans 7:4)

Is it any wonder that we choose to gather each Sunday, in conscious and appreciative community, to celebrate and thank God for this mysterious dignity (to be “in Christ”) that has been so graciously conferred upon us and in which we are allowed to participate? is it any wonder that the medium of the Eucharist was always meant to be joyful singing? Finally, is it any wonder that Vatican II’s primary challenge to us all is to reawaken that sense of “full, conscious, and active participation…which is demanded by the very nature of the Liturgy?