Lent Group for Lent 1 2011 – “The Sacrifice of the Mass”

Notes for the Lent Group (the presentation was followed by discussion)

At every Mass the celebrant says,

“Pray, my brothers and sisters, that this our sacrifice may be acceptable to God the Almighty Father.”

To which everyone replies,

“May the Lord accept the sacrifice at your hands, for the praise and glory of his name, for our good and the good of all his Church.”

What I’d like to explore in this session is what on earth we might be talking about when we say these things. We’ll be looking at two paintings which in different ways explore what happens when violence and the Eucharist come up against each other.

The last supper was a scene of betrayal. Jesus was about to be given up to death, and the supper was the set-up for a lynching. Judas had already given away the location of Jesus, and the route he would take to the garden after supper, where the temple guard would be waiting for him. At every Mass the celebrant, re-enacting the words and actions of Jesus, begins, “in the same night that he was betrayed”. The Eucharist was instituted as Jesus’ last act before the oncoming darkness of violence and murder.

It was at that moment that Jesus made his greatest act of love. He gave us himself. A few hours after the supper, he would no longer be free, and would no longer be in control of what happened to him. At the supper, he was still free, he could still just about have escaped and gone off to live quietly in obscurity for the rest of his days. But he chose to stay and give his life, freely, as an act of love. Before they were taken from him by force, he gave his body and blood. This is my body which is given for you.

The Jesuit theologian Maurice de la Taille argued that the essence of Christ’s sacrifice was found in the institution of the Eucharist. The supper was Christ’s oblation, that is his offering of himself, made while he was still free to do so. It was as it were the contract by which he bound himself to the death of the cross where the sacrifice was completed.

To whom did Jesus give himself up? To whom was the oblation offered? Jesus said, “This is my body which is given for you. This is my blood which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins.”

I’d like to suggest that the sacrifice of the Mass has nothing to do with a victim offered to placate an angry God. In his life and teaching Jesus consistently rejected any such idea. He quoted the psalms and the prophets who said that God wanted mercy, not sacrifice, the knowledge of God, not burnt offerings. He overturned the tables in the temple, not because he objected to trade, but because they were an essential part of the sacrificial system. He did so saying that the temple was to be a house of prayer for all nations. God did not want, did not require, the wholesale slaughter of animals that went on there.

According to the catholic anthropologist René Girard, ancient cults of sacrifice have their origin in violence, rivalry and fear. They are a way in which society protects itself from its own violence by finding substitute victims. A society which is in conflict regains its unity by focussing outwards on a scapegoat. According to Girard, this is the mechanism of violence which has controlled human society from the beginning. And because sacrifice and scapegoating get disguised in religious imagery, people think that this is what God is like, that this is what God wants.

Jesus undermined that idea, and consciously placed himself in the position of our scapegoat. He subverted the murder that was coming his way by giving his life freely and forgiving his murderers. He was raised from the dead, not to exact revenge, but to bring forgiveness and new life to all. His death and resurrection is God’s life and light breaking through into our darkness and violence. It is humanity meeting God’s utterly generous, vivacious alive-ness, and being transformed. It is the life of Jesus given for us, not to propitiate an angry deity. And this is expressed, lived out, in a unique way through the Eucharist.

Every Eucharist takes place in this world, in some way or another amid the gathering clouds of human betrayal, violence and murder. And every Eucharist is the breaking in to that of God’s utterly vivacious alive-ness, the generosity that is completely free of rivalry and violence. The sacrifice of the Mass is God giving himself to us in Jesus, subverting and overturning the way in which human beings demand sacrifices and victims.

Last year in his homily for the feast of Corpus Christi, Pope Benedict said that the priesthood of Jesus was not the same as that of the priests in the temple. In fact, his sacrifice was “completely the opposite” of theirs. He concluded:

“It is divine power, the same power that created the incarnation of the Word, that transforms extreme violence and extreme injustice into a supreme act of love and justice. This is the work of the priesthood of Christ, which the Church has inherited and extends through history, in the dual form of the common priesthood of the baptised and the ordained priesthood of ministers, so as to transform the world with the love of God.”

http://visnews-en.blogspot.com/2010/06/prophetic-priesthood-of-christ-and.html

It is that possibility of the transformation of the world from violence to love which we will explore in these two paintings.

Ramon Casas i Carbó (1866-1932)

Corpus Christi Procession leaving Santa Maria del Mar, Barcelona 1896-98. Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya.

(Image source: Wikipedia)

Barcelona in 1896 was part of a Spain in which a repressive government protected vested interests, one of which was the Church. Revolutionary groups had carried out a number of bombings and assassinations in Barcelona, culminating in the attack on this Corpus Christi procession. 12 people were killed. No-one knows who was to blame, but  anyone suspected of being an anarchist or revolutionary was rounded up and confessions extracted under torture. Several died under torture, five were executed, and 61 people who were acquitted were nonetheless sent to a penal colony. The so-called "Montjuic Trials" caused outrage around the world. Protest in Barcelona itself had to be subtle, but Casas, by the mere fact of painting and exhibiting this picture after the trials, was making a powerful statement.

So this is no mere street scene, but an image fraught with tension and impending violence and revenge. The dresses of the first communion girls look as though they are dissolving, about to be blown away. The group of men in the middle ground holding torches for the procession look as though they could be lighting fuses on bombs. And you have in the front and all around the Guardia Civil on horseback, figures of state authority and repression.  They appear again in another painting by Casas, The Charge, which shows mounted Guardia mowing down an unarmed demonstration. As has often been the case in the polarised history of Spanish politics, the Church and its clergy with some noble exceptions tended to side with the forces of repression, and indeed were complicit in the scenes of torture and "confession" which were a reaction to the equally outrageous and unjust acts of terrorism.

And yet this is a Corpus Christi procession, the Body of Christ about to be caught up in this storm of murder and revenge, the very scapegoating from which Jesus seeks to free us. That Body still given, freely, divinely, even into a situation where it is about to be betrayed once more. We are perhaps too used to images of Judas at the last supper, the first treacherous priest about to betray Jesus. He fails to shock us any more. This image of the Body of Christ caught up in violence in which some of his priests, too, will be complicit, brings home the darkness of that first betrayal into which Jesus, nevertheless, gave himself, the light of the world that the darkness cannot overcome.

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) 

The Supper at Emmaus, 1601. The National Gallery, London.

(Image source: The National Gallery)

Caravaggio had a troubled life. He was passionate, jealous and violent. He’d killed someone in a brawl, been imprisoned, escaped and was on the run from a death sentence when he caught a fever and died. Some of his paintings show the dark and troubled side of his character. Beheadings which are all too vivid, perhaps from his reflecting on the possible fate that lay in store for him while he was in prison. Sexual desire bound up with death, sensual bodies already tinged with the green of decay.

And yet he painted this. In fact he painted this scene twice, and this is the earlier version which is in the National Gallery. He uses chiaroscuro to make the scene come alive and draw us in. It is the risen Jesus making himself known in the breaking of bread, after the disciples on the road had failed to recognize him while he explained the scriptures to them. Jesus does not look like conventional portrayals of him. Caravaggio used rough working men as models which scandalized some, but which helps to bring out the enigma of Jesus’ appearance here.

To me this is a hopeful picture. Caravaggio, for all his violence and sin, draws us into this scene and I can only think that he does so by seeing himself there too. It is a scene of recognition, of the possibility of redemption, the meeting with the Divine victim, risen from the death we inflicted, and offering us freely the life we thought we had to take. It says to me that violence and sin need not be the final word on Caravaggio’s life. Or on ours.