The Lamb's Supper Read online

  Everything we have goes on the altar, to be made holy in Christ. The priest makes the connection explicit as he pours the water and wine into the chalices: “By the mystery of this water and wine, may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, Who humbled Himself to share in our humanity.” This mingling is a rich symbol, suggesting the union of Christ's divine and human nature, the blood and water that poured forth from His side on the cross, and the union of our own gifts with the Savior's perfect gift of Himself. That's an offer the Father cannot refuse.

  UPWARD MOBILITY

  Now, as the priest has lifted up the gifts, he invites us to “Lift up your hearts.” This is a powerful image, and you'll find it in Christian liturgies throughout the world and since the earliest times. We lift our hearts to heaven. In the words of the Apocalypse (see Rev 1:10; 4:1–2), we are taken up in the spirit—to heaven. From now on, we are saying, we will look at reality by faith and not by sight.

  So what do we see in this heaven? We recognize that all around us are the angels and the saints. We sing the song that, according to many accounts, the angels and saints sing before heaven's throne (see Rev 4:8; Is 6:2–3). In the West we call it the “Sanctus,” or “Holy, Holy, Holy”; in the East, it's the “Trisagion,” or “Thrice-Holy Hymn.”

  Then comes the climax of the Eucharistic sacrifice, the great Eucharistic Prayer (or Anaphora). This is where it becomes clear that the New Covenant is not a book. It's an action, and that action is the Eucharist. There are many Eucharistic Prayers in use throughout the Church, but all contain the same elements:

  • The Epiclesis. This is when the priest places his hands over the gifts and calls down the Holy Spirit. This is a powerful encounter with heaven, more richly appreciated in the East.

  • The Narrative of Institution is the moment when the Spirit and the Word transform the elements from bread and wine into the body and blood, soul and divinity of Jesus Christ. Now, the priest relates the drama of the Last Supper, when Jesus made provision for the renewal of His covenant sacrifice through all time. What Exodus 12 was to the Passover liturgy, the Gospels are for the Eucharistic Prayer—but with a major difference. The words of the new Passover “effect what they signify.” When the priest speaks the words of institution—“This is My body . . . This is the cup of My blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant”—he is not merely narrating, he is speaking in the person of Christ, Who is the principal celebrant of the Mass. By the sacrament of Holy Orders, a man is changed in his very being; as priest, he becomes “another Christ.” Jesus ordained the Apostles and their successors to celebrate the Mass when He said: “Do this . . . in remembrance of Me” (1 Cor 11:25). Note that Jesus commanded them to “do this,” and not “write this” or “read this.”

  • Remembrance. We use the English words “Remembrance” and “Memory” to describe the next section of the Eucharistic Prayer, but these words hardly do justice to the terms in the original language. In the Old Testament, for example, we often read that God “remembered His covenant.” Well, it's not as if He could ever forget His covenant; but at certain times, for the benefit of His people, He renewed it, He re-presented it, He reenacted it. That's what He does, through His priest, in the remembrance of the Mass. He makes His New Covenant new once again.

  • Offering. The Mass's “memory” is not imaginary. It has flesh; it is Jesus in His glorified humanity, and He is our offering. “Father, calling to mind the death Your Son endured for our salvation . . . we offer You in thanksgiving this holy and living sacrifice” (Eucharistic Prayer III).

  • Intercessions. Then, with Jesus Himself, we pray to the Father for the living and the dead, for the whole Church and the whole world.

  • Doxology. The end of the Eucharistic Prayer is a dramatic moment. We call it a “doxology,” which is Greek for “word of glory.” The priest lifts up the chalice and the host, which he now refers to as Him. This is Jesus, and “Through Him, with Him, in Him, all glory and honor is Yours, almighty Father, forever and ever.” Our “Amen!” here should be resounding; it is traditionally called “The Great Amen.” In the fourth century, St. Jerome reported that, in Rome, when the Great Amen was proclaimed, all the pagan temples trembled.

