Today's spiritual reading was concerning the legionary's vocation (and indeed the vocation of all Christians) to share in the sufferings of Christ, so that we can also share in His glory. According to the reading, we cannot hope to have the one without the other.
We know that Christians are renewed human beings. We are changed within. Our conformity to our old model, our father and the progenitor of our race, Adam, is changed for a conformity to our new father, the progenitor of the new race, the New Adam. In the re-creation, God chooses not to create out of nothing as He did before, but to make the new Creation from the wreckage of the old. Conformity to Christ, participation in Christ, can only mean conformity to the Paschal Mystery, the life-giving suffering, death and resurrection.
In this new Creation, suffering has new meaning. The spiritual reading compares the role of suffering to the loom's woof, which holds all the complexity of the weave together. In the writings of many of the Fathers of the Church, suffering of the individual Christian has a mystical identity with Christ's redemptive suffering. Beginning from Saint Paul, who said, "fill up what is wanting in the sufferings of Christ on behalf of His Body, the Church," the Fathers continued the explicate how the members of Christ's Body exercise the same redemptive ministry as the Head.
As we have said many times, according to the Church's traditional mystagogy, the Mass is the Life of Christ. It is the mystical re-presentation of the Paschal Mystery. Fruitful participation in it means joining ourselves, offering ourselves completely in union with the Self-Sacrifice of the Son of God. Not only does the Head offer Himself in sacrifice, but all His members do as well.
In the traditional mystagogy of the Roman Rite, the offertory procession commemorates the arrest and trial of the Lord Jesus. Those who would insist that the traditional form of the Rite had no offertory procession are ignorant of the Roman Rite's true history and development. No less an authority than Adrian Fortescue tells us that the offertory procession was still present in the Roman Rite, but that, by the time of Pope St. Gregory the Great, only the size of the procession had been reduced from its full form, encompassing the entirety of church's liturgical space, to a simple movement of the priest and his ministers from the epistle horn of the altar back to the center. Thus, in all the forms of the Roman Rite currently in use, the offertory procession continues to fulfill that same function. It is a sign of Christ, mystically offering Himself, as St. Peter tells us, "He gave Himself up to the one who judged Him unjustly." It is a challenge for us to unite ourselves with Him in His offering. To embrace our suffering, whatever it is, as a share in His suffering will be painful to be sure, but we will suffer anyway. (In the hymns of the Byzantine Rite, the martyrs are depicted as encouraging one another. They say, "if we do not die today, we will still have to die someday.") In Christ is the only way that our suffering can have meaning.
In the introductory dialogue at the beginning of the Anaphora or Canon of the Mass, the priest reminds us, "Let us lift up our hearts," and the people respond in a way that suggests that they are already doing so. The original is difficult to translate: "We are holding them to the Lord." The people and their leaders the clergy are uniting themselves to the very work of Christ. Just as Christ tells St. John the Baptist that His intention is " to fulfill all righteousness," so the people join themselves together to do what is "right and just."
Although in the Consecration of the Mass it is the Risen Christ, over Whom Death no longer has any power, Who becomes really Present on the altar, that Real Presence takes the form of a "mystical death." The Body and Blood of the Lord are re-presented separately, in different species. Even though both are the totality of the Risen Christ, the Blood (i.e. the Life) is "depicted" as apart from the Body. In this way, the Lord Jesus invites all of us to go down to death with Him, to be partakers of the same "mystical death," with the assurance that from henceforth death itself is just a sign. In Holy Communion we receive the fullness of the Risen Christ. Having received Him, He is kneaded into us through suffering as leaven is kneaded into the lump.
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