The Eucharist and the Church's Mission (1997)
By Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (b. 1927) - Marktl, Germany
The following text is excerpted from Pilgrim Fellowship of Faith: The Church as Communion, ed. Stephan Otto Horn and Vinzenz Pfnür, trans. Henry Taylor (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2005), pp. 90-122. This book of selections from Cardinal Ratzinger's extensive writings, compiled and presented to him by several of his students several years prior to his election to the Papacy, first appeared in German in 2002 as Weg Gemeinschaft des Glaubens: Kirche als Communio. This text itself is drawn from two versions of a paper delivered by Ratzinger at Eucharistic congresses in Como and Bologna in Italy in 1997.
An old legend about the origin of Christianity in Russia tells how a series of people presented themselves before Prince Vladimir of Kiev, who was seeking to find the right religion for his people: each in turn, representatives of Islam from Bulgaria, representatives of Judaism, and then emissaries of the pope from Germany, offered him their faith as being the right one and the best. Yet the prince remained unsatisfied by any of these things being offered. The decision was made, it is said, when his ambassadors returned from a solemn liturgical celebration in which they had taken part in the Church of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. Filled with enthusiasm, they told the prince: 'Then we came to the Greeks, and we were taken to the place where they worship their God.... We do not know whether we have been in heaven or on earth.... We have experienced how God dwells among men' [see P.B.I. Bilankium, The Apostolic Origin of the Ukranian Church (Toronto, 1988)].
This story, as such, is certainly not historical. The way the "Rus" turned to Christianity and the final decision in favor of the link with Byzantium constitute a long and complicated process, and historians now believe they can trace its main outlines [see H. Jedin, ed., Hanbuch der Kirchengeschichte, vol. 3 (Freiburg, 1966), 275-278]. Yet as is always the case, there is also a kernel of profound truth within this legend. For the inner power of the liturgy has without doubt played an essential role in the spread of Christianity. The legend of the liturgical origin of Russian Christianity, however, above and beyond this general connection between worship and mission, tells us something particular about their inner relationship. For the Byzantine liturgy, which transported to heaven the foreign visitors in search of God, was not of itself missionary in character. It did not advertise the faith with an interpretation for outsiders, for nonbelievers, but dwelt entirely within the inner home of faith. The report in Acts 20:7 of how Paul celebrated the Eucharist with the Christians of Troas "in the upper room" was, in the early Church, as a manner of course, connected with the story according to which, after the Lord's Ascension into heaven, the disciples together with Mary waited in prayer for the Holy Spirit in the upper room and received him there (Acts 1:3). This upper room, in turn, was identified -- historically, this was probably correct -- with the room in which the Last Supper was held, where Jesus had celebrated the first Eucharist with the Twelve. The upper room became a symbol of the inner recollection of the faithful, for the way the Eucharist is removed from ordinary everyday life. It became an expression for the "mystery of faith" (1 Tim 3:9; cf. 3:16), in the inmost heart of which stands the Eucharist. If the Roman liturgy has inserted this acclamation, "The mystery of faith," into the institution narrative and has thus made it a part of the central action of the Eucharist, then its interpretation here of the heritage from primitive Christianity is entirely correct -- the eucharistic liturgy is not, as such, directed toward nonbelievers; rather, it presupposes, as a mystery, that worshippers are "initiated": only those who have entered into the mystery with their whole life, who know Christ no longer just from the outside...only these can come to the Eucharist. Only someone who, in the communion of faith, has arrived at the point of an inner agreement and an understanding with him can communicate with Christ in the Sacrament.
Let is turn back to our legend: What persuaded the emissaries of the Russian prince of the truth of the faith celebrated in the Orthodox liturgy was not a kind of missionary persuasiveness, with arguments that seemed to them clearer than those of the other religions. What moved them was in fact the mystery as such, which demonstrated the power of the truth actually in transcending the arguments of reason. To put it again another way: The Byzantine liturgy was not, and is not, concerned to indoctrinate other people or to show them how pleasing or entertaining it might be. What was impressive about it was particularly its sheer lack of a practical purpose, the fact that it was being done for God and not for spectators; it was simply striving to be...before God and for God: to be pleasing to God, as the sacrifice of Abel had been pleasing to God. The very selflessness of this standing before God and turning the gaze toward God was what allowed God's light to stream down into what was happening and for it to be detected even by outsiders....