  FAMILY MATTERS

  We follow the Eucharistic Prayer with the Our Father, the prayer that Jesus taught us. We find it in the ancient liturgies, and it should have richer meaning for us in the context of the Mass—and especially in the context of the Mass as heaven on earth. We have renewed our baptism as children of God, Whom we can call “Our Father.” We are now in heaven with Him, having lifted up our hearts. We have hallowed His name by praying the Mass. By uniting our sacrifice with Jesus' eternal sacrifice, we have seen God's will done “on earth as it is in heaven.” We have before us Jesus, our “daily bread,” and this bread will “forgive us our trespasses,” because Holy Communion wipes away all venial sins. We have known mercy, then, and so we will show mercy, forgiving “those who trespass against us.” And through Holy Communion we will know new strength over temptations and evil. The Mass fulfills the Lord's Prayer, perfectly, word for word.

  We can't overemphasize the relationship between “our daily bread” and the Eucharistic host before us. In his classic essay on the Our Father, Scripture scholar Father Raymond Brown demonstrated that this was the overwhelming belief of the early Christians: “There is good reason, then, for connecting the Old Testament manna and the New Testament Eucharistic bread with the petition . . . Thus, in asking the Father “Give us our bread,' the community was employing words directly connected with the Eucharist. And so our Roman Liturgy may not be too far from the original sense of the petition in having the [Our Father] introduce the Communion of the Mass.”

  So the “Communion Rite” begins, and we shouldn't miss the original power of the word communion. In Jesus' time, the word (in Greek, koinonia) was used most often to describe a family bond. With Communion, we renew our bond with the eternal family, the Family Who is God, and with God's family on earth, the Church. We express our communion with the Church in the Sign of Peace. In this ancient gesture, we fulfill Jesus' command that we make peace with our neighbor before we approach the altar (see Mt 5:24).

  Our next prayer, the “Lamb of God,” recalls the Passover sacrifice and the “mercy” and “peace” of the new Passover. The priest, then, breaks the host and lifts it up—a Lamb “standing, as if slain” (Rev 5:6)—and calls out the words of John the Baptist: “This is the Lamb of God” (see Jn 1:36). And we can only respond in the words of the Roman centurion: “Lord, I am not worthy to receive You, but only say the word . . .” (Mt 8:8).

  Then we receive Him in Holy Communion. We receive Him, Whom we praised in the Gloria and proclaimed in the creed! We receive Him, before Whom we swore our solemn oath! We receive Him, Who is the New Covenant awaited through all of human history! When Christ comes at the end of time, He will not have one drop more glory than He has at this moment, when we consume all of Him! In the Eucharist we receive what we will be for all eternity, when we are taken up to heaven to join with the heavenly throng in the marriage supper of the Lamb. At Holy Communion, we are already there. This is not a metaphor. This is the cold, calculated, precise, metaphysical truth that was taught by Jesus Christ.

  YOU'RE HEAVEN-SENT

  After so much that's so heavy duty, the Mass seems to end too abruptly—with a blessing and “The Mass is ended. Go in peace.” It seems strange that the word “Mass” should come from these hasty final words: Ite, missa est (literally, “Go, it is sent”). But the ancients understood that the Mass was a sending-forth. That last line is not so much a dismissal as a commissioning. We have united ourselves to Christ's sacrifice. We leave Mass now in order to live the mystery, the sacrifice, we have just celebrated, through the splendor of ordinary life in the home and in the world.

  PART TWO

  ONE

  “I Turned to See”

  THE SENSE AMID<
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  THE STRANGENESS

  THOSE FIRST FOUR CHAPTERS were the easier part. Most Catholics, after all, have at least a glancing awareness of the Mass. They're familiar with the prayers and gestures, even if they've only endured them sleepily. With this chapter, however, we turn to see (Rev 1:12) what many Catholics have turned away from—sometimes in terror, sometimes in frustration.

