20110416 New (Nicene Creed 3)

For our sake He was crucified under Pontius Pilate; He suffered, died, and was buried. On the third day, He rose again in fulfillment of the Scriptures; He ascended into Heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father. He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead, and His kingdom will have no end.

Even though He was betrayed, tried, convicted, and executed by earthly authorities (the Romans, Pontius Pilate specifically, King Herod, the Jews of Jerusalem in general, and the Sanhedrin and Judas Iscariot in particular), these parties are not the only ones involved in the death of Jesus.

Firstly, Jesus freely offered Himself. Jesus had within Himself the power to escape, but He chose to endure His sufferings so that He might redeem us. It is in this that the awesome power of God becoming man is shown. As a man, Jesus is able to be truly obedient and sinless but is able to suffer the evil and die the death that all of us sinners are due. As God, His self-sacrifice is an infinite gift: to all men in all places at all times.

If sacrifice is the main principle of worship, then the main principle of priesthood is offering the sacrifice for the people and sharing the grace of the sacrifice with them. Jesus is our great highpriest. He is our greatest teacher, He is our greatest king, and He offered the greatest sacrifice, His own life, and continues to share with us the grace of that sacrifice.

When Jesus appointed His twelve disciples (Apostles) to continue His ministry on Earth, He did so at the Last Supper. In blessing the bread, He said that it was now His Body, given up for us. In blessing the wine, He said that it was now His Blood of a new covenant. He then told His disciples to do the same. Jesus sacrificed His Body and Blood to make a new covenant with us. The Eucharist that we celebrate at Mass is that sacrifice brought into our lives, to each one of us in churches throughout the world for the last two thousand years and on into the future.

Even despite all the miracles Jesus worked, we might still doubt Him if not for one thing. Jesus rose from the dead. He showed us that He is truly from God, and, then, at His Ascension into Heaven, He showed us where He is going. Remembering that Jesus is man, we see as well that if we accept that He died in our place, we can rise to new life with Him and find our destiny in Heaven as well.

We must commit ourselves to Him and to righteousness, however. We all have some guilt for His death because He died for all our sins. As such, our lives are His alone to judge.

20100723 New (Lord's Prayer 2)

"Give us this day our daily bread; and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us; and lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil."

God is the source of everything we could need or want because He is the source of the whole universe. Asking God to give us our daily bread is recognizing that even our basic needs for life are from Him. This is what we recognize when we worship God. By making choices to live for Him, by faithful worship, and by giving things up to Him we recognize that He is our Lord in every sense.

Throughout time, mankind has struggled to live up to the goodness we were created to have. Even with the first man and woman, we wound up sinning and hurting our relationship with God. In every generation after, sometimes better, sometimes worse, we have continued to sin and to forget how much God has done for us.

Yet in every age, God has continued to reach out to us. He has given us covenants to try and help us to live out our relationship to Him, revealed Scripture to us to guide us, and has worked miracles to strengthen our faith. The fullness of all these outreaches is Jesus. He and His message are the final public revelation of God’s Word. He worked great miracles and still does even today. And He gave us a new covenant in His blood.

Jesus has given us true forgiveness for our sins. In dying on the cross for us, He accepted the death that would only be fair punishment for our sins. He died in our place to give the opportunity for new life to all mankind through all time. He even descended unto the dead so that He could raise the righteous of the past up to life with God in Heaven. He died for each one of us as if we were the only one. This is the example of the kind of love we are supposed to try to live out in our lives: to give your life for your friends.

20100505 Update: The Eucharist

“The Eucharist and the Mass”

By Michael A. Kirk

“Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread…”[1]

The Eucharist is a sacrifice without blood. It is entirely different from the sin offerings that our Hebrew forebears offered unceasingly, vainly attempting to counterbalance the weight of their sins with quantities of the blood of oxen and goats. The offering of bread and wine is a sacrifice of thanksgiving (eucharistein in Greek) that the Hebrews called ToDaH. This is the sacrifice that is to be offered when we recall the great deeds that God has done for us.

