The
Twenty-eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A)
Dear brothers and sisters,
As he does today, the prophet
Isaiah frequently speaks of “this mountain” on which the Lord God “will provide
for all peoples a feast of rich food and choice wines” (Isaiah 25:6). It is on
this same mountain that he will “destroy the veil that veils all peoples”
(Isaiah 25:7) and “destroy death forever” (Isaiah 25:8). And it is on this
mountain that he will “wipe away the tears from every face” (Isaiah 25:8). It
is a prophecy filled with great hope, with great love, and with great longing,
the great prophecy of the advent of God.
It is a prophecy that answers the
deepest yearning of the human heart, but which mountain does Isaiah refer to?
We know he is not speaking of some vague, notional mountain, but is instead referring
to a very specific mountain. If we go back several chapters in the Book of
Isaiah - nineteen, in fact – the prophet tells us, “In the year that King
Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne, high and lifted up; and his
train filled the temple” (Isaiah 6:1). Isaiah, then, was in Jerusalem, on Mount
Zion where the Lord of hosts dwelt (cf. Isaiah 8:18).
 |
| From the Map Psalter. |
It was on that very mountain that
the Temple had been built and dedicated. It was on that very mountain that
sacrifices were offered to God, both to give him thanks and to atone for sins.
It is of Mount Zion, then, that Isaiah says, “one day it will be said: ‘Behold
our God, to whom we look to save us’” (Isaiah 25:9)! In this prophecy, so full
of eager expectation, we see that “Temple worship was always accompanied by a
vivid sense of its insufficiency.”[1] If
it were sufficient to fully reconcile God and man, such a prophecy would not
have been needed for it would already have happened; man would already have
been able to look upon the face of God.
We see this in the Epistle to the
Hebrews, where we read that “the former priests were many in number, because
they were prevented by death from continuing in office;” they could not finally
fulfill their function (Hebrews 7:23). They served “a copy and shadow of the
heavenly sanctuary; for when Moses was about to erect the tent, he was
instructed by God, saying, ‘See that you make everything according to the
pattern which I will show you on the mountain’” (Hebrews 8:5). This is, in
part, why the Old Covenant, sealed with the blood of sheep and goats, had to be
annually renewed on the Day of Atonement when the High Priest would enter the
Holy of Holies and sprinkle the Ark of the Covenant with blood (cf. Leviticus 16).
So it was with the priests of the
Old Covenant, but it is not so with the High Priest of the New Covenant, Jesus
Christ. He came among us
as
a high priest of the good things that have come, then through the greater and
more perfect tent (not made with hands, that is, not of this creation) he
entered once for all into the Holy Place, taking not the blood of goats and
calves but his own blood, thus securing an eternal redemption. For if the
sprinkling of defiled persons with the blood of goats and bulls and with the
ashes of a heifer sanctifies for the purification of the flesh, how much more
shall the blood of Christ (Hebrews 9:11-14).
We might well say that
worship
through types and shadows, worship with replacements, ends at the very moment
when the real worship takes place: the self-offering of the Son who has become
man and ‘Lamb,’ the ‘Firstborn,’ who gathers up into himself all worship of
God, takes it from the types and shadows into the reality of man’s union with
the living God.[2]
The sacrifice of Christ on the
Cross fulfills what the sheep and goats only signified; they pointed to “the
Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” (John 1:29).
Isaiah’s prophecies concerned the
Temple on Mount Zion, but Jesus clear that he himself is the true Temple of
God. As such, it is on Calvary, where he was lifted up for all to see, where
the Lord provided a rich feast, removed the veil between us and God, and
destroyed death forever; it is there that we, too, can look to the God who
saved us. It is here, at the altar of the Lord, at, if you will, this mountain,
that we, too, can look to the God who saved us because the place of the Temple has
been replaced “by the universal Temple of the risen Christ, whose outstretched
arms on the Cross span the world, in order to draw all men into the embrace of
eternal love.”[3]
It should be a great sadness for
us, then, that so many who have been invited to the wedding feast, that so many
who have been invited to the wedding banquet of the Lamb, refuse his invitation
to receive the embrace of his love. Indeed, it is here at the altar of the
Lord, where the Death of Christ is re-presented to the Father and at which we
receive his very Body and Blood as our nourishment and sustenance on our
pilgrimage to the Father’s house, that the Lord will indeed wipe away the tears
from every face. Too many miss this because they do not believe in the Real
Presence of the Eucharist; they question the power of the Lord’s own words to
do as he says and so their hearts are not comforted on this mountain because
they do not see him.
Each one of us must fall in love
with the Blessed Sacrament by which the Lord Jesus remains with us always, by
which he refreshes our souls, and by which he strengthens us to do his will
(cf. Psalm 23:3; Philippians 4:13). If we fall in love with the Eucharist, we
will understand the truth of Isaiah’s words, even as J.R.R. Tolkien did.
In a letter to one of his sons, he
wrote these moving words from the heart of one who loved the Eucharist very
deeply:
Out
of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great
thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament…. There you will find romance,
glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all of your loves upon earth, and
more than that, Death: by the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands
the surrender of all, and yet by the taste (or foretaste) of which alone can what
you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained,
or take on that complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man’s
heart desires.[4]
The key phrase here is that the
Eucharistic Lord “demands the surrender of all.” Jesus held nothing back for us
and went all the way to the Cross; he surrendered everything for us. How can we
not respond in return and surrender everything we have, everything we are to
him? Let each of us, then, seek our satisfaction in the Eucharist and surrender
to him and find everything we seek in him. Then, having ourselves been filled
with the Lord’s loving mercy, we, too, can go out and invite others to join us
at the banquet of the Lamb. Amen.
[1] Joseph Ratzinger, The Spirit of the Liturgy (San
Francisco, California: Ignatius Press, 2000), 39.
[2] Ibid., 43-44.
[3] Idid., 48.
[4] J.R.R. Tolkien, Letter to Michael
Tolkien, 6-8 March, 1941. In The Letters
of J.R.R. Tolkien, Humphrey Carpenter, ed. (New York: Houghton Mifflin
Company, 2000), 53-54.
No comments:
Post a Comment