The way of talking about "missionary liturgy" that became widespread in the [nineteen] fifties is, at the least, ambiguous and problematical. In many circles, among people concerned with liturgy, it led, in a quite inappropriate fashion, to turning a didactic element in the liturgy, and its comprehensibility even for outsiders, into the primary standard for shaping liturgical celebrations. Likewise, the saying that the choice of liturgical forms must be made with respect to "pastoral" points of view betrays the same anthropocentric error. The liturgy is then being constructed entirely for men; it is either serving to convey certain contents or -- after people are tired of the rationalism that arises that way and of its banality -- to build up a community in a way that is related, no longer necessarily to any comprehensible content, but to processes in which people draw close to one another and experience community. Thus, suggestions for styling the liturgy became -- and are still becoming -- more one-sided and more dependent upon profane models, drawn, for instance, from the way meetings are held or from ancient or even modern socialization rituals. God does not actually play any role there; it is all concerned with winning people over, or keeping them happy and satisfying their demands.
No faith is aroused that way, of course, since faith has to do with God, and it is only where his closeness is felt, where human intentions take second place to reverence before him, that the credibility comes about the creates belief.... [T]he Eucharist, as such is not directly oriented toward the awakening of people's faith in a missionary sense. It stands, rather, at the heart of faith and nourishes it; its gaze is primarily directed toward God, and it draws men into this point of view, draws them into the descent of God to us, which becomes their ascent in fellowship with God. It aims at being pleasing to God and at leading men to see this as being likewise the measure of their lives. And to that extent it is, of course, in a more profound sense, the origin of mission....
If...we try to grasp what Paul says about the connection between Eucharist and faith, then the first thing we see is that there are...different levels at which this subject is presented.... The first thing is the interpretation of Christ's death on the Cross in terms of the cult, which represents the inner presupposition of all eucharistic theology. We are still hardly able to grasp the importance of this step. An event that was in itself profane, the execution of a man by the most cruel and horrible method available, is described as a cosmic liturgy, as tearing open the closed-up heavens -- as the act by which everything that had hitherto been ultimately intended, which had been sought in vain, by all forms of worship, now in the end actually comes about.
In Romans 3:24-26...Paul has put together the fundamental text for this interpretation. Yet, possibly, this was only because Jesus himself, at the Last Supper, had anticipated his own death, had gone through it in advance and transformed it from within into an event of self-sacrifice and love. On that basis, Paul could describe Christ as hilasterion, which in the cultic terminology of the Old Testament meant the center of the temple, the cover that lay upon the ark. It was called kapporeth, which was translated into Greek with hilasterion, and was seen as the place above which Yahweh appeared in a cloud. This kapporeth used to be sprinkled with the blood from expiatory sacrifices, in order that God might thus come as close as possible. If, then, Paul says that Christ is the heart of the temple, which has been lost ever since the Exile, the real place of atonement, the true kapporeth, then modern exegesis has represented this as a spiritualizing reinterpretation of the old cult and, thus, in fact as the abolition of the cult, as its replacement by spiritual and ethical elements. Yet the contrary is the truth: For Paul it is not the temple that is the true reality of worship, and the other thing a kind of allegory, but vice versa. Human cults...are mere "images," foreshadowing the real worship of God, which is what does not happen in the animal sacrifices.... [T]he sacrifices of animals and other things are only ever helpless attempts to substitute for man, who ought to be giving himself -- not in the horrible form of human sacrifices, but in the entire wholeness of his being. Yet this is precisely what he is incapable of.
Thus for Paul...it is clear that the voluntary self-sacrifice of Jesus is not an allegorical abolition of the concept of worship; rather, here the intent and purpose of the Feast of Atonement become reality.... It is not the killers of Christ who are offering a sacrifice -- it would be a perversion to think that. Christ gives glory to God by sacrificing himself and thus bringing human existence within God's own being....
