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Among the most crucial principles the Second Vatican Council
established for the reform of the Church's liturgy was the fundamental,
one could even say authoritative, role of sacred scripture
in the content and structure of the rites. The Constitution on
the Sacred Liturgy, Sacrosanctum Concilium teaches:
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Sacred Scripture is of the greatest importance in the celebration
of the liturgy. For it is from Scripture that the readings
are given and explained in the homily and that psalms
are sung; the prayers, collects, and liturgical songs are
scriptural in their inspiration; it is from the Scriptures that
actions and signs derive their meaning. Thus to achieve the
reform, progress, and adaptation of the liturgy, it is essential
to promote that warm and living love for Scripture to
which the venerable tradition of both Eastern and Western
rites gives testimony (#24).
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Taking this statement as programmatic for exploring the
integral relationship between word and sacrament in the life of the
Church, I shall begin with the nature of biblical proclamation in
the liturgy. On that basis we can consider how scripture inspires
the content of the liturgy's texts and the meaning of its symbolic
actions, before concluding with a note on sound Tradition.
If asked, most people would probably mention the use of the
local language (in the words of the Constitution, "the mother
tongue") as the most obvious difference between the post-Vatican II liturgy and the previous post-Tridentine rites. While
on the surface this switch to the vernacular made elements of
the ritual more comprehensible to the people, among the reasons
given for that change, first and foremost, is the content of
the readings to be proclaimed in not only the Mass but also
the administration of every sacrament (see SCL, 36.2). The pastoral
and theological impact of the council's mandate that the
"treasures of the Bible . . . be opened up more lavishly, so that
richer fare may be provided for the faithful at the table of God's
word [mensa verbi Dei]" (CSL, 51) has given rise to a profound
transformation in the content, tenor, and length of our sacramental
celebrations, especially the Mass.
For centuries prior to the council, the Church practiced a
one-year cycle of epistle and Gospel passages in the Mass, with
minimal, if any preaching, and no Prayers of the Faithful.
Indeed, the Mass's opening with the priest's prayers at the foot of
the altar followed by the Kyrie and Gloria was, in terms of duration
and drama, more significant than the usually cursory reading
of two biblical texts with the graduale in between.
The council Fathers took the "intimate connection" (CSL,
35) between word and sacrament to a deeper theological and
pastorally more nourishing level by raising the role of the proclaimed
word in scripture to a balanced relationship (rather
than supporting role) with the eucharistic rite. Thus, the
Constitution on Divine Revelation, Dei Verbum, teaches: "The
Church has always venerated the divine Scriptures just as she
venerates the body of the Lord, since, especially in the sacred
liturgy, she unceasingly receives and offers to the faithful the
bread of life from the table both of God's word and of Christ's
body" (#21). The word of God is venerated by the liturgical ministers'
effectively proclaiming the readings, chanting the psalm,
and preaching the Gospel, along with the people's fervent desire
to make the Gospel's mission their own for the life of the world.
Thus, the intentions of the Prayer of the Faithful are not to be
announced by the presiding priest but rather by a "cantor, lector,
or another person" (GIRM, 138), who leads the faithful in their
response to the word.
The Christian dynamic of revelation comes full circle as
the faithful raise up in prayer a Church and world ever in need
of God's grace. For believers engaged in the Liturgy of the Word,
the wealth of Old and New Testament literature, especially the
Gospel accounts of Jesus' words and actions, contribute to an
image of the Christ who becomes present in the sacramental
ritual. When done with even a modicum of care (i.e., well-paced
reading, pastoral preaching, opportunity for silent reflection),
the proclamation of the word prevents sacramental celebration
from devolving into mere ritualism. In the Mass, the dialogue of
divine proclamation and human response shapes the thoughts
and emotions of the faithful as they turn to the table of Christ's
body, well disposed to respond not mechanically but actively to
the Preface's call, "Lift up your hearts."
While the faithful may well draw consolation from the doctrine
that sacramental grace is assured in the validly performed rites
of the Church, the tradition has much more to offer than just a
conceptually held belief. The recovered and enhanced tradition
of the proclaimed word in all of the Church's rites offers an
encounter with the person of Jesus the Christ, who comes to
confront and console with his revelation of who God is, what
God has done, what God desires, and how we are invited into
God's reign. This amounts to a deepened experience and understanding
of grace.
What distinguishes sacred scripture as proclaimed word
in liturgy from all other ways whereby believers might engage
biblical texts is the Church's belief that Christ is truly speaking
in the present moment amidst his assembled body: "[Christ] is
present in his word, since it is he himself who speaks when the
holy Scriptures are read in the Church" (CSL, 7). In liturgy, the
scriptural passages are not merely read, studied, or personally
reflected upon but, rather, the Word comes alive amidst a people,
making present a living encounter with the Lord Jesus.
Christ is present in the liturgy, through the power of the Holy
Spirit, because of the Paschal Mystery that every celebration of
the rites enacts, affording all the opportunity to recognize that
mystery as "present and active within us" (CSL, 35.2).