Genesis 14:18 "Melchizedek, king of Salem, brought out bread and wine, and being a priest of God Most High, he blessed Abram...”

Hebrews 7:1-2 "This Melchizedek, king of Salem and priest of God Most High […] His name first means righteous king, and then he is also ‘king of Salem,’ that is, king of peace. Without father, mother, or ancestry, without beginning of days or end of life, thus made to resemble the Son of God, he remains a priest forever."

“Without the Shedding of Blood, There Is No Remission of Sins...”[2]

When the Lord saved his people from the bonds of slavery to men in Egypt, He had them eat the meal of the Passover sacrifice the evening before it was to be accomplished. In the Passover commemoration, the third cup of wine, which corresponds to God’s promise “I will redeem” from Exodus 6:6, is known as the Cup of Blessing, and, at the end of the meal, all participants in the Passover must drink from it. Blood was shed in the mark of circumcision in the covenant of Abraham. Blood marked the doorposts of God’s people at the Passover. And the Lord’s own Blood is offered to us in the Eucharist as the sign of our Redemption.

Exodus 24:7-8 "Taking the book of the covenant, he read it aloud to the people, who answered, ‘All that the Lord has said, we will heed and do.’ Then he took the blood and sprinkled it on the people, saying, ‘This is the blood of the covenant which the Lord has made with you in accordance with all these words of His.’"

Matthew 26:27-28 "Drink from it, all of you, for this is my blood of the covenant, which will be shed on behalf of many for the forgiveness of sins."

“For where two or three are gathered in my name, there am I...”[3]

The Hebrew people had an understanding that wherever one of the signs of God’s covenant was, the Lord had a special, real presence there. In the Ark of the Covenant, the Hebrews kept Aaron’s staff, the fragments of the Ten Commandments, and some of the manna with which God fed His wandering people in the desert. These signs of God’s providential care for and covenant with them served not only as consolations, but also as points of contact with the Divine. The Eucharist is the new sign of God’s covenant with His people, but rather than merely being present around this sign, He is substantially and personally present in it.

Exodus 25:8 "Let them make me a sanctuary, that I may dwell in their midst."

Exodus 25:22 "There I will meet with you, and from above the mercy seat, from between the two cherubim that are upon the ark of the testimony, I will speak with you..."

Exodus 25:30 "You shall set the bread of the Presence on the table before me always."

Matthew 12:1 "At that time Jesus was going through a field of grain on the Sabbath. His disciples were hungry and began to pluck heads of grain and eat them. [...] [Jesus] said to them, 'Have you not read what David did, when he and his companions were hungry, how he went into the house of God and ate the bread of offering (of the presence) [...] I say to you, something greater than the temple is here."

Matthew 28:20 "Behold, I am with you always, until the end of the age."

Luke 24:30-31,35 “And it happened that, while he was with them at table, he took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them. With that their eyes were opened and they recognized him, but he vanished from their sight […] Then the two recounted what had taken place on the way and how he was made known to them in the breaking of the bread…”

“Salvation comes from our God […] and from the Lamb”[4]

Our Lord Jesus the Christ, the Lamb of God, became man specifically that He might become the final sacrifice to save us from our sin. Abel offered a first-born lamb, and his sacrifice was looked upon with favor. Abraham offered a ram provided by God in place of his first-born son. The Hebrews offered yearling sheep in place of their first-born sons. To accept the redemption offered by each of these sacrifices, the people had to consume the lamb. The Lord God gave His first-born Son to be the lamb of sacrifice to redeem our lives. He did so not only so that by dying in our place, He might free us from our sins, but also so that by taking and eating of His Body, we might have His Divine Life welling up within us.

Genesis 22:8 “‘Son,’ Abraham answered, ‘God Himself will provide the sheep for the holocaust.’”

Exodus 12:5-8 “The lamb must be a year-old male and without blemish. You may take it from either the sheep or the goats. You shall keep it until the fourteenth day of this month, and then, with the whole assembly of Israel present, it shall be slaughtered during the evening twilight. They shall take some of its blood and apply it to the two doorposts and the lintel of every house in which they partake of the lamb. That same night they shall eat its roasted flesh with unleavened bread and bitter herbs.”