The question then arises: How could it ever occur to anyone to interpret the Cross of Jesus in such as way as to see it as actually effecting what had been intended by the cults of the world, especially by that of the Old Testament...? I have already hinted at the answer: Jesus himself had told the disciples about his death and had interpreted it in terms of prophetic categories. which were available to him above all in the Servant Songs of Deutero-Isaiah. Thus the theme of atonement and of substitution, which belongs to the broad sphere of cultic thought, had already been introduced. At the Last Supper, he developed this more profoundly by welding together Sinaitic covenant theology and prophetic theology, which go to shape the sacrament in which he accepts and anticipates his death and, at the same time, makes it capable of becoming present as the holy cult for all ages. Without this kind of essential foundation in the life and activity of Jesus himself, the new understanding of the Cross is unthinkable -- no one would have been able, as it were, to overlay the Cross with this understanding at a later stage. Thus the Cross also becomes the synthesis of the Old Testament festivals, the Day of Atonement and the Pascha in one, the point of passage into a New Covenant. [In his important book Le Sacerdote du Christ et ses ministres (Paris, 1972), A. Feuillet has shown that John 17 is rooted in the Jewish liturgy of the Day of Atonement; see esp. pp. 39-63. From this point of view, the Gospel of John is close to the Epistle to the Hebrews, which also understands the Cross of Christ entirely on the basis of the liturgy of Yom Kippur....]
[T]he theology of the Cross is eucharistic theology, and vice versa. Without the Cross, the Eucharist would remain mere ritual; without the Eucharist, the Cross would be merely a horribly profane event. Thus something else becomes clear: the close connection between life as it is lived and experienced and sacral actions in worship.... Just as the Cross of Christ provides the eucharistic liturgy with its reality and content and lifts it above what is merely ritual and symbolic, making it into the real worship for all the world, so the Eucharist must ever and again press out beyond the sphere of mere cult, must become reality over and beyond that sphere, precisely in order that it may wholly become what it is and remain what it is....
In the Letter to the Philippians, Paul, who is sitting in prison awaiting trial, talks about the possibility of becoming a martyr, and he does so, surprisingly, in liturgical terminology: "Even if I am to be poured as a libation upon the sacrificial offering of your faith, I am glad...." The witness of the Apostle's death is liturgical in character; it is a matter of his life being spilled out as a sacrificial gift, of his letting himself be spilled out for me. What happens in this is a becoming one with the self-giving of Jesus Christ, with his great act of love, which is as such the true worship of God. The Apostle's martyrdom shares in the mystery of the Cross of Christ and in its theological status. It is worship being lived out in life, which is recognized as such by faith, and thus it is serving faith. Because this is true liturgy, it achieves the end toward which all liturgy is directed: joy -- that joy which can arise only from the encounter between man and God, from the removal of the barriers and limitations of earthly existence....
Still more important for our question about Eucharist and mission is...Romans 15:16. Paul is here justifying his boldness in writing a letter to the Romans, whose congregation he neither founded nor knows at all well.... Paul says that he has written the letter "to be a minister of Jesus Christ to the Gentiles in the priestly service of the gospel of God, so that the offering of the Gentiles may be acceptable, sanctified by the Holy Spirit" (15:16). The Letter to the Romans, this word that has been written that it may then be proclaimed, is an apostolic action; more, it is a liturgical -- even a cultic -- event. This it is because it helps the world of the pagans to change so as to be a renewal of mankind and, as such, a cosmic liturgy in which mankind shall become adoration, become the radiance and the glory of God.... [T]his is not a matter of religious or philosophical propaganda, not is it a social mission or even a personal and charismatic enterprise, but (as Heinrich Schlier puts it) "the accomplishing of a mandate authorized by God, legitimized by him, and delegated by him to the Apostle." This is a priestly sacrificial action, an eschatalogical service of ministry: the fulfillment and the perfecting of the Old Testament sacrificial services....
