Emmanuel
EUCHARIST: LIVING & EVANGELIZING
Celebrating God’s Plan of
Creation/Salvation
by John Zupez, SJ
Father John
Zupez, a former
contributor
to Emmanuel,
taught for years
in seminaries in
Africa and is now
serving in prison
ministry.
Sacrosanctum Concilium, the Second Vatican Council’s Constitution on the
Sacred Liturgy, gave guidelines for a renewed spirit and practice of the
church’s liturgy. Over 50 years later, the constitution continues to challenge
us to improve our understanding of public, communitarian prayer.
For centuries, we were left to our own thoughts and devotions at
Mass celebrated by the priest in Latin. There was little sense of sharing
with those around us. Hans Urs von Balthasar succinctly describes the
challenge this presents for us: “We must make every effort to arouse the
sense of community within the liturgy. . . . Liturgical piety involves a total
turning from concern with one’s inner state to the attitude and feeling of
the church. It means enlarging the scope of prayer, so often narrow and
selfish, to embrace the concerns of the whole church and indeed of God”
(Church and World, New York, Herder and Herder, 1967, 32).
As an assist for our more fully realizing this larger perspective, I review here
God’s overall plan in creation, which has the power to move us beyond
a narrow focus on ourselves during the Mass to an experience of a more
pervasive community consciousness that was integral to the church’s
liturgy from the start. Such consciousness is evident in the liturgies of
the Eastern Christian churches that were not impacted by barbarian
invasions during the “Dark Ages,” when the church in the West lost vital
contact with its roots. The ressourcement called for by the bishops at
Vatican II is largely about going back to our roots in the Bible and being
inspired by the message of Christian revelation in its integrity.
The epistles of the apostle Paul are filled with polemic regarding Judaism,
and also with encouragement for the early Christian church. To grasp
Paul’s insight into God’s overall plan in creation, one must select phrases
and verses from throughout the Pauline corpus and weave these into a
meaningful narrative. I have done this in what follows. Texts are taken
from the New Revised Standard Version of the New Testament.
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