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Thy life shall be as it were hanging before thee. Deut. 28
Last time, I'm afraid, we left off in the middle of a sentence. The bit of the Mass we are corning to now begins with a participle, Communicantes, and the sentence goes on for rather over twenty lines without any main verb in it. And I am sure that any of you who do Latin have been told that you must never write a sentence without a main verb in it. Some clever people think this participle, Communicantes, is just hanging in the air; like when you send a person a Christmas card which just says WISHING YOU A HAPPY CHRISTMAS-there is no main verb in that; or when you end your letter home, " hoping this finds you as it leaves me "-there is no main verb in that. But I don't believe that's so here. I think the participle agrees with the last set of people who have been mentioned; and that is YOU. In corning to Mass, in offering your intentions at Mass, you are uniting yourselves with the great string of saints which follows. Et memoriam venerantes-uniting yourselves in a rather distant, apologetic way, making a kind of mental curtsy to our Blessed Lady and St. Peter and all the rest of them. But you do, nevertheless, unite yourself in thought with this string of saints; you take your place, as it were, at the end of the queue. We have already reminded ourselves that the Mass is all one, and that all Christians hearing Mass in all parts of the world are present in chapel when we have Mass here. But now we see that the thing goes wider than that; the Saints in heaven, too, from our Lady downwards are part of it all; you, as a faithful Christian, are holding hands with the next person, so to speak, and she with the next person, and so on and on and back and back and up and up till you get to our Blessed Lady herself.
I don't think we need worry if we don't know all about the saints whose names appear on the list; when we have finished the apostles we go on to the early popes and the early martyrs who suffered at Rome. But, of course, they are only specimens; it's like when you are doing an exam, and you finish up the last question with a scrawl that says NO TIME FOR MORE; either because you hadn't time for any more or because you don't know anything else to say in answer to that particular question. St. Pius V cut down the list, as he cut down everything else in the Mass; " No time for more " seems to have been his motto. But they are all meant to be there really, all your favourite saints, and you are quite right to think of them if you care to, instead of people like St. Cornelius and St. Chrysogonus, who were very holy men, but don't somehow ring a bell.
The server does ring a bell at this point. If I have blown my nose or made any other unexpected gesture with my hands since the Sanctus, he has probably rung it already by mistake, but this is the place where it is supposed to come, just after the list of saints, when I hold my hands extended over the chalice like that. The bell, this time, is really meant to wake you up, unless you want a dig in the back from Mother Clare; it wouldn't do to leave you snoozling on till the actual moment of Consecration you have got to be ready for it when it comes. And the gesture I make, together with the signs of the Cross which I make immediately afterwards, are a kind of blessing, rather like the blessing I give you when you are going away for the holidays. I give it at Mass to the bread and wine, when they are just going off on a journey, the strangest journey imaginable. They are going to transcend the order of nature altogether. Meanwhile, I ask Almighty God to accept this offering, made on our behalf but also on behalf of his whole family; we never get away from that point, you see-the Mass is all one. I ask that the bread and wine may be blessed; that they may be set apart; that God's promise in connexion with them shall be ratified, that is, shall be kept; that they shall form a reasonable sacrifice, and therefore an acceptable sacrifice. We do not, under the Christian dispensation, offer to God dumb animals or lifeless things, but it will be all right about the bread and wine, because, once consecrated, they will be built into the human Body of our Lord Jesus Christ. And finally, I ask that they may be accepted. Then, with two more signs of the Cross, I ask God to perform this miracle of Transubstantiation.
What happens if the priest falls down dead at this point?
The answer to that is that you say one Hail Mary for my soul and go back to breakfast; there is nothing special that needs to be done about it; I mean about the Mass. For all intents and purposes it hasn't started yet. Three minutes later, when the Consecration has happened, if the priest who is celebrating the Mass falls dead or is taken gravely ill, any other priest who can be got hold of must finish off the Mass, even if he isn't fasting; even if he is under ecclesiastical discipline and is forbidden in the ordinary way to celebrate any Sacrament at all. There are a lot of exciting rubrics like that at the beginning of the big Latin Missal, which aren't printed in the book you use. I only mention the circumstance here so as to ram home the fact that the really important moment of the Mass has now arrived. True, the Mass is all one; true, all the bits we have been talking about in the last few sermons I've given you are really part of the sacrifice. But if the Consecration doesn't happen, all that goes for nothing; it's like the burnt faggots that lie about in the grate when the coal has never lit. It is only with the Consecration that the sacrifice of the Mass is achieved.
I have represented the Mass to you, more than once, as a kind of ritual dance. And here, at this most solemn part of it, I think you can say with all reverence that it becomes a kind of ritual drama. The priest finds himself, almost absent-mindedly, acting the part of Jesus Christ. In consecrating, he recalls the history of Maundy Thursday evening; just in a few sentences which include the actual words in which the Sacrament was instituted. But he is not content merely to tell the story; he acts it; he suits the action to the word.
