True Worship
Posted by Rebecca Teti in Faith on Thursday, January 08, 2009 5:00 PM
Welcome back from Christmas break, fellow students! Think these seminarians were happy to see the Pope at his first audience of the new year?
The Pope has a New Year’s Resolution for us all. “Let us renew our determination to open the mind and heart to Christ, to be and live as his true friends. His company will make this year, even with its inevitable difficulties, be a path full of joy and peace.”
He devotes this audience to what St. Paul teaches us about worship, using three specific passages from Romans. Let’s take them one by one.
1. Christ’s cross makes true worship of God possible.
The animal sacrifice of the Jews was a longing for expiation of sin and renewal of life, and had value as such, but that longing couldn’t be fulfilled until Christ. In a lovely expression the Pope writes of the annual Yom Kippur observance,
This rite was the expression of the desire that all our faults could really be put in the abyss of divine mercy and thus made to disappear. But with the blood of animals, this process was not fulfilled. A more real contact between human fault and divine love was necessary. This contact has taken place with the cross of Christ.
The result is that what the Jews experienced as a worship of desire we can now experience truly: all our sins obliterated in the abyss of God’s mercy.
2. The worship pleasing to God is the union of ourselves with the entire Church. You have to read everything the Pope says here, but when Paul writes in Romans 12, “I urge you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship,” he’s saying something much richer and deeper than that we should live right in order to please God.
This new worship can easily be interpreted in a moralist sense—offering our lives we make true worship. In this way, worship with animals would be substituted by moralism: Man would do everything for himself with his moral strength. And this certainly was not the intention of St. Paul.
What he’s really asking is that we be one in Christ, living a profound union with the entire Church and allowing Christ to transform us:
In communion with Christ, accomplished in the faith and in the sacraments, we transform, despite our deficiencies, into living sacrifice: “True worship” is fulfilled.
This synthesis is the backdrop of the Roman Canon in which we pray that this offering be “rationabile,” so that spiritual worship is accomplished. The Church knows that in the holy Eucharist, the self-gift of Christ, his true sacrifice, is made present. But the Church prays so that the celebrating community is really united to Christ, is transformed; it prays so that we ourselves come to be that which we cannot be with our efforts
3. The purpose of missionary activity is to draw everyone into true worship. Here’s a beautiful thought:
the goal of missionary action is—we could say it this way—the cosmic liturgy: that the peoples united in Christ, the world, become as such the glory of God…
This in a way is an extension of the previous point. When we allow Christ to transform us, when we are in union with him, we are his glory. As Christians, we are ever at work to bring more and more souls into this same relation with Christ.
As always, don’t rely on my summary, Read The Whole Thing.
Previous Sessions:
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Session 2
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Session 5
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Session 7
Session 8
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Session 11
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