  The Book of Revelation, the last book in the Bible, seems a weird book indeed: full of frightening wars and consuming fires, rivers of blood, and streets paved with gold. In all of its parts, the book seems to defy common sense and good taste. Let's take just one famous example, the plague of locusts. John reports that “from the smoke came locusts . . . like horses arrayed for battle; on their heads were what looked like crowns of gold; their faces were like human faces, their hair like women's hair, and their teeth like lions' teeth; they had scales like iron breastplates, and the noise of their wings was like the noise of many chariots. . . . They have tails like scorpions, and stings, and their power of hurting men for five months lies in their tails” (Rev 9:3, 7–10).

  We hardly know whether to laugh or scream with fright. With all due respect, we want to ask St. John, “Okay, let me get this straight: you saw long-haired locusts with lion's teeth and human faces . . . and they were wearing golden crowns and armor?” The great temptation is just to excuse ourselves from reading the Apocalypse, reminding God that we have pressing appointments here on earth.

  I am not going to deny that the details of the Book of Revelation are exceedingly strange. Instead, I'll invite you to come with me on an investigation, so that you can discover, as I did, that there is sense amid the strangeness.

  THE BLOT WITH NO PLOT?

  When I started my study of the Book of Revelation, I was a Protestant, evangelical in expression, Calvinist in theology. Like many other evangelicals, I found the Apocalypse fascinating. It is Scripture, of course, and I held “Scripture alone” to be the rule of faith. What's more, Revelation holds a conspicuous position as the final book of the Bible—God's “last word,” as it were. Also, Revelation seemed to me the most mysterious and cryptic book of the Bible, and I found that just too tantalizing to pass up. I saw the Apocalypse as a puzzle that God dared me to solve, a code that begged to be cracked.

  I had a lot of company. As the second millennium drew to its close, interpretation of the Book of Revelation exploded into a cottage industry among my evangelical brethren. With every trip to the bookstore, I discovered new and more promising revelations of Revelation.

  This was not always the case with Protestant interpreters. The very first Protestant, Martin Luther, found the Apocalypse entirely too bizarre. For a while, he even rejected its place in the Bible, because, he said, “a revelation should be revealing.” Yet Revelationis always revealing, in that it unmasks the prejudices, anxieties, and ideological bent of each particular interpreter.

  The Apocalypse remains a sort of Rorschach blot for Christians. Preachers try first to discern an order in the text. This is usually a fruitless effort, since the book lacks the ordering principles of a literary work: a conventional story line or an argument. Failing to find order, they try to impose order. This is, more or less, the pattern I followed during my years as a Protestant seminarian and minister. What usually happens is that a particular detail seizes the imagination and becomes the interpretive key for reading the entire book. The “millennium,” for example—a concept that appears only in chapter 20 of the Apocalypse—begins to color everything one sees in chapters 1–19, and 21–22.

  MILLENNIUM BUG

  The millennium is, today, the favored interpretive key among evangelicals and fundamentalists. Hal Lindsey's 1970 blockbuster,The Late, Great Planet Earth, launched a genre, as it became the second-biggest-selling book of the last thirty years. Its sales have, at last count, exceeded 35 million copies in fifty languages. Lindsey contended that the prophecies of Revelation were a precise forecast of future events, a future that was just dawning in the 1970s. He saw Revelation's strange imagery as corresponding exactly to people, places, and events that were then in the news. Russia was the beast, for example; and Gog and Magog applied to the Soviet Union. Lindsey predicted that the Soviets would swoop down upon Palestine; but Jesus would return and slaughter them and establish a thousand-year kingdom in Jerusalem.

  Lindsey was not alone. In fact, for a few years, I was firmly with him—though with shades of difference—in the “futurist” camp of Revelation's interpreters. Within this camp, there is much disagreement over when the events will take place, and which of Revelation's beasts will correspond with which world leaders. Futurists also disagree among themselves as to whether Christians will go through the “tribulation,” and when the world will eventually enter Christ's thousand-year reign. Some have developed new concepts such as the “Rapture” to describe the miraculous interventions they predict for the end times. At the Rapture, they say, God will sweep His chosen ones into the clouds to live with Him (see 1 Thess 4:16–17).