In the Liturgy of the Word, the members of the assembly
are not left to speculate, "What would Jesus do?" On the contrary,
they respond to the personal offer of grace the living Jesus
gives in this particular event, an original moment when once
again the Lord says: "Today this word has been fulfilled in your
hearing" (see Lectionary of the Mass: Introduction, 3; c.f. Luke
4:21). The assembled faithful do not hear about God; rather,
they hear God speak to them. God does not communicate by
mental or spiritual telepathy but through the activity of the
liturgical assembly and its ministers, whose faithful pastoral
practices of the rites serve the reception and appropriation of the
word in thoughts, experiences, and emotions.
As the General Introduction to the Order of Christian Funerals tells of the importance of scripture in funeral rites, it exemplifies
the treasure of the word of God is for us:
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In every celebration for the dead, the Church attaches great
importance to the reading of the word of God. The readings
proclaim to the assembly the paschal mystery, teach remembrance
of the dead, convey the hope of being gathered
together again in God's kingdom, and encourage the witness
of Christian life. Above all, the readings tell of God's designs
for a world in which suffering and death will relinquish their
hold on all whom God has called his own. A careful selection
and use of readings from scripture for the funeral
rites will provide the family and the community with an
opportunity to hear God speak to them in their needs, sorrows,
fears, and hopes (OCF, 22).
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While the priority given to the Paschal Mystery in the
present example might seem due to the pastoral circumstances
of the funeral rites, that priority is essential to all liturgical celebrations.
It is only because God has raised the crucified Jesus
from the dead and continuously sends his Spirit into the midst
of those assembled in his name that the celebrating community
enters into the very world of Jesus, sharing in the company of his
kingdom "God's designs for a world in which suffering and
death will relinquish their hold . . . ." That this is not merely
wishful thinking is assured by the biblical witness, especially the
Gospel narratives, wherein the humanity of the risen Jesus
comes alive in the stories of his encounters with the women and
men among whom he taught and healed, proclaiming the inbreaking
of God's reign.
In addition to the proclamation of the word in the liturgy
(including the readings, psalmody, and homily), biblical words
and imagery suffuse the content of the rites of the post-conciliar
Church: "It is from Scripture that the readings are given and
explained in the homily and that psalms are sung; the prayers,
collects, and liturgical songs are scriptural in their inspiration; it
is from the Scriptures that actions and signs derive their meaning"
(CSL, 24). Indeed, the reformed rites of the Church find
their pastoral promise fundamentally in the biblical witness of
the person and mission of Jesus. For example, the General
Introduction of the Pastoral Care of the Sick opens with a blunt
acknowledgment of the troubling questions suffering and illness
pose to the human condition, only to assert that "Christ's words"
reveal "meaning and value" in people's struggles with illness
both "for their own salvation and for the salvation of the world"
(1). This stunning assertion about individual and universal salvation
coincides with believers' personal knowledge of Christ's
love for them in their illness, a conviction grounded in the fact
that Jesus "during his lifetime often visited and healed the sick."
Even as Christians find the promise of the world's salvation in
the Resurrection of the crucified Christ, this faith does not
abstract him into the realm of philosophical principle or mythical
deity. The gift of genuine faith in Jesus as the Christ, the Son
of God, entails a yearning to know Jesus of Nazareth that is as
ancient as the communities from which the canonical Gospel
accounts emerged.
A crucial distinction between the Gospel accounts the
early Church discerned to be God's word and the various Gnostic
texts that vied with them for the claim to revelation was the latter's
general disregard for the stories of Jesus' life and work
among his fellow Palestinian Jewish people. To give revelatory
status to those stories is to embrace the mysterious ambiguity of
our created bodily condition as the very medium of our divine
redemption. Thus, Gnostic gospels largely include sayings by
Jesus but little, if any, narrative of his actions—his miraculous
work with the physically and spiritually afflicted, his table fellowship
with sinners, his emotional investment in the lives of
the poor. The reconstituting of group membership, the forging
of new communal bonds, points to the other crucial feature of
Jesus' prophetic mission that the first generation of believers in
him as risen Lord understood to be essential to following him:
his open table fellowship.
Jesus called those he healed to communion in the reign of
God, and thereby to a sharing in his healing life. Feasting was a
sign of healing and forgiveness, as Mark's account of the call of
Levi the tax collector exemplifies (2:13–17). There is near unanimous
scholarly agreement that Jesus' egalitarian dining with
sinners was one of the most prominent, highly symbolic, and
ultimately dangerous features of his prophetic mission. True to
classical Jewish prophetic tradition, N. T. Wright has argued,
Jesus' open fellowship with the poor, the sinners, the nobodies
was a highly symbolic enactment of his claim that God was taking
a new initiative to deliver his exiled people, inaugurating a
new interpretation of Torah for the life of the people. Both the
healings and the table fellowship were shocking acts challenging
social conventions and the regnant organs of power, both religious
and political, countering their claims to divine authority
with an enacted proclamation of mercy and forgiveness as the
hallmark of God's sovereign rule. As essential elements of the
Gospel narratives, miracles and meals together comprise a
bravely enacted vision that proves to be a matter of life or death
for Jesus. For believers from the first generations to the present
they are an invitation to life "in the Spirit of the one who raised
Jesus from the dead" (Romans 8:11). It is the revelation of this
Jesus as Christ that makes scripture the inspiring, empowering
source of meaning in the liturgy's symbolic words and actions.
