Schola Christi - Mass and the New Covenant

Schola Christi, The Oratory Lecture Series and Homilies from The Pittsburgh Oratory

Guardini draws our attention to a way that Christ establishes His memorial that is often given little notice in instructions on the Mass - Covenant. At the consecration of the wine we hear: "this is the blood of the new and eternal covenant." Yet what that exactly means may elude many Catholics. Guardini shows us how the Mass is connected to the Passover and the establishment of the Law of Mt. Sinai. He writes: "The parallel is obvious. The mediator on Sinai says: 'This is the blood of the covenant which the Lord hath made with you . . .' Jesus says: 'This is the chalice of My Blood, of the new and eternal testament . . . which shall be shed for you.'" The parallels in scripture go even further back to the covenant establish with both Abraham and Noah. In all of these we find the stress laid upon "blood" - however, not in the manner in which it is often describe in tribal religions and their sacrifices. Neither, does God bind himself to one tribe or nation. He is the Lord of all and Israel was to be a light to the nations. Again Guardini states: Christ "accepts the destiny prepared for Him by the disobedient people of the first covenant and turns it into the sacrificial offering of the second, which binds the Father, Lord of the world, to His new people, now no longer a natural ethnic one, but a spiritual people, comprised by all the races of the earth and united by faith. Wherever a man opens his heart to the tidings of Christ and believes in Him, he becomes a member of that 'people'." All things that came before merely point to this covenant of grace that comes to us from God and draws us from the natural into the divine. With this new covenant comes a new birth and a new creation! "Christ’s sacrificial death opened for us the new heaven and the new earth; that there exists between Him and us a contract based not on nature or talent or religious capacity, but on grace and freedom; that it is binding from person to person, loyalty to loyalty. At every Mass we should reaffirm that contract and consciously take our stand in it."

AMONG THE words Jesus used to establish His memorial, there is one which as a rule receives little notice in instruction on the Mass: the word about the covenant. St. Matthew’s Gospel reads: “All of you drink of this; for this is the blood of the new covenant, which is being shed for many unto the forgiveness of sins” (Matt. 26:29). St. Mark’s: “This is my blood of the new covenant, which is being shed for many” (Mark 14:24). St. Luke’s: “This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which shall be shed for you” (Luke 22:20). In St. Paul’s first Epistle to the Corinthians we also find a reference to the covenant, resembling that in Luke (1 Cor. 11:25). We see how important the idea of the covenant is to the Church in the emphasis she places on it. At the consecration of the wine in the Canon of the Mass we have the words: “For this is the chalice of My Blood, of the new and eternal testament: the mystery of faith: which shall be shed for you and for many unto the remission of sins.” What exactly does this mean?

The Passover was a feast of commemoration. We have already discussed the event it commemorated. When the rulers of Egypt remained unmoved by Moses’ threats and God’s lighter plagues, stubbornly refusing to let the Hebrew captives go, the Lord God sent them the terrible plague of the death of all their firstborn, human as well as animal. In order that it might be perfectly clear who was being punished, the members of each Jewish household were commanded to slaughter a lamb and daub the door-posts of the house with its blood. Thus the angel of death would pass them by, and their oppressors would be left in no doubt that they alone were meant. That evening the lamb was to be consumed by the joyfully united members of the household, and the solemn feast was to be repeated annually in commemoration of the end of Egyptian bondage. Jesus Himself had celebrated the Passover each year with His disciples. But He had given the celebration a different turn by emphasizing not so much the liberation as the event following it: the sealing of the covenant of Sinai. The Book of Exodus reports:

So Moses came and told the people all the words of the Lord, and all the judgments. And all the people answered with one voice: We will do all the words of the Lord, which he hath spoken. And Moses wrote all the words of the Lord: and rising in the morning he built an altar at the foot of the mount, and twelve titles according to the twelve tribes of Israel. And he sent young men of the children of Israel: and they offered holocausts, and sacrificed pacific victims of calves to the Lord. Then Moses took half of the blood and put it into bowls: and the rest he poured upon the altar. And taking the book of the covenant, he read it in the hearing of the people: and they said: All things that the Lord hath spoken we shall do. We will be obedient. And he took the blood and sprinkled it upon the people, and he said: This is the blood of the covenant which the Lord hath made with you concerning all these words” (Ex. 24:3-8).

