This is the first of two installments in a series taken from two lectures given by Oblate School of Theology President Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI, during December.
J. Michael Parker
For Today’s Catholic
SAN ANTONIO • The Eucharist has many dimensions, Father Ron Rolheiser, OMI, told about 300 listeners during a recent three-week lecture series at the Oblate Renewal Center.
Rolheiser, whose latest book is to be on the Eucharist and is to be published soon, spoke of 10 dimensions of the sacrament: The Eucharist as God’s physical embrace, an intensification of our unity within the body of Christ, the new manna, a meal, sacrifice, memorial, reconciliation, a commitment to “wash each other’s feet,” a sustaining health ritual and vigil — a communal ritual of waiting.
Two of those — sacrifice and memorial — have been controversial.
Protestants have argued that Jesus sacrificed himself once and for all time. But Father Rolheiser’s insights on sacrifice suggest that many people, Catholic and Protestant, have an inadequate understanding of the term.
For example, most people commonly think of sacrifice as giving up something we want in order to help somebody else. But Father Rolheiser said it really means giving something back and is connected with the nature of gift-giving.
“By definition, a gift is something we don’t deserve, and we have an instinctive, healthy human reaction to gifts: ‘I don’t deserve it,’ or ‘You shouldn’t have,’ or ‘I can’t take this,’” the priest said.
“When the giver ignores the refusal and insists on giving the gift, it becomes easier to accept. That’s when it really becomes a gift,” the priest said. “It’s a gift because the receiver has recognized precisely that it’s freely given. Every gift has to be given twice to be truly a gift.”
The biblical story of Abraham and Isaac illustrated the point. God gave Isaac to Abraham as his firstborn son, but then asked him to kill Isaac as a sacrifice.
Abraham was about to kill his son when God sent an angel to stay the patriarch’s hand, allowing Isaac to live.
“When Abraham returned down the mountain afterward, Isaac was truly his son,” Father Rolheiser.
“Giving a gift back is our only way of trying to receive gifts without guilt. All cultures suffer guilt complexes. Catholics blame it on our religious training and think we invented guilt. Presbyterians assure us that we’re amateurs at it,” he said. People of other faiths also think they invented guilt, the priest said.
But guilt doesn’t come from religion, he said; in fact, it’s much older than religion.
“Guilt comes from taking gifts for granted. Sacrifice — the act of giving something back — erases guilt. Good givers don’t take the gift back; they give it a second time — and the second time, we appreciate it more.”
Much of the controversy over the concept of sacrifice in the Mass stems from the idea of Jesus giving us his body and blood a second time. Yet Jesus himself linked the Eucharistic feast with his sacrifice on Calvary, an act of love to his father and a sacrifice freely given.
“He tied his passion, death and resurrection to the act of celebrating the Eucharist at the Last Supper when he said, ‘This is my body’ and ‘This is my blood.’”
“Jesus chose to die, and he said, ‘Nobody takes my life from me, but I lay it down on my own. I have power to lay it down, and power to take it up again.’”
Catholics, he said, have been accused of saying the Mass is “magic” because the bread and wine is changed into Jesus’ body and blood. But the power to change the elements is Christ’s power and doesn’t depend on the priest.
“Protestants, in their own way, consider their own worship services ‘magic,’” Father Rolheiser said, in the sense that the services are meant to transform participants. But in neither case does transformation depend on the priest or minister.
“It’s Christ’s action; we’re just plugging into something. (A priest or minister) is just the electrician who turns on the switch.”
The Eucharist is also a memorial for Catholics in the same sense that the Passover Seder is for Jews. It isn’t about making the person of Jesus present, the priest said. “It’s about making his passion, death, resurrection, ascension and Pentecost present.
“When Jews celebrate the Passover Seder, they don’t just remember the Exodus and their forefathers going through the Red Sea. They believe that when they eat the ritual foods (bitter herbs, lamb and matzo) and recite the story of passing through the Red Sea, they are re-enacting this great event in history. As they remember it, it’s happening to them.”
The Eucharist, Father Rolheiser said, is the Christian equivalent of the Passover celebration.
“Jews memorialize the great saving event of their history, the Exodus; we memorialize the great saving events of our history — Jesus’ passion and death, resurrection, ascension and Pentecost.
The point of the Jewish Seder meal, he said, is the belief that the Exodus is happening to the participants today, not just that it happened to Moses and the ancient Israelites.
“We go to Mass to enter into the great mystery of our salvation,” Father Rolheiser said. “The Eucharistic Prayer says that we gather to make a memorial of the great mystery of our salvation,” he said.
Some bishops in Father Rolheiser’s native Western Canada have stopped allowing Communion services led by nuns or lay parishioners, the priest said. The reason is that people came to like them too much.
“They seemed to be getting everything at a lower cost. But what was missing? The Eucharistic prayer. They got communion, but they didn’t get the memorial of the event,” he said.
The priest said that much of the controversy over the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharist can be traced to the fact that the debates have been overlaid with Aristotle’s ideas of metaphysics.
“People apply different metaphysical language to describe how bread and wine become Jesus’ body and blood, and some Protestants have accused Catholics of “cannibalism” because of the language used,” he said. But he added: “If you bite into the host, it doesn’t bleed; but it’s not merely symbolic, either.”
Father Rolheiser used an analogy of sewing red, white and blue pieces of cloth together to make a United States flag. “The pieces of cloth don’t change, but their meaning changes,” he said. “Everybody understands that what is has been made is a flag.”
Father Rolheiser is an author of popular books on spirituality for general audiences, including The Holy Longing, The Shattered Lantern, Lost Among the Lilies and Against An Infinite Horizon.