I. Introduction and Purpose of the Talk

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Theology at the Eucharistic Table

I.  Introduction and Purpose of the Talk

A.  There is a temptation to talk about faith in understandable hunks, i.e. The Trinity, The Scripture, The study of Christ, the study of the Spirit, The Church, Sacraments, The Liturgy, Moral theology, and the Spiritual Life.

1.  The problem with this approach is that these element of our faith can seem to get a little too esoteric, separated from the realities of our lives and not seemingly related to one another.

B.  Abbott Jeremy Driscoll of Mount Angel Seminary and Monastery in Portland, Oregon, one of my professors at the Gregorian University wrote the book that is the title of this talk as an answer to this problem. His theory is that it is our celebration of the Eucharist that is the key to unlocking the spiritual power of all of these teachings within our faith. It is the Eucharist that synthesizes them and can inspire us to live out this faith in a powerful way. It will further help Catholics to understand and to be able to explain to others in a comprehensible way what difference does it make to my faith when I say I am a Catholic.

C.  Why is the Eucharist that which synthesizes theology.

1.  Irenaeus of Lyons – Our way of thinking is attuned to the Eucharist, and the Eucharist in turn confirms our way of thinking.”

2.  The Eucharist is what makes the Church what it is.

3.  From it unfolds all theology and this same theology in-folds back into the celebration of the Eucharist.

4.  There is a truism that has been expressed by the Fathers of the Church in this way – The law of belief follows from the law of prayer – Lex Orandi Lex Credendi.

a)  Fr. Driscoll puts it this way, “I want also to claim that there is for all theological reflection a foundational role which is to be assigned to the celebration of the liturgy and especially to the celebration of the Eucharist.

5.  This helps us to understand that the celebration of the Eucharist helps Catholics to understand the faith so that faith may be professed and celebrated ever more deeply and with ever greater understanding.

D.  We are presenting these themes of theology as the eight “Master Themes” presented by the Eucharist itself.

II.  The first Master Theme – Ecclesiology

A.  The Mass begins when an assembly forms – The coming together of many people into one place to pray under the headship of their bishop or priest is already a manifestation of the Church.

1.  The action of the Eucharist causes the Church to be; to do Eucharist is to be Church.

B.  Behind every baptized person who comes to celebrate the Eucharist stands a magnificent personal story of grace, of struggle and labor and rejoicing, and all these united around that persons faith.

C.  All of these baptized received their faith through others who have believed before them and passed it on.

D.  The Eucharist is the ultimate point of arrival of being Church and of the passing on of the faith.

E.  Faith brings together thousands of people together from hundreds of directions together in one place.

1.  This people disposes itself for undergoing divine action – the many will be made one.

2.  The many will be made one not by an action of their own devising, but by receiving from Christ himself that life that he receives from another, from his eternal Father.

3.  It is by receiving from the Lord what they themselves do not have and could never generate that these many who are gathered are brought into a unity which has divine origins. The name for that unity is the Church.

F.  The Eucharistic Celebration has many elements which express the divine nature of the ecclesial reality which is occurring – that it is Christ that is acting and the community is entirely defined and comes into being only through what he does and accomplishes.

1.  The person of the bishop or the priest represents Christ as head of the this assembly. It is he who gathers it; it is under his authority that it stands; it his word which is gratefully heard and pondered; it is together with him that the community will dare to speak a word back to the Father and make its thanksgiving offering to him.

G.  All this happens at a particular time and place.

1.  This particular time and place are made to expand and dilate and to contain the mystery of the universal Church across the world and across the centuries and across the heavens extending to the community of saints in heaven.

a.  In the Eucharistic Prayer the pope is named, and the local bishop and the bishops across the world who verify their communion in the faith with the pope and the apostolic faith.

b.  The saints of heaven are named

c.  The dead are remembered

d.  The year is boldly etched in the Easter Candle

e.  Virtually all the major questions in ecclesiology are contained here in ritual form and in the people who interact with the ritual.

III.  The Second Master Theme – The Scriptures

A.  Word and Sacrament together and one never understood without the reference to the other.

B.  The first major action of the Eucharistic Liturgy after assembling is the proclamation of the Word of God.

1.  Much of the time of the ritual is spent in understanding the Word.

2.  In the Liturgical Assembly the deepest encounter with the Word is achieved.

a.  The Scripture is not so much a book as a living word from God.

b.  A word that defines the very event that is underway.

c.  It is God’s intervention and offer of salvation in the here and now of a particular assembly.

3.  What is spoken in the proclamation of the word is repeated at a different and deeper level in the symbolic, sacramental action.

IV.  The Third Master Theme – The Paschal Mystery (Christology)

A.  If Word and Sacrament are considered the Forms of what happens in the Eucharistic Liturgy, then the Paschal Mystery is their content.

1.  In Theology this becomes Christology – all that can be asked and wondered about and explored concerning Jesus of Nazareth, who was crucified, who is proclaimed as raised from the dead by the Father, who sends the Holy Spirit to gather all peoples into his one body.

2.  Speculation on Christ must always be measured and ultimately judged by its conformity to the Christ-experience of the believing community in its Eucharistic celebration.

3.  It is in the Eucharistic celebration that the crucified and risen Lord manifests himself in word and sacrament and joins to his risen body all his faithful followers.

