Autor: Haaland, Janne Matlary

Buch: Veruntreute Menschenrechte

Titel: Veruntreute Menschenrechte

Stichwort: Eucharistie: als Opfern und Sakrament; eucharistisches Hochgebet: Wechsel: "wir" - "ich"; Priester in persona Christi;

Kurzinhalt: ... , the Eucharist is the same sacrifice as the one offered by Jesus on the cross, and yet the eucharistic celebration and the death of Christ on Calvary are two different historical events. How can the same redemptive action be achieved at different ...

Textausschnitt: 2 EUCHARISTIC PERSPECTIVES

13a Thomas Aquinas says that the Eucharist is both a sacrament and a sacrifice.1 It is a sacrament insofar as it spiritually nourishes us, a sacrifice insofar as it is offered by the Church to God. Let us dwell on the Eucharist as a sacrifice, and let us develop two lines of thought. (Fs)

First, the Eucharist is the same sacrifice as the one offered by Jesus on the cross, and yet the eucharistic celebration and the death of Christ on Calvary are two different historical events. How can the same redemptive action be achieved at different times and places? Clearly, a special sense of sameness and otherness is at issue in the Eucharist, one quite different from the identities and differences we encounter in our ordinary worldly experiences. The new sense of sameness and otherness needs to be clarified theologically. (Fs)

13b Some light may be shed on this question by our second line of thought, in which we examine the perspectives from which the eucharistic celebration presents the sacrifice of Christ. Most of the prayers said by the priest during the Mass are stated in the first person plural. The priest says that "we" come before God and pray, and he asks for blessings and forgiveness for "us." He prays in the name of the congregation and the whole Church. In particular, all the prayers in the eucharistic prayer are expressed in the first person plural. From the prayer of thanksgiving in the Preface, through the invocation of the Holy Spirit, through the memorial and offering that follow the institutional narrative, through the intercessions and final doxology, the priest addresses God the Father by expressing "our" thanks, praise, and petition.2 At the central point of the Canon, however, within the context set by the prayers spoken by "us," and within the narrative describing the Last Supper, which is also stated by "us," the celebrant begins to quote the words of Jesus at the Last Supper and, within this quotation, he speaks in the first person singular: "This is my body.... This is the cup of my blood." Correlated with this quotational use of the first person singular is a citational use of the second person plural, referring to those whom Christ addressed: "Take this, all of you, and eat it. ... Take this, all of you, and drink from it." The same form is used when the priest, speaking in the voice of Christ, says that his body "will be given up for you," and that his blood "will be shed for you and for all."

14a This change of person, even within a quotation, is dramatic and profound. It is not merely a grammatical change. The words express a change of perspective, a difference in intentionality and disclosure. We as a group of Christians at worship, we as addressing the Father, living in our own present time and place, scattered into countless celebrations of the Eucharist all over the earth, "we" are now all brought together to the single time, place, and perspective from which Jesus, at the Passover he celebrated with his disciples, anticipates his own sacrificial death. The one event on Calvary that we commemorate and reenact was first anticipated, before it occurred, by Jesus. It was anticipated and accepted by him as the will of the Father. In our eucharistic liturgy, through our quotation, we join in the perspective he had on the event that was to take place, that has taken place. (Fs)

15a St. Thomas observes that the use of the first person singular in the eucharistic consecration is different from its usage in the other sacraments. In the cases of baptism and penance, for example, when the minister of the sacrament says, "I baptize you," or "I absolve you from your sins," he speaks in his own voice. Aquinas says that the "form" or verbal expression of such sacraments is stated "by the minister speaking in his own person."3 The minister, speaking as a minister of the Church, expresses himself as the one doing the baptizing and the one forgiving sins. In the Eucharist, however, the "my" stated in the words of consecration is the first person singular uttered by Christ and only quoted by the priest. St. Thomas says that the words expressed in this sacrament are now spoken as though spoken by Christ himself: "The minister who accomplishes this sacrament does nothing except to state the words of Christ."4 In the words used by the encyclical Mediator Dei and taken from St. John Chrysostom, the priest "lends his tongue and gives his hand" to Christ: his tongue allows Christ's words to be stated again, and his hand allows Christ's gesture of taking the bread and the wine to be carried out again.5 The priest's gesture is an analogue to the verbal citation; it is a kind of quotation of the bodily movement. The citation of the words and the quotation of the gesture allow the things taken up and spoken about—the bread and the wine—to become the same in substance as those that were taken up by the Lord. (Fs) (notabene)

16a It is true, of course, that Christ is the ultimate agent in all the sacraments, but the presentational form in which his agency is carried out is distinctive in the Eucharist; the words used in baptism and in absolution, for example, are not the quoted words of Christ. When Christ told his apostles to "make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit" (Matthew 28:19), he was not at that moment performing what his words described; he was not baptizing. When he said to his disciples, "Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained" (John 20:22-23), he was not at that moment forgiving sins. Baptism and absolution are not the reenactment of any particular action of either baptizing or absolving carried out by Christ. But when Jesus told the apostles to "do this in memory of me" (Luke 22:19), he referred not just to something they should do but to what he himself was doing.6 Whenever they would do it, they would reenact the same thing he accomplished when he spoke the words. (Fs) (notabene)

