Catholic Sacrifice in the Mass
Ordinary Sunday 17: 30th July, 2000
The Rev'd Dr Colin Holden
Assistant Priest and Archivist, St Peter's Eastern Hill
One high priest after another must stand there day by day offering again and again the same sacrifices, which can never take away our sins; whereas he sits forever at the right hand of God, offering for our sins a sacrifice that is never repeated. Hebrews 10: 11
The epistle to the Hebrews can rightly claim a special place in the reading of Catholic Anglicans, and for all the very best reasons. In terms of New Testament Greek, it is a polished and stylish piece of writing. It is perfectly appropriate therefore to quote this morning from Monsignor Ronald Knox's felicitous translation, which does not suffer as so many of the most recent translations, from a degree of paraphrase that amounts to a dumbing down of the text. Its author remains unknown, and biblical scholarship offers more than one possible community as its origin or destination. The is the anecdote still told by some here in the sanctuary of the pre-1964 subdeacon who intoned the introduction to a reading from this epistle as A reading from the Epistle of Blessed Paul the Apostle to the Hebrews, and was greeted by Father Maynard with the comment 'You have provided a solution to a problem that has been puzzling scholars for some time'.
It began to receive special attention from high church Anglicans in the seventeenth century. Its picture of Jesus offering a sacrifice at Calvary which was complete, but offering to the end of time a high priestly prayer as a continual act of intercession in heaven, was interpreted by them to mean that at a heavenly altar in a sanctuary beyond this world, Jesus was engaged in a continuing priestly and sacrificial work. It was seen by a number of Anglicans as an ideal way of articulating a theology of sacrifice related to the eucharist, which could bypass areas still seen to be controversial and divisive between Anglicans and Roman Catholics. Because its focus was on what Jesus is doing now in eternity, it did not run any risk of suggesting that the offering of the liturgy on earth was a new offering, or was an action in which Christ was crucified again. It was attractive because it offered a sense of continuity between Jesus' death on Calvary and something else that was continuous and eternal - His prayer in the presence of the Father (elaborated into a picture of Jesus praying at a heavenly altar). It offered an understanding of the eucharist as offered on earth that was at once dynamic and possessing a real sense of mystery: what happens when we offer the eucharist on earth is that we join in that continuous intercession of Jesus in His Father's presence. There is a strong sense of a vertical dimension in worship here. Here is one of the great 17th century Anglican spiritual writers, Jeremy Taylor. Discussing the eucharist in language taken from the Epistle to the Hebrews:
Whatsover Christ did at the institution, the same he commanded the Church to do in remembrance and repeated rites; and himself also does the same thing in heaven for us, making perpetual intercession for his church, the body of his redeemed ones, by representing to His Father his death and sacrifice: there He sits a high priest continually, and offers still the same one perfect sacrifice . . . and this also his ministers do on earth, they offer up the same sacrifice to God, the sacrifice of the Cross by prayers, and a commemorating rite, and representment according to His holy institution . . . .
17th century Anglicans likewise used these images derived from the Epistle to the Hebrews as a basis for visual aids. More than one Anglican devotional book has a frontispiece that shows a very austere eucharistic celebration on earth, but above the congregation and celebrant, a Jesus in heaven kneels offering His perpetual prayer at another altar. The implication of these visuals is clear: the earthly rite, with all its imperfection and finiteness, its words that try to approach an ineffable and inexpressible mystery, is a means for entry into, and participation in the other. It is an almost neo-Platonic approach: the ideal sacrificial offering is being presented by Jesus in a perfect state, beyond time and space; if there is something transcendant, something that offers an encounter with the timeless here, it is because our earthly eucharist for a brief moment in time intersects with that other offering.
