Synagogue, Temple, Church, Parousia, and Eucharist

I never cease to be amazed at the seamlessness and continuity between the Old Covenant People and the early Christian community on the one hand, and the early Christian community and the Catholic Church on the other. It's well-known, for instance, that the early Christians continued worshiping in the Temple and the synagogue for a time, and then gradually began their own (independent) communal worship practices which closely mirrored the liturgy that took place in the synagogue. There is however a crucial difference between synagogue and early Christian worship, especially after the destruction of Jerusalem in AD 70. For from that point forward the Jews couldn't offer sacrifice at all; thus the practice of turning toward the Jerusalem Temple in the midst of the synagogue liturgy so as to offer a "sacrifice of praise" and "thanksgiving" which was directed toward the place wherein the "real" sacrifice was offered became a poignant symbol of the Jews' loss: The destruction of the Temple was the end of the world as the Jews knew it, and it left a gaping hole where the (sacrificial) covenant renewal and communion meal between God and His People took place.

That's why it would be too quick to assume a complete correspondence between synagogue and early Christian worship. As Ratzinger (The Spirit of the Liturgy, Ignatius Press 2000, 48-49) rightly notes,

Christian worship, or rather the liturgy of the Christian faith, cannot be viewed simply as a Christianized form of the synagogue service, however much its actual development owes to the synagogue service. The synagogue was always ordered toward the Temple and remained so, even after the Temple's destruction. The synagogue's liturgy of the Word, which is celebrated with magnificent profundity, regards itself as incomplete, and for that reason it is very different from the liturgy of the Word in Islam, which, together with pilgrimage and fasting, constitutes the whole of divine worship as decreed by the Koran. By contrast, the synagogue service is the divine worship that takes place in the absence of the Temple and in expectation of its restoration. Christian worship, for its part, regards the destruction of the Temple as final and theologically necessary. Its place has been taken by the universal Temple of the risen Christ, whose outstretched arms on th Cross span the world, in order to draw all men into the embrace of eternal love. The new Temple already exists, and so too does the new, the definitive sacrifice: the humanity of Christ opened up in his Cross and Resurrection.

But it's at precisely this point that the "incompleteness" of the synagogue liturgy of the Word (only) is rectified by the liturgy of the restored and New Temple (Christ's Church), toward which the old Temple and its sacrificial liturgy had pointed. Thus Ratzinger:

The prayer of the man Jesus is now united with the dialogue of eternal love within the Trinity. Jesus draws men into this prayer through the Eucharist, which is thus the ever-open door of adoration and the true Sacrifice, the Sacrifice of the New Covenant, the "reasonable service of God." In modern theological discussion, the exlusive model for the liturgy of the New Covenant has been thought to be the synagogue - in strict opposition to the Temple, which is regarded as an expression of the law and therefore as an utterly obsolete "stage" in religion. The effects of this theory have been disasterous. Priesthood and sacrifice are no longer intelligible. The comprehensive "fulfillment" of pre-Christian salvation history and the inner unity of the two Testaments disappear from view. Deeper understanding of the matter is bound to recognize that the Temple, as well as the synagogue, entered Christian liturgy.

Rabbi Baruch Levine has also noticed this distinctive difference between synagogue worship and the Mass. (It's good to remember here that the form of the Mass goes all the way back to the first century.) In his commentary on Leviticus (The JPS Torah Commentary, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society 1989, 216-217), he notes that whereas the destruction of the Temple in AD 70 resulted in the non-sacrificial worship of the synagogue, the Christian liturgy took over (in a renewed form) the sacrificial liturgy of the Temple: "Christian worship in the form of the traditional mass," he says, "affords the devout an experience of sacrifice, of communion, and proclaims that God is present" - each of which disappeared along with the Temple, for the Jews. Thus Rabbi Levine recognizes that "The Christian Church, then, is a temple."