16b The interplay of the first-person plural ("we") and the first-person singular ("I") occurs within the wider context of the liturgical celebration of the Eucharist, which develops in a beautiful progression of stages. First, there are the introductory greetings, prayers, and rituals, in which the local community is assembled: the Church is actualized into this time and place, into this particular church, this particular manifestation of the Body of Christ. Second, once assembled, the community listens and responds to the word of God in the scriptural readings and responsorial psalm, as well as in the application made to the present in the homily and the prayer of the faithful. Third, having assembled and heard God's word, the community, now acting even more explicitly through the priest, carries out its eucharistic action, which ends in the "application" that occurs in communion, as the altar becomes the table of the eucharistic meal. The eucharistic action can be carried out only by the baptized; although catechumens can share in the initial assembly and in hearing the word of God, they cannot, in principle, participate in the offering of the eucharistic sacrifice and the reception of the eucharistic meal; only those who are formally members of the Body of Christ can do so. Eucharistically the catechumens can listen but they cannot yet act. (Fs)

17a The three stages of the Mass involve many presences of Christ in his Church: the community itself establishes a particular presence of the Body of Christ, Christ is present in the minister who celebrates the Eucharist, he is present in the Scriptures read during the liturgy of the Word, and he becomes sacramentally present as he is both offered in sacrifice and received in communion during the liturgy of the Eucharist.7 These presences are graded in intensity, leading up to the real presence of Christ that occurs when the bread and wine are changed in their substance into the Body and Blood of the Lord: "The Word assembles the Church for his incarnation in her."8 Moreover, there is a graded order among those who participate in the Eucharist, particularly between the priest and the congregation. This order emerges not because of any personal qualities of the individual celebrant, but because the ordained celebrant represents Christ the Lord. The liturgy culminates in the assumption of the voice of the celebrant by the quoted words and voice of Christ. In a sacramentally and grammatically perceptible way, Christ becomes the speaker of the words of institution and the doer of the gestures associated with them. The appearances of the words and gestures of institution become, through quotation, those of Christ, as the "we" of the community, the Body of Christ, becomes the "I" of Christ the Head of his Body the Church (Ephesians 1:22-23). (Fs) (notabene)

17b The distinctive role of the priest in the Eucharist has been explained in various ways. He is a representative of the bishop and hence a link between the particular community and the universal Church. He does not only come from and represent the local community, but has been sent to it: first by the bishop, more remotely by the apostles, and ultimately by Christ; in this sense his presence is apostolic, the presence of someone who has been sent. But the deepest reason for the distinctive role of the priest in the Eucharist lies in the fact that only God can offer worthy sacrifice to God: the Christian God is so transcendent to the world, so holy, that no act of human religion is adequate in his presence. Only the incarnate Son of God can make the suitable offering and exchange.9 The priest must speak and act in persona Christi, because only Christ can act in the appropriate way in the presence of the Father; in what other name could the Church speak and act? This offering of the Son of God is not just mentioned or remembered in the Eucharist but expressed and actualized in the Son's own words. The community, in adoration and thanks, joins in this offering, but the offering is first there through the action of Christ, who uses the words and actions of the priest to reenact his perfect offering sacramentally. In speaking of the role of the priest in the Mass, Pope John Paul II says, "The sacrifice is offered 'in the person of Christ' because the celebrant is, in a special sacramental way, identified with the 'eternal high priest' who is the author and primary agent of his own sacrifice. ... His sacrifice—and it alone—could and can have expiatory value in the eyes of God, of the Trinity, of the all-transcendent holiness."10 The priest represents the community before the Father as he says the prayers in the first-person plural, but he represents Christ to the Father and to the community as he speaks in the first-person singular. As Josef Jungmann says, "The rite makes it clear that the priest, when he begins the words of consecration, is no longer merely the representative of the assembled congregation, but that he represents now the person of Christ, because he does what Christ did."11 (Fs)

19a The Christian eucharistic prayer was developed from Jewish prayers of proclamation, thanksgiving, and blessing for the great works of God, prayers that were part of the ritual of Jewish meals.12 However, the eucharistic prayer was not a simple transposition of Jewish prayers; folded into the prayer of praise and thanksgiving was the institutional narrative, together with the words of institution included in the narrative. This blending of old and new is appropriate. What "work of God" could, for the Christian, be more deserving of proclamation, thanks, and praise than the Redemption achieved in the death and Resurrection of Christ?13 And what more intense way could there be of proclaiming this action than to quote the words used by the priest and victim when he anticipated the sacrifice? The eucharistic prayer fulfills the Jewish prayer of thanks and praise in the way that the New Testament fulfills the Old, and also in the way the Christian tabernacle differs from the Jewish: in the Jewish synagogue the tabernacle contains the Torah, but in the tabernacles of Christian churches the Word of God dwells not as the Law, not as the inspired written word, but as the incarnate Son of God in his eucharistic presence. (Fs) (notabene)

20a In the sacred liturgy the Christian community is brought into the offering of the Son to the Father, an action that was once achieved in the past but endures as an eternal offering in heaven (Hebrews 8:1-3, 9:23-26). The Eucharist is our participation, even now, in the celestial liturgy. Alexander Schmemann describes the divine liturgy as "the continual ascent, the lifting up of the Church to heaven, to the throne of glory, to the unfading light and joy of the kingdom of God."14 In accomplishing the center of its liturgy, the Church forgoes any verbal initiative of its own and simply quotes the words and gestures of Christ, using the ordained priest as the instrument for this quotation. The Church thus expresses itself through the interaction of the pronouns "we" and "I," and the use of these pronouns expresses a shift of perspective between two points of view, that of the Christian community at worship and that of Christ at the Last Supper. The two perspectives, as well as the transition between them, deserve fuller theological exploration. The two points of view manifest one and the same event, the sacrificial death of Jesus, and the way in which the "two" bring the "one" to light calls for further discussion. Before pursuing this theological issue, let us make some philosophical remarks about identity and recognition, and about the appearances through which they are achieved. (Fs)