- Valson Thampu
In terms of what the Holy Mass has come to be, as it is experienced by the communicants, consecrated bread and wine are assumed widely to be its core. The scriptural references foregrounded in the previous section highlight the need to lift our spiritual imagination beyond the elements, which are the sacramental vehicles. The heart of the Sacrament is the attainment of oneness. In St John 13, Jesus emphasizes that this oneness is possible only through love (v. 34). The New Commandment mandates that we love one another. Can there be communion, or communication, or community without love? Love is the mystical host of the sacrament. No love, no sacrament. It is only in love that we can be one with God and with one another.
Love, the soul of the Sacrament
What is the nature and scope of this love?
Spiritually and psychologically, love is the formative and transformative energy of vulnerability, and its outcome of brokenness. Through this love ‘that never fails’ (1 Cor. 13:8), the persons in love meet the basic condition for oneness, which also defines the eligibility for discipleship: self-denial (Mtt.16:24). To love is to deny oneself in order to be one with the other and for both, reciprocally, to become one. (Short of this, the relationship amounts to the annexation of the one by the other.) This is the human counterpart of the oneness between Jesus and God the Father. In the words of Jesus: ‘I and my Father are one’ (Jn. 10:30). Remove spiritual love from the Sacrament, it becomes, at best, a privileged meal. It falls short of the sacramental.
Sacramental brokenness is decisive for the blessedness of ‘abiding in’, at the human and divine levels alike. (‘Abiding in’, sans the spirit of brokenness, amounts to colonisation.) Jesus’s perfect oneness with his Father is authenticated in retrospect by his brokenness on the Cross in fulfilling the will of his Father. Brokenness per se, or of the reckless kind, inclines towards the suicidal, not the sacramental. The brokenness of love, the love that never fails, alone is sacramental. Judas too was broken; but broken suicidally. Such brokenness breeds despair, not hope; death, not life. It is the brokenness of the chaff; not of the grain of wheat that precedes harvest. Such is the power of the sacrament of love-inspired obedience that it transforms the cross into a sign of hope. The breaking of the bread parallels the breaking of the body. Both are characterised by the brokenness resulting from love expressing itself as perfected obedience. This needs to be emphasized all the more today as we are least conscious of this aspect in partaking of the body and blood of Jesus.
Now consider yet another of Jesus’s sacramental self-revelation: ‘I am the way’ (Jn. 10:10). Clearly, he means that he is the way to blessed life. He is not saying that he ‘knows’ that way. He is the way. And that way, is the way of oneness with God. What, otherwise, is the link between the bread and the body? Given that, we become a sacramental people, as against a people who merely observe the sacrament, only to the extent that we walk the Way. The Mass needs to be seen as nourishment for this journey: the journey towards blessedness. Partaking of the Mass as a Sunday routine -or as a church-granted privilege- ignores the spiritual genius of the sacrament.
One of the earliest clues to this insight may be found in Jesus’s response to his first temptation by Satan: ‘Man does not live by bread alone’. If ‘bread alone’ could have sufficed for humankind, the Mass would have been superfluous. The Gospel itself would have been. Most Christians do not realize that the affirmation, ‘man does not live by bread alone,’ is a significant compliment Jesus pays to our species. It is so, because we are conceived ‘in God’s image and likeness’. The Mass must be seen as an indispensable nourishment for ‘the image and likeness of God’ that distinguishes our humanity.
The sacrament, thus understood, is our indispensable spiritual food; not a religious extra. Only the Heavenly Bread can sustain and fortify our humanity. We know a young man who assumed otherwise for a while: the younger son in the Parable of the Lost Son (Lk. 15:11ff). We know how and where he ended up: among the pigs. Jesus defines this state symbolically in his exhortation: ‘Cast not your pearls before swine’ (Matt. 7:6). It implies a gentle, but grim, warning to the children of the present consumerist-materialistic culture: ‘Live by bread alone, and see what happens’! (By the way, I often wonder why we get infected with swine-flu now-a-days!) The Sacrament is, in that sense, an insurance against human degradation. If, partaking of the body and blood of Jesus does not make us better than metaphoric swine -indifferent, even hostile, to the wisdom of life- then we need to wonder if what we partake of is indeed the Sacrament.
No one would argue that we can stay swine-like and still fulfil the mandate to be ‘the light of the world’. This metaphoric swine-state implies, inter alia, blindness to the goodness of God’s creation, affirmed repeatedly in Genesis. Every sacramental response to everything around us is an affirmation of this goodness, no matter how hidden it remains. For an illustration, consider Jesus’s interaction with the woman of Samaria (Jn.4). She had already encountered six men; and she bore the scars on her plight. In Jesus, she met Sacrament personified. It resurrected the goodness in her: the hidden treasure of Jesus’s parable. She was transformed. The real famine in our world is the dearth of sacramental personality of this order. Manifesting the same must be deemed an irreducible Christian duty at the present time. The church is mandated to be not only a sacrament-dispenser, but also a credible witness that creation as a whole is sacramental.
This brings us to yet another core aspect of the Sacrament. Communication is implied in communion. To be sacramental, as against remaining mere consumers of the Sacrament, is to communicate with the world, or to be in redemptive dialogue with the world, as Jesus was (Jn.3:16). St John presents Jesus as a communication of God’s love for the world. If the Holy Mass we partake of in the enclosure of the church is to be an authentic sacramental experience, we too have to become, as a result, the medium through which God’s love for humankind is expressed in spirit and truth.
This sacramental dimension that we are mandated to live must be recognized as the core distinction as well as necessary connection -for every meaningful distinction is also a connection- between the faith community and the world. A tree, said Jesus, will be known by its fruit. The same applies to us as well. We need to remain mindful of the question: What indeed is the fruit we produce, and what do we communicate to the world?