V.  The Fourth Master Theme – Anamnesis, Epiclesis, and Eschatology

A.  Anamnesis is a celebrative narration and remembering of the events of Christ’s Paschal Mystery – his death, resurrection, ascension, his coming again in glory – and an offering of these to the Father.

1.  In this remembering within the celebration the remembered past is rendered present in mystery and becomes the event which the assembly enacts and participates in.

2.  Such a reflection tries to understand and articulate how concrete, actual events from the past, can in the risen Christ, be present in a new time and place and form a new event, the liturgy, which derives from and was already contained in that past event.

B.  The Epiclesis is an invocation of the Father that he send the Holy Spirit upon the gifts for their transformation and that the Spirit fill those who receive the gifts.

1.  Nothing that happens at the Eucharistic liturgy is possible without the action of the Holy Spirit. This spurs theology to develop Pneumatology – a reflection on the role of the Holy Spirit in the salvation wrought by Christ.

2.  In the Epiclesis we move beyond the events of the past being brought into the present, to the future being brought into the present.

a.  The risen Christ already stands in that definitive future in which he is established by his glorification, and through him the Spirit descends from that future to be one body, one spirit in him.

C.  Eschatology is the reflection from theology of history itself and its significance all the way to consideration of the last things and the last times.

1.  The Eucharistic experience is the anchor and guide for these reflections, and what escapes the firm and definitive grasp of the inquiring mind is nonetheless again and encountered in the celebration. This leads the mind forward in this quest.

VI.  The Fifth Master Theme – the manifestation of the Trinitarian Mystery.

A.  The mystery of the Holy Trinity is the central content of Christian Revelation.

1.  Christian reflection has concentrated its attention on exploring the riches and treasures hidden in the figure of Christ, it is through this that it has come to an articulation of the one God in the three divine persons of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.

B.  The whole form of the Eucharistic Liturgy is thoroughly Trinitarian in its structure.

1.  The Trinitarian structure does not speak of Father, Son and Holy Spirit in the abstract but always in conjunction with the community formed by those who share this triune life – namely, the Church.

2.  In the Eucharist the Father gives himself through his Son to the world in the Church.

3.  In the Eucharist the Spirit illumines and vivifies every dimension of this gift.

4.  The Church responds in thanksgiving by offering to the Father the very gift she has received, the Son.

5.  The Spirit effects the transformation of the Church’s gifts into the Body and Blood of the Son.

6.  Many are one, through sharing in the death and resurrection of the Lord, in the oneness of Father, Son and Spirit.

VII.  The Sixth Master Theme – the Moral Life

A.  Theological Studies do not begin with this topic and for a good reason, for Christian moral theology is not merely the presentation of natural morality which all people of good will manage to value and pursue.

1.  It is at least this much but more.

2.  The catechism states what the Church professes in its creed, and celebrates in its Sacraments, require and make possible a new way of living.

3.  The sacraments render people capable of loving with God’s own love. We are called and equipped by Christ and the Sprit to love one another and all people not with whatever love we manage to muster but with the divine love which is communicated to us in the sacraments.

B.  In Christ God makes every man and woman new, he renews the whole creation and sets history itself on a new course.

1.  This is what takes place in the sacraments and especially the Eucharistic liturgy.

2.  Because I celebrate the Eucharist I must live differently.

3.  The Eucharist explains the very strong emphasis on justice and love of neighbor that distinquishes the Christian moral life.

C.  Saint Leo the Great – Christian, recognize your dignity and, now that you share in God’s own nature, do not return to your own former base condition by sinning. Remember who is your head and of whose body you are a member. Never forget that you have been rescued from the power of darkness and brought into the light of the Kingdom of God.

VIII.  The Seventh Master Theme – Spiritual Theology.

A.  The relationship with God which is expressed through prayer is a relationship not with the God of one’s own imagination but with the God professed and celebrated and lived in the Church.

B.  This is the theology produced by the Saints. The experience of the saints is also a kind of guarantee, a testimony, and an exploration of all that is professed, celebrated and lived in the Church.

IX.  The Eighth Master Theme - Missiology.

A.  Ite Missa Est.

B.  The whole celebration is called by its ultimate purpose – the task of evangelization.

1.  The Church does not exist for herself but for the sake of the world.

2.  Yet the Church – a collection of many human beings of all stripes and colors – has nothing to offer the world if she herself is not first transformed and made into the one body of Christ in whom she partakes of Trinitarian life.

a.  It is this that is meant to pass through the Church to the world and without this transformation there is no Church but only so many human beings of various stripes and colors.

C.  The Source and Summit of our Faith.

1.  The mission for charity and evangelization are linked together.

2.  The Gospel is not fully lived without this sharing

D.  The Christian faith cannot be accepted as just one more among a variety of religious options. When this view is accepted by Christians, even only half consciously, the sense of what Christian faith is slides toward an assessment of it which is more sociologically than theologically conceived.

1.  The celebration of the Eucharist is the strongest remedy against such tendencies. It is not possible to celebrate the Eucharist as the Church understands; it and come out from there assessing Christian faith as a relative value.

2.  One can only come out from the Eucharist as sent, sent with what is of ultimate and decisive value for the whole world.

X.  Conclusion

A.  All these master themes are deeply intertwined; they care not merely separate theological specializations. It is the Eucharistic celebration itself that reveals the way in which the themes are related.