The parallel is obvious. The mediator on Sinai says: “This is the blood of the covenant which the Lord hath made with you . . .” Jesus says: “This is the chalice of My Blood, of the new and eternal testament . . . which shall be shed for you.”

Behind the covenant of Sinai stands an earlier covenant, the one that existed between God and Abraham. It too had been sealed in blood: After the sun had set and a dark mist had risen, a lamplike fire passed between the “divisions” [of the slaughtered, sacrificial animals]. “That day God made a covenant with Abram, saying: To thy seed will I give this land, from the river of Egypt even to the great river Euphrates” (Gen. 15:17-18). And still further back, in the grey beginnings of time, looms the original covenant between God and Noe, sealed after the Flood, when Noe offered sacrifice to the Lord: “. . . and Noe built an altar unto the Lord: and taking of all cattle and fowls that were clean, offered holocausts upon the altar. And the Lord smelled a sweet savour, and said: I will no more curse the earth for the sake of man: for the imagination and thought of man’s heart are prone to evil from his youth: therefore I will no more destroy every living soul as I have done. All the days of the earth, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, night and day, shall not cease” (Gen. 8:20-22). “Behold, I will establish my covenant with you, and with your seed after you…. And God said: This is the sign of the covenant which I give between me and you, and to every living soul that is with you, for perpetual generations. I will set my bow in the clouds, and it shall I be the sign of a covenant between me, and between the earth” (Gen. 9:8-13).

In all these texts we find the reference to blood, often stressed again and again. This may impress us as strange, inhuman, but we do well to refrain from judging hastily by our twentieth-century reactions. Deep in the consciousness of all races lies a knowledge of the power of blood. Blood is life in its primary and most elementary form. Its flow eases tension, appeases anger, averts the lowering fate, enables life to reassume its course. How, it is impossible to say; we can only sense the truth of this. Somehow, through the flowing of blood a new beginning is made, mysteriously fortified by the sanguinary life-power. Obviously, the primitive significance of blood cannot simply be applied as it stands to revelation, for if ever anything needed redemption, it is the dark, primeval powers of blood. However, once existence has been transfigured, all things are revealed anew, and with them the power of blood. It is significant in the covenant not because it is symbolic of the glory and terror of life, but because in a special way it belongs to God, the Lord of all life. The flowing of the sacrificial blood in the Old Testament is an acknowledgment of His sovereignty, signifying the opposite of what it signifies in other religious sacrifices. It is not a kind of blood-mysticism, not a release of the divinity in nature, not a summoning of the powers of the deep. It has nothing to do with any of these. It is simply the recognition and prayerful acknowledgment that God alone is Lord!

Upon the conception of streaming blood as an expression of ultimate obedience, then, God places His covenant. And again we must be careful to differentiate. The word does not signify here what it does in the various religions, namely, the alliance of a divinity with a particular tribe. There it constitutes the secret vitality of the tribe, which in turn is the immediate expression of the god’s reality. Thus the two are interdependent to the point of being or non-being: the tribe enjoys the power and protection of its god; on the other hand, the god lives from the fertility and strength of the tribe. Their unity is effected in sacrifice. Through his offerings man strengthens the vitality of his god; then, by consuming the offerings, man avails himself of his god’s strength.