Yet it is a Temple that spans heaven and earth: it is a Temple within which heaven and earth meet, most especially in the Eucharistic liturgy. For Christian worship

is the worship of an open heaven. It is never just an event in the life of a community that finds itself in a particular place. No, to celebrate the Eucharist means to enter into the openness of a glorification of God that embraces both heaven and earth, an openness effected by the Cross and Resurrection. Christian liturgy is never just an event orgainized by a particular group or set of people or even by a particular local Church. Mankind's movement toward Christ meets Christ's movement toward men. He wants to unite mankind and bring about the one Church, the one divine assembly, of all men. Everything, then, comes together: the horizonal and the vertical, the uniqueness of God and the unity of mankind, the communion of all who worship in spirit and truth. (Ratzinger, 49)

This is a present reality when the Church celebrates the liturgy: in it, we, the believing assembly, are "drawn up" before the Throne, before the Heavenly Altar where the Lamb presides, "standing as if One slain" (Rev 5:6). (We see this, e.g., in the sursum corde just prior to the consecration of the elements: "Lift up your hearts!"/"We lift them up to the Lord!") Equally, Heaven "touches down" on earth through the Incarnate Son. Our "Zion" and "New Jerusalem" - in which we participate presently through the liturgy - isn't like the old Zion that made even Moses tremble (Heb 12:18-21), for "you have approached Mount Zion and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and countless angels in festal gathering, and the assembly [ecclesia - 'Church'] of the Firstborn enrolled in heaven, and God the judge of all, and the spirits of the just made perfect, and Jesus, the Mediator of a New Covenant, and the sprinkled blood that speaks more eloquently than that of Abel" (vv. 22-24). All these things - saints, angels, and the whole "assembly" or ecclesia of the Firstborn - are present when we approach the Heavenly City, the New Jerusalem in assembled worship here on earth. Vatican II's Constitution on Sacred Liturgy (Sacrosanctum Concilium #8) reaffirms this breathtaking reality, when it says that

In the earthly liturgy we share in a foretaste of that heavenly liturgy which is celebrated in the Holy City of Jerusalem toward which we journey as pilgrims, where Christ is sitting at the right hand of God, Minister of the sanctuary and of the true tabernacle. With all the warriors of the heavenly army we sing a hymn of glory to the Lord; venerating the memory of the saints, we hope for some part and fellowship with them; we eagerly await the Savior, our Lord Jesus Christ, until He, our life, shall appear and we too will appear with Him in glory.

The Catechism likewise tells us where we are when we go to Mass, drawing from the same heavenly-liturgy imagery of Hebrews and St. John's Revelation:

Christ, indeed, always associates the Church with Himself in this great work [the liturgy] in which God is perfectly glorified and men are sanctified. The Church is His beloved Bride who calls to her Lord and through Him offers worship to the eternal Father ... [worship] which participates in the liturgy of heaven. (# 1089) ... Liturgy is an "action" of the whole Christ ... Those who even now celebrate it without signs are already in the heavenly liturgy (# 1136).

There is much consolation in the fact that so much of Christ's Kingdom and presence here with us is "already" - but there of course remain "not yet" elements as well. For although Incarnation and Resurrection have of course made their irrevocable mark on the present, we still await the final consummation of heaven and earth, the final "descent" of the New Jerusalem and the perfect and eternal Marriage Supper of the Lamb. We participate in these things now through the liturgy, but the liturgy also points ahead to the time when the union of heaven and earth it actually effects in the present is perfectly complete in the future.

The mystery of faith which we celebrate at a particular point in time and proclaim in the liturgy after consecration - "Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again;" "Dying You destroyed our death, rising You restored our life, Lord Jesus, come in glory" - thus spans all three dimensions of time, which means that what Christ has done in the past is drawn into the present for us, and the future is likewise pulled into the present as well, by way of anticipation. Still, the present reality remains in degrees an incomplete "pointer" toward the future. Thus Ratzinger (50):

Christian liturgy is a liturgy of promise fulfilled, of a quest, the religious quest of human history, reaching its goal. But it remains a liturgy of hope. It, too, bears within it the mark of impermanence. The new Temple, not made by human hands, does exist, but it is also still under construction. The great gesture of embrace emanating from the Crucified has not yet reached its goal; it has only just begun. Christian liturgy is liturgy on the way, a liturgy of pilgrimage toward the transfiguration of the world, which will only take place when God is "all in all".

Scott Hahn likewise strikes the chord of already/present reality and not yet/anticipatory hope within the liturgy, but he's focusing below on the already aspect as we find it principally in Hebrews and the Book of the Apocalypse, as well as the earliest non-canonical Christian literature. Commenting on the Catechism of the Catholic Church, paragraph 2816, which states "The Kingdom of God has been coming since the Last Supper and, in the Eucharist, it is in our midst. The kingdom will come in glory when Christ hands it over to his Father," Hahn (Letter and Spirit, Doubleday 2005, 107-111) writes:

Since Christ's coming, he is present in the world in a way that he was not in the old covenant; yet he remains veiled in a way that he will not be veiled at the consummation of history ... In his incarnation, Jesus came; and, as he passed from human sight, he promised to sustain his presence forever: "I am with you always, to the close of the age" (Mt 28:20). Thus, his parousia - his presence - remained with Christians, even as they prayed for its plentiude.