An attraction to concepts drawn from the Epistle for the Hebrews didn't stop with the 17th century men of prayer. It reappears in 19th and 20th century theology, and in hymnody. Among our hymns, 'Once only, once, and once for all, His precious life He gave', is in many ways an excellent summary of the whole position, though it doesn't stress the extent to which the earthly eucharist participates in the heavenly, in the way that Chatterton Dix does in 'Alleluya! Sing to Jesus' (whose imagery is derived from a variety of biblical and theological sources, and does not by any means rely solely on Hebrews). It reappears in Michael Ramsey, as he considered the priest as a person of prayer, and took as the text for his address on this subject 'He always lives to make intercession for them'. He described the eucharist as 'the supreme way in which the people of Christ are, through our great high priest, with God [and] with the world around on their hearts'.
What does it offer us today here in Australia? In many ways, the same things. But I think that its appeal might be even stronger. The image of Christ as great high priest interceding for us in Hi s Father's presence , an intercession in which we can be caught up, might have even more attraction in the face of the increasing sense of the transient, the temporary and ephemeral that dominates much of mainstream culture at the moment. It offers us a powerful reminder that the temporary is not all that there is, nor is it the only dimension in which we can participate. It is true that much of our intercession on earth, if we seek to be regular about it, seems faltering and very much in the realm of the transitory. Much of it, if persisted with, is sheer hard work, without any instant breakthrough to another dimension. Nevertheless, for those who have experienced it, t6hat other dimension is there, even if it is for much of the time a distant background murmur, or a powerful recollection of a split second in time in which we were catapulted into another dimension.
It also offers an alternative to a sense of isolation. Many Australians earlier in our history sensed isolation in terms of distance and its tyranny. In 1914, just before the outbreak of the First World War, Frederick Goldsmith, the first bishop of Bunbury in Western Australia, presided over a motley collection of tiny isolated settlements, most of them parish districts, one representing a territory that was a fair proportion of Great Britain. He had the advantage of the most highly educated group of clergy, Oxford and Cambridge graduates of good standing back in England (and even one Dublin LLD), that the diocese has ever had. Goldsmith encouraged the formation of a support prayer group with members in England and Australia; he was convinced that despite the daunting distance and isolation, prayer could still make available a dimension that transcended that transcended it. He reminded those who felt that they were ekeing out their lives in a very isolated corner of the British Empire, oceano divisi, eucharistia conjugimur: though divided by the high sea, we are made one in the eucharist (an inscription that was embroidered on at least one rural West Australian altar frontal).
Today, we may well feel at times a different dimension of isolation, that of isolation from much of the culture around us, and from others who share our faith, many of whom may seem scattered, rather than part of a powerful backing community. Yet we are still called to believe that not only the intermittent and sometimes halting prayer that we carry on, but a real awareness of the intercession continually offered by Jesus Himself, can enable us to transcend that sense of isolation in the face of an indifferent or hostile culture.
I have been unable to find any poetry inspired by the Epistle to the Hebrews: instead, as I close, I return to Jeremy Taylor, and a passage from his Holy Living that encapsulates many of the themes already referred to:
God is especially present in the hearts of his people, by his Holy Spirit: and indeed the hearts of holy men are temples in the truth of things, and, in type and shadow, they are heaven itself. For God reigns in the hearts of his servants: there is his kingdom. The power of grace hath subdued all his enemies: there is his power. They serve him night and day, and give him thanks and praise: that is his glory. This is the religion and worship of God in the temple. The temple itself is the heart of man; Christ is the high-priest, who from thence sends up the incense of prayers, and joins them with his own intercession, and presents all together to his Father; and the Holy Ghost by his dwelling there, hath also consecrated it into a temple; and God dwells in our hearts by faith, and Christ by his Spirit, and the Spirit by his purities; so that we are also cabinets of the mysterious Trinity; and what is this short of heaven itself, but as infancy is short of manhood, and letters of words? The same state of life it is, but not the same age. It is heaven in a looking-glass, dark, but yet true, representing the beauties of the soul, and the graces of God, and the images of his eternal glory, by the reality of a special presence.
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