Leviticus 23:12-13 "You shall offer to the Lord a holocaust an unblemished yearling lamb. Its cereal offering shall be two tenths of an ephah of fine flour mixed with oil […] and its libation shall be […] of wine."

John 1:29,34 “‘Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. […] Now I have seen and testified that he is the Son of God.’”

Luke 22:19 "Then he took bread, said the blessing, broke it and gave it to them, saying, 'This is my body which will be given for you; do this in memory of me.'"

Revelation 19:9 "Blessed are those who have been called to the wedding feast of the Lamb."

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[1] Matthew 6:11

[2] Hebrews 9:22

[3] Matthew 18:20

[4] Revelation 7:10

20100510 Question: Mary

10: Mary...

10. Concerns regarding the relationship between Catholics and Mary generally revolve around a few key issues: 1) Do Catholics worship Mary? 2) Why do Catholics believe that Mary never sinned? 3) Is it not better to give attention to Jesus rather than Mary?

These are all very good questions. With regards to the first question, the simple answer is "No."

1) Catholics do not worship Mary. All aspects of religion are not necessarily worship. Many Christians, for example, choose to abstain from work on Sunday in order to observe the Lord's command to keep the Sabbath holy. Also, studying Scripture and leading a moral life are aspects of Christian life that are not worship per se. For many Protestant communities, the meaning of worship has been distorted so as to be roughly equivalent to prayer, singing, or listening to a sermon. Catholics remember the history of our Salvation from the beginning of time and what Christ showed us upon the Cross: "worship" means "sacrifice." The word "prayer" bears the meaning "asking for a favor," which does not of itself entail worship, otherwise, we would be worshiping our neighbors whenever we are in need of a cup of sugar. Singing does not of itself entail worship; otherwise we would be worshiping every child to whom we ever sung "Happy Birthday." Study or listening to lectures certainly does not of itself entail worship; otherwise most of us would have spent a fair portion of our lives worshiping dinosaurs or ponies. We, as Catholic Christians, ask Mary to pray for us to God, to join us in worshiping Him, and to lead us into a deeper imitation of His Ways. We sing of the holiness and virtue of Mary because, as the first and most loyal disciple of Jesus, she provided for us such a great example. We study and seek to know more of Mary because, after all, it is from her that Our Lord drew His sacred humanity. For us Catholic Christians, no matter how much we may admire Mary, we offer spiritual sacrifice to one God alone--the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

2) God the Son received His human nature from Mary. That nature needed to be without stain of sin, Original or personal. We know that the merits of Christ's sacrifice (i.e. forgiveness of sin) could be applied to points earlier in history because we saw just such a thing with the prophets Isaiah, who was purified from sin by a heavenly ember, and Elijah, who was assumed into Heaven. Given the angel's greeting to Mary in the Gospel according to Luke, "Hail, she-who-has-been-graced," which is absent her name and wholly unique in all of Biblical history, we are led to see that she must have been blessed in some way that separates her from the rest of humanity. What might this singular grace have been that she had even before conceiving the Lord? Once we recognize that Mary was uniquely blessed among all humanity and remember that she is the source of Jesus' sinless human nature, it becomes obvious that the two are related and that that singular blessing is that the forgiveness won by Christ on the Cross was applied to Mary at her conception that she might be forever without sin, a new Eve who can remain sinless next to the new Adam who would die for our sins rather than sin Himself.

3) Lastly, of course, worshiping Jesus the Christ is better than speaking about Mary. The real question is, "Why do you have to choose?" Worshiping God is better than hugging your Grandma, but that doesn't mean it's not good to do both. Like it or not, if Christ is the head of the Church and we are members of His Body, Mary is also our mother. While she can never replace Our Lord, not by a long shot, she does deserve a great deal of respect and love, and we would be doing wrong by her and by Jesus to ignore her or speak ill of her.