[T]
he progressives [say] that with the traditional form of celebrating the Mass the Church has strayed far from the original intentions of the Lord. The Lord, they say, held a simple meal of fellowship with his disciples, and he said: “Do this in remembrance of me!” But it is precisely this that the Church does not do, they say; rather, she has made of it yet another sacral cultic ritual; she has reworked the whole thing into the Mass, has surrounded it with richly decorated cathedrals and with an imposing and sublime Liturgy, and has thus altered beyond recognition the simple nature of what Jesus commanded us to do.
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Jesus did not, it is said, cal for any kind of cult of liturgy, but just an everyday meal of fellowship, when he said: “Do this!” Plausible though this objection may seem, as soon as we listen more carefully to Holy Scripture and refuse to be satisfied with superficialities, it becomes clear to us that it is untrue. For Jesus did not command his disciples to repeat the Last Supper as such and as a whole; this would in any case not have been possible, as it was a Passover meal. But Passover is an annual festival, with a quite specific date in the lunar calendar, which comes around just once a year. No more than I can keep Christmas whenever I feel like it can the Passover just be continually repeated. Jesus did not give the command to repeat, as a whole, this Jewish liturgy that he had kept with his people – this, as we said, would have been impossible. His command to repeat something referred to the new element he was presenting to them, to his gift of himself, which he had instituted within the old setting of the worship of Israel. we are thus presented with the essential element, but it has not yet found a new Christian form. Not until the moment when, through the Cross and the Resurrection and the story that followed, the Church emerged from within Israel as an independent community could this new gift find its own new form.
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Jewish worship had two elements. One was the sacrificial worship in the Temple, where in accordance with what the law prescribed the various sacrifices were offered. Side by side with this Temple worship, which took place, and could only take place, in Jerusalem, a second element was steadily developing: the synagogue, which could be set up anywhere. Here the service of the word was celebrated, the Holy Scriptures were read, the Psalms were sung, people joined in praising God, hearing the Word of God interpreted, and making petitions to God. After the Resurrection of Jesus, his followers ceased to take part in the sacrificial cult in the Temple. They could no longer do so, for the curtain in the Temple was torn, that is, the Temple was empty. It was no longer that stone building that was the Temple, but the Lord, who had opened a way for the Father, from himself, into humanity. In place of the Temple there is the Eucharist, since Christ is the true Pascal Lamb; everything that ever took place in the Temple has been fulfilled in him.
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The basic Christian worship, as we keep it up to the present day in the Church’s Eucharist, was thereby completed. It looks like this: At the beginning is the service of the Word, consisting of readings from the Old and New Testaments, songs from the Psalms, new prayers, and the joyous greeting of the Lord, the Kyrie, which is the transformation of the ancient cry of homage to the emperor into the cry in homage to Christ as the true Lord of the world. There follows the eucharistic worship itself, … the Canon, as an inclusive “Sacrifice of the Word”, grew directly out of the prayer of Israel and of Jesus, given substance now with the narrative and action from the Last Supper as its new heart and also with Holy Communion. Thus, out of the inner logic of Jesus’ giving of himself, the shape of the Mass sprang. It developed without any break, as the fulfillment of the original command; and now that it had completed this development, it stood open to receive the wealth of the Temple, the wealth of the nations.
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Those attempts to tell us that we should “get back” to a simple profane meal, to multipurpose areas and so on, are only in appearance a return to the origins. In reality, they are a step back behind the turning point of the Cross and the Resurrection, that is, behind the essentials that are the basis for Christianity in all its novelty. This is not restoring the original state, but abandoning the mystery of Easter and, thereby, the very center of the mystery of Christ.