If, in the letter to the Philippians, we found martyrdom being presented as a liturgical event...now it is the specifically apostolic service of preaching the faith that appears as a priestly activity, as actually performing the new liturgy, open to all the world and likewise worldwide, which has been founded by Christ. The connection with the Pascha of Jesus Christ and with his presence in the Church through the Eucharist is not immediately evident here. And yet we cannot disregard it. here, too, the "cleaving to the Lord" that unites us with him in a life of body and soul is ultimately indispensable as a spiritual foundation. For without this concrete christological cohesion, the whole thing would just simply decline into a mere fellowship in thought, will, and activity -- that is, it would be reduced to what relates to morality and rational considerations. That, however, is exactly what Paul is trying to counter by talking about liturgy, which he uses to show that mission is more than that: that it has a sacramental basis, that it involves being united in a concrete sense with the Body of Christ, which was sacrificed and is living eternally in the Resurrection.... The Eucharist, if it continued to exist over against us, would be relegated to the status of a thing, and the true Christian plane of existence would not be attained at all. Conversely, a Christian life that did not involve being drawn into the Pascha of the Lord, that was not itself becoming a Eucharist, would remain locked in the moralism of our activity and would this again fail to live up to the new liturgy that has been founded by the Cross. Thus, the missionary work of the Apostle does not exist alongside the liturgy; rather, both constitute a living whole with several dimensions....
In what sense can we say that the Eucharist is the source of mission? We cannot...talk as if the Eucharist were some kind of publicity project through which we try to win over people for Christianity. If we do so, then we are damaging both the Eucharist and mission. We might rather understand the Eucharist as being (if the term is correctly understood) the mystical heart of Christianity, in which God mysteriously comes forth, time and again, from within himself and draws us into his embrace. The Eucharist is the fulfillment of the promise made on the first day of Jesus' great week of climax: "I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself" (Jn 12:32). In order for mission to be more than propaganda for certain ideas or trying to win people over for a given community -- in order for it to come from God and to lead to God, it must spring from a more profound source than that which gives rise to resource planning and the operational strategies that are shaped in that way. It must spring from a source both deeper and higher than advertising and persuasion. "Christianity is not the result of persuading people; rather it is something truly great," as Ignatius of Antioch so beautifully puts it in one place (Epistle to the Romans 3:3).
The sense in which Thérèse of Lisieux is patroness of missions may help us to understand in what way that is meant. Thérèse never set foot in a missionary territory and was never able to practice any missionary activity directly. Yet she did grasp that the Church has a heart, and she grasped that love is this heart. She understood that the apostles can no longer the preach and the martyrs no longer shed their blood if this heart is no longer burning. She grasped that love is all, that it reaches beyond times and places. And she understood that she herself, the little nun hidden behind the grille of a Carmel in a provincial town in France, could be present everywhere, because as a loving person she was there with Christ in the heart of the Church. Is not the exhaustion of the missionary impulse in the last thirty years the result of our thinking only of external activities while having almost forgotten that all this activity must constantly be nourished from a deeper center? This center, which Thérèse calls simply "heart" and "love," is the Eucharist. For the Eucharist is not only the enduring presence of the divine and human love of Jesus Christ, which is always the source and origin of the Church and without which she would founder, would be overcome by the gates of hell. As the presence of the divine and human love of Christ, it is also always the channel open from the man Jesus to the people who are his "members," themselves becoming a Eucharist and thereby themselves a "heart" and a "love" for the Church. As Thérèse says, if this heart is not beating, then the apostles can no longer preach, the sisters can no longer console and heal, the laymen no longer lead the world toward the Kingdom of God. The heart must remain the heart, that through the heart the other organs may serve aright. It is at that point, when the Eucharist is being celebrated aright in the "upper room," in the inner sphere of reverent faith, and without any aim or purpose beyond that of pleasing God, that faith springs forth from it: that faith which is the dynamic origin of mission, in which the world becomes a living sacrificial gift, a holy city in which there is no longer any temple, because God the ruler of all is himself her temple, as is the Lamb. "And the city has no need of sun or moon to shine upon it, for the glory of God is its light, and its lamp is the Lamb" (Rev 21:22f).