The language of mercy and healing pervades the collects of the
Mass (the Opening Prayer and Prayer after Communion)
throughout the seasons of the liturgical year. At the climax of
the Introductory Rites the presiding celebrant's invitation to
prayer and the ensuing collect constantly acknowledge God's
mercy and ask for the Spirit to empower us for peaceful solidarity
in faith, hope, and love. A representative sampling of postcommunion
prayers in Ordinary Time reveals such petitions as,
"Lord, / may your healing love / turn us from sin / and keep us
on the way that leads to you" (Tenth Sunday), and "Lord, / may
this eucharist increase within us / the healing power of your
love" (Twenty-first Sunday). In light of scripture, this should
come as no surprise, nor should contemporary believers bemoan
the content of such prayers unless, of course, in hearing them
they are imagining a different god than the God and Father of
the Lord Jesus Christ.
Liturgical prayer for mercy, forgiveness, and healing is not
a matter of repeated groveling before a god who arbitrarily
wields autonomous tyrannical authority or only feels powerful
by demanding the abeyance of inferiors. On the contrary, the
assembled Church's prayers are life-empowering acts incarnating
the faith of the centurion who, in response to Jesus' offer to
come and cure his servant, replied: "Lord, I am not worthy to
have you come under my roof; but only speak the word, and my
servant will be healed" (Matthew 8:8). That very biblical passage
is the source for the assembly's response to the invitation in
the Communion Rite. Indeed, in the Latin typical edition of the
Mass of Paul VI the faithful are to respond: Dominus, non sum
dignus, ut intres sub tectum meum, sed tantum dic verbo et sanabitur
anima mea. An accurate English translation would read,
"Lord, I am not worthy that you should come under my roof, but
say only the word and my soul shall be healed." Unfortunately,
the current Missal has the people say, "Lord, I am not worthy to
receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed." The
translation, thereby, reduces the faithfuls' personal appropriation
of the word of God at the moment of Holy Communion to a
mere, if not lost, allusion to that powerful passage of the Gospel.
Advocates for the biblically toned-down translation of the
official Latin text of the current Communion Rite argue that
some contemporary Catholics are so ignorant of scripture that
they largely would find the more accurate translation, "that you
should come under my roof," arcane and off-putting. To my
mind, that is a distressing admission to how terribly short we
continue to fall of the council Fathers' vision that scripture
imbue the liturgy and, thus, the lives of the faithful. Indeed, I
would press further that the invitation to Communion, likewise,
adhere more closely to the Latin typical edition so as to read,
"Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world,
happy those who are called to the wedding banquet of the Lamb
(ad cenam Agni)." The first half of the invitation quotes John the
Baptist at the beginning of the Gospel of John (1:29), while the
second echoes the Book of Revelation, "Write this: Blessed are
those who are invited to the marriage supper of the Lamb"
(19:9). The wedding banquet imagery, of course, draws even
more broadly and deeply from the parables of Jesus in the synoptic
accounts of the Gospel, a fact that altogether attests to the
historical importance of wedding, banquet, and supper in Jesus'
description of the kingdom of God. By more explicitly articulating
the biblical content repeatedly over time, the invitation to
Communion would afford the opportunity for the faithful to
hear the Spirit's prompting of connections between their lives
and the life God is offering through the indwelling of Jesus
among us.
The soundness of liturgical tradition, then, stands on the
shoulders of scripture. The execution of a three-year Sunday
Lectionary cycle, as well as a two-year cycle of readings for daily
Mass, has realized the council Fathers' mandate, "In sacred celebrations
there is to be more reading from holy Scripture and it
is to be more varied and apposite" (SCL, 35.1). Consistent, widespread,
quality liturgical preaching knowledgeable of this treasury
is yet to be realized. For example, during Year C of the
Easter Season six Sundays of second readings from the Book of
Revelation afford homilists a tri-annual occasion to link the
vision of salvation (the Lamb's wedding banquet) with its present
offer at the Table of the Lord's Body. That preaching improves
to be more "the proclamation of God's wonderful works in the
history of salvation, the mystery of Christ, ever present and active
within us" (#35.2) promises a more intimate connection of word
and sacrament for the nourishment of the people of God.
1. Can you recall any times at liturgy when you heard a certain
passage or even sentence being proclaimed that struck you so
powerfully that you had the sense that God was speaking to you
in those words? How did that affect your experience of the
liturgy but also perhaps your life?
2. Name and consider the different ways you engage or
encounter scripture in your life (for example, personal reading,
Bible study group, hearing it proclaimed in liturgy, and so on).
What comparisons and contrasts do you note in these different
modes of engaging the word of God? Do you find them
complementing each other, and if so, in what ways?
3. What do you listen for in a homily? Can you recall a particular
homily or preacher you found enriched your participation in
liturgy, and if so, how?
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