Several generations of scholars, from the nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, told the story of the primitive church in terms of eschatological expectation and eventual disappointment, followed by ecclesiastical damage control. Jesus predicted a glorious return, which the first believers died awaiting. In the words of Alfred Loisy: Christ preached the kingdom, but left only the church. In this view, Stephen's vision [in Acts 7:56] represented an ecclesiastical effort to reinterpret Jesus' eschatology, recasting it as a "realized eschatology" - a spiritualizing of a formerly material expectation.

Jaroslav Pelikan wrote forecefully against such scholars, who find a supposedly "catastrophic" sense of delay in the early texts: "Any such description is based on too simplistic a view of the role of apocalyptic in the teaching of Jesus and in the early church. Nor is it corroborated by later texts, for one looks in vain for proof of a bitter disappointment over the postponement of the parousia or of a shattering of the early Christian communities by the delay of the Lord's return."

The "catastrophic" interpretation has grown increasingly untenable with the documentary discoveries of the past hundred and fifty years. Subsequent scholarship has demonstrated persuasively that realized eschatology represents the most primitive strain of Christian eschatology - and that Christian hope for an imminent parousia was actually born of faith in a liturgical parousia.

Jaroslav Pelikan, the great Lutheran historical theologian from Yale, writes (in The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600), University of Chicago Press 1971, I:126-127) the following concerning the prominence of this "primitive" realized eschatology strain:

That impression is corroborated by the references to the "coming" of Christ in the scraps of early liturgies that have come down to us. For example, the Benedictus of Matthew 21:9 ["Blessed is He who comes in the Name of the Lord!" - the Latin rite places this during the Sanctus before the consecration of the elements] was clearly an affirmation of the coming of the end with the promised arrival of the messianic kingdom. But at least as early as the Apostolic Constitutions, and presumably earlier, the liturgical practice of the church employed these same words to salute either the celebrant or the eucharistic presence ... The coming of Christ was "already" and "not yet": he had come already - in the incarnation, and on the basis of the incarnation would come in the Eucharist; he had come already in the Eucharist, and would come at the last in the new cup that he would drink with them in his Father's kingdom. When the ancient liturgy prayed, "Let grace come [or "Let the Lord come"], and let the world pass away," its eschatological perspective took in both the final coming of Christ and his coming in the Eucharist. The eucharistic liturgy was not a compensation for the postponement of the parousia, but a way of celebrating the presence of the one who had promised to return.

(My emphasis.) Hahn goes on:

Gregory Dix confirmed that this was not a later eschatology imposed on the primitive kerygma. Indeed, it was everywhere in the ancient kerygma. Dix maintained that this notion of a liturgical parousia was "universal" by the third century, and probably long before, since, he added, there are no exceptions to this rule: "no pre-Nicene author Eastern or Western whose eucharistic doctrine is at all fully stated" holds a different view.

Consider just two examples from the ancient liturgies. The West Syrian Liturgy of St. James announces: "Let all moral flesh be silent, and stand with fear and trembling, and meditate nothing earthly within itself: for the King of kings and Lord of lords, Christ our God, comes forward." In its oldest Greek recensions, James consistently uses the word parousia to describe the liturgical theophany. [A 'theophany' is an appearance or manifestation of God.] The Egyptian liturgy of Sarapion proclaims: "This sacrifice is full of your glory." Similar passages can be found in the liturgies of Mark, Hippolytus, the Apostolic Constitutions, John Chrysostom, and Cyril of Alexandria, as well as the Roman Canon. [My emphasis]

What the ancients saw in the liturgy was the coming of Christ: the parousia; and what they meant by parousia is what Catholic theology came to express as the "real presence" or "substantial presence" of Jesus Christ.

