Liturgical Cogitations

Details: 11 February 2011

Sacred Time

By means of the sacred liturgy God makes time holy. In and through the liturgy, which is the sublime and divinely instituted worship given by the "whole Christ", Head and members, to God the Father through the Holy Spirit, the space-time continuum into which creation is inserted is sanctified. Each day, each week, each season of the year, and each year in itself is made holy by the liturgy. Then too, the lifetime of each Catholic is touched by the liturgy, especially by the sacraments and sacramentals, and thus the "time" allotted to each Christian’s existence on earth too is sanctified and made holy.

Pope Benedict XVI explains in his book "The Spirit of the Liturgy": "All time is God’s time. When the eternal Word assumed human existence at His incarnation, He also assumed temporality. He drew time into the sphere of eternity. Christ Himself is the bridge between time and eternity. At first it seems as if there can be no connection between the "always" of eternity and the "flowing away" of time. But now the eternal One Himself has taken time to Himself. In the Son time co-exists with eternity. God’s eternity is not mere time-lessness, the negation of time, but a power over time that is really present with time and in time. In the Word incarnate, Who remains man forever, the presence of eternity with time becomes bodily and concrete. All time is God’s time. On the other hand...the time of the Church is a "between" time, between the shadow and the reality, and so its special structure demands a sign, a time specially chosen and designated to draw time as a whole into the hands of God."

Malachi

About four hundred years before the era of Christ on earth, one of the last of the Old Testament prophets, a man named Malachi (whose name means the messenger of the Lord) appeared on the scene. He foretold the rejection of the Jewish temple sacrifices (and to some extent of the Jews themselves) and then told of the coming call of the Gentiles (the "goyim", that is, the non-Jews) and of their future sacrifice that God would find acceptable. "For from the rising of the sun even to its going down, My Name is great among the Gentiles and in every place there is sacrifice, and there is offered to My Name a clean oblation, for My Name is great among the Gentiles, says the Lord of hosts" (Malachi 1:11).

Almost immediately the first Christians saw in those prophetic words a foretelling of the sacrifice of the Mass, making present again and again the once-and-for-all saving sacrifice of Jesus on Mount Calvary. The words of the prophet were taken to mean two things, time and space. Holy Mass is always offered through the day throughout the world from dawn to dusk. However, the expression in Hebrew "from the rising of the sun to its setting" also can be understood geographically, that is, "from east to west". Our English language does not have the capacity in a translation to include both of those meaning at the same time. This sometimes requires the translator to chose one or the other, that is, time or space.

This is why in the Third Eucharistic Prayer (Third Canon), where there is a clear reference to that prophecy of Malachi, the original ICEL translators chose to make the expression geographic (..."from east to west"). The newer translation, however, which will come into use at the beginning of Advent this year (November 27, 2011) will be a more accurate translation from the Latin and will say "from the rising of the sun to its setting a pure sacrifice will be offered to Your Name..." Those modern translators wanted to mirror more precisely the prophecy of Malachi and to retain the possibility of those words being understood both ways by the hearers, that is, as concerning time as well as concerning geographic space.

Days and Weeks

The sacred liturgy sanctifies each day first and foremost by the sacrifice of the Mass. Then the hours of the day are made holy by the Church’s prayers contained in the Divine Office (the Liturgy of the Hours). These prayers are recited by all priests and transitional deacons and by others, especially consecrated religious, who are deputed by the Church to pray for all of mankind. The hours of prayer are Readings (Matins or Vigils), Morning Prayer (Lauds), Daytime Prayers at 9 AM, noon, and 3 PM, Evening Prayer (Vespers) and Night Prayer (Compline). Many lay people often also recite some or all of these prayers which are found in the prayerbook commonly called the Breviary.

Every week is made holy by the sacred liturgy because of the importance of Sunday, the Lord’s Day, which is called either the first or the eighth day of the week. It is the day of the week in which the most important events in world history occurred, the day that creation began, the day on which Christ rose from the dead, to begin the new creation of Christianity, and the day on which the Holy Spirit descended upon the nascent Catholic Church, beginning her manifestation to the world. Every Sunday is considered an Easter. (This is why Sundays in Lent are not calculated as part of the traditional forty days of that liturgical season.) Pope Benedict XVI remarks, "For Christians it (Sunday) is the weekly returning of the resurrection... It is called the eighth day because it looks forward and not backward, looking toward the final consummation. With the day of the resurrection coming after the Sabbath, Christ, as it were, strode across time and lifted it up above itself... The eighth day signifies a new time that has dawned with the resurrection. In the liturgy we already reach out to lay hold of it, but at the same time it is ahead of us. It is the sign of God’s definitive world in which shadow and image are superseded in the final indwelling of God and His creatures."

The Holy Father notes that "It was to reflect this symbolism of the eighth day that people liked to build baptistries with eight sides. This was meant to show that Baptism is birth into the eighth day, into the resurrection of Christ and into the new time that opened up with the resurrection. Sunday is thus for the Christian, time’s proper measure, the temporal measure of his life. It is not based on an arbitrary convention that could be exchanged for another, but contains a unique synthesis of the remembrance of history, the recalling of creation and the theology of hope."

The Pope notes also that in the Church’s liturgy "we do participate in the heavenly liturgy, but this participation is mediated to us through earthly signs which the Redeemer has shown us as the place where His reality is to be found. The liturgy is the means by which earthly time is inserted into the time of Jesus Christ. The Shepherd takes the lost sheep onto His shoulders and carries it home."