When he says the words " he took bread " or " he took the cup ", the priest suits the action to the word. So, too, at the words, " lifting up his eyes to Heaven " the priest lifts up his own eyes to Heaven. That is a curious point; none of the Gospels mention that our Lord did that; St. Paul in the Corinthians doesn't mention that our Lord did that. Was it just a guess? Or has the rite of the Roman Mass preserved, by a tradition that has lasted nineteen centuries and more, a detail which the sacred authors omitted to mention? I don't know; we shall never know. But that is a digression. What I am trying to explain to you is that the priest does, here, act a part, and the part of our Blessed Lord himself. Isn't that, perhaps, rather an irreverent idea? Why, no; because this isn't ordinary acting, like the plays you act here. When you act, you pretend that somebody is there who isn't there, King Henry the Eighth or Macbeth or somebody. But the priest, in this interval of drama, doesn't pretend that somebody is there who isn't there. Jesus Christ is really there; there's no pretending about it. He is really there, not merely in the sacred Host, but also in the person of the priest. We mustn't say that the priest is Jesus Christ; that would be blasphemy and nonsense. No, but the priest has become a kind of dummy through which, here and now, Jesus Christ is consecrating the Sacrament, just as he did, but in his own person, nineteen hundred years ago.
The most obvious symbol of that is the fact that, between the Consecration and the ablutions, the priest keeps the thumb and first finger of either hand pressed close together, except when he is actually holding the sacred Host between them. The practical purpose of that is obvious; there may be some tiny crumb of the Host sticking to his fingers, and there must be no danger of its dropping. But, as I say, it seems to me the thing is an excellent symbol; a symbol of the fact that the priest, when he consecrates, is turning himself into a kind of slave, a kind of tool; he is abandoning the use of his bodily muscles and lending them to Jesus Christ; he is turning himself into a kind of dummy for Jesus Christ to use exactly as he wants to. You probably couldn't turn a key in the door by taking it between your first finger and your middle finger; at least, you would do it clumsily. I could, because that is the way every priest turns the key of the tabernacle when he gives Communion during Mass; he can't separate his thumb and first finger. I say he can't; I mean he mustn't; but the habit so grows upon you, if you're a priest, that you feel as if it was impossible to separate them; they've got stuck like that, as your mother told you that your face would get stuck if the wind changed while you were making faces.
I've been labouring that point about the priest identifying himself with Jesus Christ in the Mass because that is the thing you ought to be doing, first and foremost, while the Consecration is happening; you want to identify yourself with Jesus Christ, with Jesus Christ being offered there in the sacred Host.
What you come to Mass for isn't to worship Jesus Christ present in the Sac:ament of the altar; that isn't Mass, that's Benediction. You come to Mass to offer Jesus Christ with the priest, and to offer yourself to God with Jesus Christ and as a part of Jesus Christ. Of course it's true that at the actual moment when the priest elevates you are taught to look up and say, " My Lord and my God "; look up again when he elevates the chalice, though I have never found any book which gave you any prayer to say when the priest elevates the Chalice. But that is just politeness; obviously you couldn't allow our Blessed Lord to become specially present, close at your side, without saying "How do you do?" to him; but that is not what you came to Mass for. You came to Mass to offer him to God, and yourself with him.
Possibly you will complain that you have heard a lot about this before; long ago, when we were talking about the Offertory., I was saying that when we give the priest bread and wine to perform the sacrifice with, we are really meant to be presenting ourselves, our souls and bodies, as a living sacrifice to God. Yes, I know, but that act of oblation you were making earlier on in the Mass was only a kind of rehearsal for the great act of oblation which you ought to be making now. A kind of rehearsal. I'm not sure that isn't rather a good way of putting it. Most of you are rather mad. on acting, so you'll understand what I mean when I say that there is all the difference in the world between rehearsing your lines, even at a dress rehearsal, and having to speak them on the night. The footlights and the audience, somehow, make all the difference. Really, of course, if you break down and make a fool of yourself it will be a great relief and delight to the audience; it will make their day for them. But that side of the picture doesn't present itself to your mind, does it, when you actually step into the glare of the footlights. You have ceased to be just yourself, and have become a part of the cast; you throw yourself into the thing instinctively, not bothering in the least about the audience and whether they are enjoying themselves. Well, there's the same sort of difference between the Offertory at Mass and the Consecration at Mass; one's the rehearsal, the other's the real thing.
So I would say, don't make too much of that glance which you give when the Host is elevated, and of the prayer which goes with it ;-let it be only a momentary burst of recognition. Then relax the effort of your mind, and let yourself be carried away on the stream of intercession which is going on all round you when Jesus Christ is there. Don't get worked up about whether you are praying well or not, just stand down and let our Lord do the praying for you. He has taken over our sacrifice, and he is going to offer it for us.
At this point above all in the Mass, don't bother to try to follow in a book if you find your prayers come easier without. But if you should be following in the book, you will see that the next bit which comes after the Consecration says just what we should want to say. Priest and people (the priest is careful, once more, to associate the whole of the congregation with him, it is their sacrifice, not his) priest and people remind themselves of our Lord's Passion, Resurrection and Ascension. The last three events of his life; and this new meeting with him reminds us of them all. The Christ who left us at the Ascension has come back to us; the Christ who triumphed over matter by rising from the dead comes back to us under the forms of lifeless things, bread and wine; the Christ who offered himself for us through suffering is impassible now, but offers himself still. With all this in mind, we present to God the oblation we are making to him out of his own gifts to us; his own gifts of bread and wine - but what a change has come over them! Bread, that was meant to sustain our bodies just for a few hours, now ready to bring us eternal life; wine, that might be used to cheer us up just for an evening, now implanting unfailing health in our souls! God's gifts, but so far beyond our ordinary human reach that we are ashamed to accept them; we offer to give them back to him. " No, really, Lord, it's awfully good of you, but we've no right to such gifts as these; please take them back! " We must offer to give them back, offer to share them with him, before we can reconcile ourselves to the idea of actually consuming them, the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ.
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