St. John's Apocalypse (or Revelation) is a really crucial early text as regards the liturgy, and the sense in which the earthly believing community is drawn up into the liturgy as it unfolds in heaven. (For a popular and very accessible introduction, see Scott Hahn's The Lamb's Supper: The Mass as Heaven on Earth, Doubleday 1999.) "Apocalypse" means "unveiling," after all. And veils are associated both with Temples and with Brides. Thus we, the Church, Christ's Bride (and Temple), are presently "veiled," and it's the "apocalypse" (the "unveiling") which allows us to see what is really taking place in the Church's worship: "The Church knows that the Lord comes even now in his Eucharist and that he is there in our midst. However, his presence is veiled. Therefore we celebrate the Eucharist 'awaiting the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ...'" (Catechism, # 1404).

All of this connects beautifully with the kingdom of David, centered upon the Temple, but restoratively transformed by Christ the New High Priest of Humanity.

The people of Israel considered their earthly liturgy to be a divinely inspired imitation of heavenly worship. Both Moses and Solomon constructed God's earthly dwellings ... according to a heavenly archetype revealed by God himself ... The prophets expressed this belief in a mystical way, as they depicted the angels worshiping amid songs and trappings that were clearly recognizable from the Jerusalem temple ... The hymns sung by the angels were the same songs the Levites sang before the earthly sanctuary ...

None of this was mere pageantry. Both the heavenly and earthly liturgies had more than a ceremonial purpose. The angelic liturgy preserved a certain order not only in the courts of the Almighty, but in the entire universe. God had given over the governance of creation to his angels, and so the world itself was caught up in a cosmic liturgy: "Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of his glory" (Is 6:3). As Israel's priests performed their temple liturgy, they - like their counterparts in heaven - preserved and sanctified the order of the cosmos ...

With all of that in their cultural and historical background, the Jews of Jesus' time would have recognized the beauty of his petition in the Lord's Prayer "Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven," in a way that many of us today do not.

To the ancient People of God, heaven and earth were distinct, but earth traced the motions of heaven most clearly in the rites of the temple ... Yet it was still only a shadow of the angels' worship - and only a shadow of the earthly worship that would be inaugurated by Jesus Christ.

By assuming human flesh, however, Christians believed that Jesus brought heaven to earth. Moreover, with his very flesh, he had fulfilled and perfected the worship of ancient Israel. No longer must the covenant-people worship in imitation of angels. In the liturgy of the new covenant, the renewed Israel - the church - worshiped together with the angels. Martimort explained: "This singular interplay of earth and heaven is characteristic of the Christian liturgy. There are not two liturgies, any more than there are two Churches. Rather, as the same Church is a pilgrim on earth and triumphant in heaven, so the same liturgy is celebrated here below in figurative rites and without figures 'beyond the veil' in the heavenly sanctuary." ...

(My emphases.) And last, connecting with Rabbi Levine's remarks above,

the tradition of the old covenant's priesthood passed into the new covenant's priesthood. In the verse that immediately precedes Stephen's story in Acts, we learn that "a great many of the [temple] priests were obedient to the faith" (Acts 6:7). The fathers understood this liturgical and sacrificial connection between the temple and the church. Eusebius tells us that John "wore the sacerdotal plate," the petalon, until the end of his days, as did James of Jerusalem. And the earliest Christian documents (Didache, Ignatius, Justin) agree in using overwhelmingly sacrificial language (sacrifice, altar, oblation) to describe the church's liturgy.

In the worship of the new covenant, however, Christ himself now served as high priest of the liturgy in heaven and on earth - a liturgy led in the church by his clergy, who "preside in the place of God." And Christians not only imitated the angels, but actively participated in the angelic worship. The sense of angelic presence is especially acute in the primitive liturgies ...

The doctrine of the angels, like the arm of God, has not been shortened over time; and it remains integral to every liturgy of the apostolic churches. In the Roman liturgy's preferances, this theme is especially strong: "And so with all the choirs of angels in heaven, we proclaim your glory and join in their unending hymn of praise ... Holy, Holy, Holy ..."

That part of the liturgy, the Sanctus, always gives me goosepimples:

Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord
God of power and might
Heaven and earth are full of Your glory
Hosanna in the Highest
Blessed is He who comes in the Name of the Lord [all bow]
Hosanna in the Highest

Sanctus, Sanctus, Sanctus
Dominus Deus Sabaoth
Pleni sunt caeli et terra gloria tua
Hosanna in excelsis
Benedictus qui venit in Nomine Domini
Hosanna in excelsis

I'll try to lay out some of these themes in more detail in coming days.