In the Old Testament there is not a trace of any such conception. God is not the divinity of a people or tribe because of any natural circumstance. He is not the mysterious source of its vitality and strength, but One who summons it from the freedom of divine decree. Certainly not because He needs human expression of His existence and a steady stream of earthly vitality in order to exist. He needs neither the Hebrew people nor any other people, for He is Lord of all that is. He summons this particular race not because it is better or more pious or more loyal than another. On the contrary, over and over again it proves itself disobedient, hard-hearted, and inconstant. What God founded with the Hebrew people was neither a powerful theocracy nor a religion expressive of a particular racial existence. He simply entrusted the Hebrews with His word and His law, which they were to bear through history, ultimately to all the peoples of the earth. Why He selected the Hebrews for this task is the impenetrable mystery of His decree.

All this must be clear if the word covenant is to receive its full weight. Above all, it is no question of a natural give and take, no alliance between the divine essence and the tribal, no blending of divine power with earthly, no beginning of a history of God in the history of a race. Not until all these conceptions have been cleared away does the inconceivable reveal itself: in absolute freedom the Lord of the universe singles out a people, addresses it and enables it to respond; He gives it His loyalty and demands its loyalty in return. He undertakes a divine task on earth and commands a race to render its services. If that race renounces its natural-historical existence in obedience to God’s command, it will receive its fulfillment direct from divine sovereignty.

But the Hebrew people declined. They clung fast to their racial consciousness and will and hardened themselves therein. When God’s Son, whose coming had been foretold throughout the centuries, comes to fulfill and end the covenant, His relation to men again assumes the form of a covenant. The people of the first covenant crowns its disobedience by turning on the Messiah and killing Him; and the second covenant, which should have been sealed in faith and love, once again is sealed in sacrificial blood, now the blood of Jesus Christ. For the Messiah accepts the destiny prepared for Him by the disobedient people of the first covenant and turns it into the sacrificial offering of the second, which binds the Father, Lord of the world, to His new people, now no longer a natural ethnic one, but a spiritual people, comprised by all the races of the earth and united by faith. Wherever a man opens his heart to the tidings of Christ and believes in Him, he becomes a member of that “people,” as St. Peter says in his first Epistle: “You, however, are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a purchased people; that you may proclaim the perfections of him who has called you out of the darkness into his marvellous light” (I Peter 2:9).

The new covenant, then, embraces a divine people which takes nothing from any earthly people and disturbs no national history, because it exists on an entirely different plane.

It is strange how completely the idea of the covenant has vanished from the Christian consciousness. We do mention it, but it seems to have lost its meaning for us; our Christian existence is determined by concepts of the new life, the new world, God’s kingdom, all of which tend to attach themselves to corresponding concepts in the natural order and to masquerade as things self-understood. But the moment of demasking always arrives. Then the seeming naturalness of the Christian conceptions falls, and we realize with a start that Christian being is no mere continuation of natural being, that the Christian order of existence is not simply a higher step in the order of nature and man, but “descends” to us from divine freedom and is meant to be caught up and held in human freedom. God summons man before Him. Upon hearing the divine command and question, man is meant to liberate himself from what is purely of this earth and to prove his loyalty to God-straight through the ties of the world. What then takes place is based not on nature, or the processes of history, or the unfolding of the mind and spirit, but on grace, summons, freedom, decision, all contained in the idea of the covenant. We are Christians because of a covenant. This thought must complement the other, more familiar concept of rebirth and the new creation. Covenant and rebirth: individual dignity and responsibility, and the abundance of the new life. The two great concepts belong together, for they mutually sustain one another.

Holy Mass is the commemoration of God’s new covenant with men. Awareness of this gives the celebration an added significance that is most salutary. To keep this thought in mind is to remind ourselves that Christ’s sacrificial death opened for us the new heaven and the new earth; that there exists between Him and us a contract based not on nature or talent or religious capacity, but on grace and freedom; that it is binding from person to person, loyalty to loyalty. At every Mass we should reaffirm that contract and consciously take our stand in it.

Romano Guardini

Meditations Before Mass