  I ranged in these pastures for years, but without finding any real satisfaction. What happened again and again was that a preacher would fixate on a single element—the number of the beast, for instance—and his whole reading of Revelation would hinge on the identification of that number with someone in the news. Yet, through the 1970s and 1980s, world leaders rose and fell, and empires crumbled, and with every fallen leader, and with every crumbling empire, I watched another grand theory collapse into ruin.

  Gradually, I began to see a larger reason for my disillusion. Would God really have inspired John's Apocalypse just so that it could sit dormant in the back of the Bible, strange and inexplicable, for twenty centuries—until the time was fulfilled and the cataclysms came to pass? No, Revelation was intended to reveal, and its revelations must be for all Christians of all time, including its original readers in the first century.

  A BLAST FROM THE PAST

  The futurists, varied as they were, did not exhaust the interpretive perspectives on the Book of Revelation. Some (called “idealists”) thought the whole book was merely a metaphor for the struggles of the spiritual life. Others thought the Apocalypse outlined a plan for the history of the Church. Still others argued that the book was simply an encoded description of the first-century Christians' political situation. The thrust of the Apocalypse, according to this view, was to exhort believers to remain steadfast in the faith, and to promise divine vengeance against the Church's persecutors. I found some value in these arguments, especially as they related to some specific verses, but none was able to satisfy my desire to comprehend the unfolding of John's narrative.

  The more I studied the commentaries on Revelation, the more I came to understand selected details, but the less I seemed to understand the whole of the book. Then, while researching other matters, I happened upon a hidden treasure—hidden, that is, from someone studying the Scriptures in a tradition that reaches back only four hundred years.

  I began reading the Church Fathers, the Christian writers and teachers of the first eight centuries, and especially their commentaries on the Bible. I kept bumping up against my ignorance as the Fathers frequently referred to something I knew nothing about: the liturgy. Interestingly, however, I discovered that this ancient liturgy seemed to incorporate many of the small details of the Apocalypse—in a context in which they made sense! Then, as I pressed on to read the Fathers' exegetical studies of the Apocalypse, I found that many of these men had made the explicit connection between the Mass and the Book of Revelation. In fact, for most of the early Christians it was a given: the Book of Revelation was incomprehensible apart from the liturgy.

  As I described in chapter 1, it was only when I began attending Mass that the many parts of this puzzling book suddenly began to fall into place. Before long, I could see the sense in Revelation's altar (Rev 8:3), its robed clergymen (4:4), candles (1:12), incense (5:8), manna (2:17), chalices (ch. 16), Sunday worship (1:
10), the prominence it gives to the Blessed Virgin Mary (12:1–6), the “Holy, Holy, Holy” (4:8), the Gloria (15:3–4), the Sign of the Cross (14:1), the Alleluia (19:1, 3, 6), the readings from Scripture (ch. 2–3), and the “Lamb of God” (many, many times). These are not interruptions in the narrative or incidental details; they are the very stuff of the Apocalypse.

  WHYS-ING UP

  So Revelation wasn't just a veiled warning about 1970s geopolitics, or an encoded history of the first-century Roman Empire, or an instruction book for the end times. It was, somehow, about the very sacrament that was beginning to draw this “Bible Christian” into the fullness of Catholic faith.

  Yet new questions arose. If, in the texts of the ancient liturgies, I had stumbled upon the “what” of Revelation, I was left with some whopping “whys.” Why such an odd presentation? Why a vision and not a liturgical text? Why was Revelation attributed to John, of all possible disciples? Why was it written when it was written?

  The answers emerged as I began to study the times of the Apocalypse and the liturgy of the times.

  HEAVEN AND EARTH IN MINIATURE

  Many small details of John's vision become clear when we try to encounter the book as its original audience might have. If we were Greek-speaking Jewish Christians of John's time, living in the cities of the Roman province of Asia, we would probably know Jerusalem's topography from our regular pilgrimages. Jerusalem was supremely important for John's readers. It was the capital city and economic center of ancient Israel, as well as the nation's cultural and academic hub. But, above all, Jerusalem was the spiritual heart of the Israelite people. Try to imagine a modern city that would combine Washington, D.C., Wall Street, Oxford, and the Vatican. That's Jerusalem to a first-century Jew.