The Mass in Close-Up
Father Antony Jones
The Memorial
Jesus said: do this in memory of me/as a memorial of me.
The Jews had a very different understanding of memorial from ourselves. For us, it is a stone monument or a brass plaque; for the Jews, it was something living, something still very much alive – a feast.
Moses had ordered that the Exodus from Egypt (God’s central act of salvation in the Old Testament) be commemorated annually and at the same time of year as it actually occurred. Moses prescribed that this commemoration, this Memorial, should take the form of a celebratory feast (cf.Leviticus 23:5-8).
When the Jews thereafter celebrated this Pascal Meal, the Passover Meal, they celebrated not only the fact of the historic Exodus but also its lasting effects. They celebrated their continuing freedom from Egyptian slavery; they celebrated that they had become and still were God’s covenanted People.
The Christian Memorial
It is highly significant, therefore, that Jesus established the Eucharist while He was actually celebrating the Passover Meal. He was bringing this biblical celebration of the Passover to its total fulfilment, just as He brings to completion everything else in the Old Testament, as he promised He would in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:17).
So, in his bringing the Passover Meal to its fulfilment, He keeps the meal, but he raises everything to a higher plain. From now on, his disciples would continue to thank God for all that He did for the Jewish People at the Passover and throughput their history: but now there is an altogether new dimension.
As well as remembering and thanking God for the historic liberation of their Jewish spiritual forebears from Pharaoh’s tyranny, Christians would henceforth give thanks for the wondrous liberation and salvation won for them by the victorious death and resurrection of God’s Son.
And this is where Jesus raises the Passover Meal onto an entirely new plane. Formerly, the saving acts of God had become present only to the minds of the Jews by the simple fact of their remembering them. Now Christ, by his own and the Holy Spirit’s power, would make really present in Sacrament, in Bread and Wine, the very events being remembered.And these events were his Last Supper, his Death, and his Resurrection – the pivotal happenings in the history of the Universe.
From now on, the Lord’s Death and Resurrection would not be just in the memory, but also in outward reality, in present and living fact, in the consecrated elements of the Sacrament of the Eucharist.
Let’s put it all together
The Last Supper. The celebration of the Holy Mass, the Memorial of the Lord, makes Christ present in the actual event of his Last Supper – not a repetition for the millionth time, but a re-presentation of the actual once and for all, real-time event.
The word represent has an almost totally different meaning in this theological context from the multiple meanings it has in everyday speech. And the difference is important to notice. Theologically speaking it means to make present: to re-present. It does not mean “to repeat” or “to stand for”. In the context of the Mass, “represent” indicates the divine activity which makes Our Lord’s Supper, Crucifixion and Resurrection actually present to us. You may find it easier to understand this if you think of it in reverse – the Sacrament enabling you to be really present at these sacred events and to share in their action. Either way, the Eucharist is a Time Warp of divine devising.
Not in in an imaginative or fanciful way, as with cinema and theatre, are we present to the action. At holy Mass, we enter the Upper Room and share the Meal in actual fact. Sacramentally we are there, it is as simple as that and as real as that. We approach the table, as it were, and ask Peter and John to make room for us. From Christ’s own lips we hear the sacred words of consecration; from Christ’s own hands we receive the Bread of Life and the Cup of eternal Salvation.
The Crucifixion. That crucial and utterly sacred moment, when Christ died for the salvation of the world, is also simultaneously made present in the Mass. That saving event which happened in Jerusalem two thousand years ago is now re-presented in the New Jerusalem of today, the Church.
This is why we can talk about the Sacrifice of the Mass. The Mass is a sacrifice simply because it is the very Sacrifice of Christ re-presented. It means that at its celebration we stand beneath the Cross of Christ as really as Our Lady did, or St John. In our next chapter we shall consider what we are really doing as we stand in this awesome presence of the Crucified Christ.
The Resurrection. The moment of resurrection was hidden from the eyes of the Apostles, even from the eyes of his Mother. She and the Apostles witnessed the empty tomb and the Risen Christ Himself; but neither they nor we were permitted to witness that sublime moment when Christ rose from the dead. That moment is made present in the Eucharist, but because the Sacrament hides it under the forms of bread and wine, we do not see it either. But it is there, the glorious rising of Christ from the tomb, and we are present to it. The Risen Christ is here among his people, as present to us as He was to Mary Magdalene in the garden or the disciples in the Upper Room. He is so really present in the mystery of his rising from the dead that we, by attending Mass, become ourselves witnesses to his Resurrection, not in the same way as the eye-witness Apostles were, but just as really.
This understanding of what we mean by the word Memorial and what Our Lord meant when He used it at the Last Supper tells us exactly what the Mass is, as far as our minds are able to pierce the Sacred Mystery: it is the celebration of the Death and Resurrection of the Lord through the re-enactment, re-presentation, of the Last Supper.
We can say, therefore, that there is only one Priest and only one Holy Mass – Christ and the actual Events as they played out two thousand years ago in Jerusalem. Our priests are sharers in Christ’s Priesthood who, at his command and in the power of the Holy Spirit, effect the greatest time-warp ever, by bringing into the here and now those once and for all pivotal Events of history. And that Time-Warp is the Holy Mass.
The Eucharist is the great Mystery of Faith, which stands at the heart of the living Church of Christ. The Second Vatican Council decreed that the Liturgy (the Mass) is the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed; at the same time it is the fountain from which all her powers flow. (Vat II. Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. 10).
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