|  Meditations Before Mass
by Romano Guardini
XXXI. The Mass and the New
Covenant
AMONG THE words Jesus used to
establish His memorial, there is one which as a rule receives little
notice in instruction on the Mass: the word about the covenant. St.
Matthew's Gospel reads: "All of you drink of this; for this is
the blood of the new covenant, which is being shed for many unto the
forgiveness of sins" (Matt. 26:29). St. Mark's: "This is
my blood of the new covenant, which is being shed for many"
(Mark 14:24). St. Luke's: "This cup is the new covenant in my
blood, which shall be shed for you" (Luke 22:20). In St. Paul's
first Epistle to the Corinthians we also find a reference to the
covenant, resembling that in Luke (1 Cor. 11:25). We see how
important the idea of the covenant is to the Church in the emphasis
she places on it. At the consecration of the wine in the Canon of
the Mass we have the words: "For this is the chalice of My
Blood, of the new and eternal testament: the mystery of faith: which
shall be shed for you and for many unto the remission of sins."
What exactly does this mean?
The Passover was a feast of
commemoration. We have already discussed the event it commemorated.
When the rulers of Egypt remained unmoved by Moses' threats and
God's lighter plagues, stubbornly refusing to let the Hebrew
captives go, the Lord God sent them the terrible plague of the death
of all their firstborn, human as well as animal. In order that it
might be perfectly clear who was being punished, the members of each
Jewish household were commanded to slaughter a lamb and daub the
door-posts of the house with its blood. Thus the angel of death
would pass them by, and their oppressors would be left in no doubt
that they alone were meant. That evening the lamb was to be consumed
by the joyfully united members of the household, and the solemn
feast was to be repeated annually in commemoration of the end of
Egyptian bondage. Jesus Himself had celebrated the Passover each
year with His disciples. But He had given the celebration a
different turn by emphasizing not so much the liberation as the
event following it: the sealing of the covenant of Sinai. The Book
of Exodus reports:
So Moses came and told the
people all the words of the Lord, and all the judgments. And all the
people answered with one voice: We will do all the words of the
Lord, which he hath spoken. And Moses wrote all the words of the
Lord: and rising in the morning he built an altar at the foot of the
mount, and twelve titles according to the twelve tribes of Israel.
And he sent young men of the children of Israel: and they offered
holocausts, and sacrificed pacific victims of calves to the Lord.
Then Moses took half of the blood and put it into bowls: and the
rest he poured upon the altar. And taking the book of the covenant,
he read it in the hearing of the people: and they said: All things
that the Lord hath spoken we shall do. We will be obedient. And he
took the blood and sprinkled it upon the people, and he said: This
is the blood of the covenant which the Lord hath made with you
concerning all these words" (Ex. 24:3-8).
The parallel is obvious. The
mediator on Sinai says: "This is the blood of the covenant
which the Lord hath made with you . . ." Jesus says: "This
is the chalice of My Blood, of the new and eternal testament . . .
which shall be shed for you."
Behind the covenant of Sinai
stands an earlier covenant, the one that existed between God and
Abraham. It too had been sealed in blood: After the sun had set and
a dark mist had risen, a lamplike fire passed between the
"divisions" [of the slaughtered, sacrificial animals].
"That day God made a covenant with Abram, saying: To thy seed
will I give this land, from the river of Egypt even to the great
river Euphrates" (Gen. 15:17-18). And still further back, in
the grey beginnings of time, looms the original covenant between God
and Noe, sealed after the Flood, when Noe offered sacrifice to the
Lord: ". . . and Noe built an altar unto the Lord: and taking
of all cattle and fowls that were clean, offered holocausts upon the
altar. And the Lord smelled a sweet savour, and said: I will no more
curse the earth for the sake of man: for the imagination and thought
of man's heart are prone to evil from his youth: therefore I will no
more destroy every living soul as I have done. All the days of the
earth, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, night
and day, shall not cease" (Gen. 8:20-22). "Behold, I will
establish my covenant with you, and with your seed after you.... And
God said: This is the sign of the covenant which I give between me
and you, and to every living soul that is with you, for perpetual
generations. I will set my bow in the clouds, and it shall I be the
sign of a covenant between me, and between the earth" (Gen.
9:8-13).
In all these texts we find
the reference to blood, often stressed again and again. This may
impress us as strange, inhuman, but we do well to refrain from
judging hastily by our twentieth-century reactions. Deep in the
consciousness of all races lies a knowledge of the power of blood.
Blood is life in its primary and most elementary form. Its flow
eases tension, appeases anger, averts the lowering fate, enables
life to reassume its course. How, it is impossible to say; we can
only sense the truth of this. Somehow, through the flowing of blood
a new beginning is made, mysteriously fortified by the sanguinary
life-power. Obviously, the primitive significance of blood cannot
simply be applied as it stands to revelation, for if ever anything
needed redemption, it is the dark, primeval powers of blood.
However, once existence has been transfigured, all things are
revealed anew, and with them the power of blood. It is significant
in the covenant not because it is symbolic of the glory and terror
of life, but because in a special way it belongs to God, the Lord of
all life. The flowing of the sacrificial blood in the Old Testament
is an acknowledgment of His sovereignty, signifying the opposite of
what it signifies in other religious sacrifices. It is not a kind of
blood-mysticism, not a release of the divinity in nature, not a
summoning of the powers of the deep. It has nothing to do with any
of these. It is simply the recognition and prayerful acknowledgment
that God alone is Lord!
Upon the conception of
streaming blood as an expression of ultimate obedience, then, God
places His covenant. And again we must be careful to differentiate.
The word does not signify here what it does in the various
religions, namely, the alliance of a divinity with a particular
tribe. There it constitutes the secret vitality of the tribe, which
in turn is the immediate expression of the god's reality. Thus the
two are interdependent to the point of being or non-being: the tribe
enjoys the power and protection of its god; on the other hand, the
god lives from the fertility and strength of the tribe. Their unity
is effected in sacrifice. Through his offerings man strengthens the
vitality of his god; then, by consuming the offerings, man avails
himself of his god's strength.
In the Old Testament there is
not a trace of any such conception. God is not the divinity of a
people or tribe because of any natural circumstance. He is not the
mysterious source of its vitality and strength, but One who summons
it from the freedom of divine decree. Certainly not because He needs
human expression of His existence and a steady stream of earthly
vitality in order to exist. He needs neither the Hebrew people nor
any other people, for He is Lord of all that is. He summons this
particular race not because it is better or more pious or more loyal
than another. On the contrary, over and over again it proves itself
disobedient, hard-hearted, and inconstant. What God founded with the
Hebrew people was neither a powerful theocracy nor a religion
expressive of a particular racial existence. He simply entrusted the
Hebrews with His word and His law, which they were to bear through
history, ultimately to all the peoples of the earth. Why He selected
the Hebrews for this task is the impenetrable mystery of His decree.
All this must be clear if the
word covenant is to receive its full weight. Above all, it is no
question of a natural give and take, no alliance between the divine
essence and the tribal, no blending of divine power with earthly, no
beginning of a history of God in the history of a race. Not until
all these conceptions have been cleared away does the inconceivable
reveal itself: in absolute freedom the Lord of the universe singles
out a people, addresses it and enables it to respond; He gives it
His loyalty and demands its loyalty in return. He undertakes a
divine task on earth and commands a race to render its services. If
that race renounces its natural-historical existence in obedience to
God's command, it will receive its fulfillment direct from divine
sovereignty.
But the Hebrew people
declined. They clung fast to their racial consciousness and will and
hardened themselves therein. When God's Son, whose coming had been
foretold throughout the centuries, comes to fulfill and end the
covenant, His relation to men again assumes the form of a covenant.
The people of the first covenant crowns its disobedience by turning
on the Messiah and killing Him; and the second covenant, which
should have been sealed in faith and love, once again is sealed in
sacrificial blood, now the blood of Jesus Christ. For the Messiah
accepts the destiny prepared for Him by the disobedient people of
the first covenant and turns it into the sacrificial offering of the
second, which binds the Father, Lord of the world, to His new
people, now no longer a natural ethnic one, but a spiritual people,
comprised by all the races of the earth and united by faith.
Wherever a man opens his heart to the tidings of Christ and believes
in Him, he becomes a member of that "people," as St. Peter
says in his first Epistle: "You, however, are a chosen race, a
royal priesthood, a holy nation, a purchased people; that you may
proclaim the perfections of him who has called you out of the
darkness into his marvellous light" (I Peter 2:9).
The new covenant, then,
embraces a divine people which takes nothing from any earthly people
and disturbs no national history, because it exists on an entirely
different plane.
It is strange how completely
the idea of the covenant has vanished from the Christian
consciousness. We do mention it, but it seems to have lost its
meaning for us; our Christian existence is determined by concepts of
the new life, the new world, God's kingdom, all of which tend to
attach themselves to corresponding concepts in the natural order and
to masquerade as things self-understood. But the moment of demasking
always arrives. Then the seeming naturalness of the Christian
conceptions falls, and we realize with a start that Christian being
is no mere continuation of natural being, that the Christian order
of existence is not simply a higher step in the order of nature and
man, but "descends" to us from divine freedom and is meant
to be caught up and held in human freedom. God summons man before
Him. Upon hearing the divine command and question, man is meant to
liberate himself from what is purely of this earth and to prove his
loyalty to God-straight through the ties of the world. What then
takes place is based not on nature, or the processes of history, or
the unfolding of the mind and spirit, but on grace, summons,
freedom, decision, all contained in the idea of the covenant. We are
Christians because of a covenant. This thought must complement the
other, more familiar concept of rebirth and the new creation.
Covenant and rebirth: individual dignity and responsibility, and the
abundance of the new life. The two great concepts belong together,
for they mutually sustain one another.
Holy Mass is the
commemoration of God's new covenant with men. Awareness of this
gives the celebration an added significance that is most salutary.
To keep this thought in mind is to remind ourselves that Christ's
sacrificial death opened for us the new heaven and the new earth;
that there exists between Him and us a contract based not on nature
or talent or religious capacity, but on grace and freedom; that it
is binding from person to person, loyalty to loyalty. At every Mass
we should reaffirm that contract and consciously take our stand in
it.
|
