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Eucharistic Sacrifice — An Insoluble Liturgical Problem?
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 February 2009
Extract
It is a well-known fact that many a modern eucharistic prayer shows signs of handling the relationship between Supper and Calvary with due care, even with some creative ambiguity. For some, indeed, the very concept of offering is fraught with problems which can only be faced in liturgical formulae by having recourse to paradox. The bread and wine are on the table, but they are neither ‘offered’ sacrificially, nor are they ‘held back’ from the good purposes of God. The act of memorial is neither a re-enactment of Calvary nor is it an insignificant feature of the Church's life, as if all the eucharistic community did was to bask in the sunshine of Christ's single offering, and that is that. Yet many modern prayers are the direct result of creative movements such as liturgical research, patristic theology, and the rapprochment between the Churches that has been so much part of twentieth-century history.
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- Copyright © Scottish Journal of Theology Ltd 1989
References
1 ‘… in spite of a proper caution about speaking too loosely of the elements as ‘offered’ to God in the eucharist, we still need to say that the moment of relinquishing what is ours is crucial in the eucharistic process’, quoted from Williams, Rowan, Resurrection: Interpreting the Easter Gospel (London: Darton, Longman and Todd, 1982), p. 111.Google Scholar I owe a great deal to the ‘broadened’ view of the eucharist expounded in this book.
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28 Ibid., p. 182. By no coincidence(?), this anaphora is the earliest to contain a prayer for the celebrant himself, in the first person singular, noted in Stevenson op. cit., p. 44).
29 Ibid., passim, but see pp. 92f. This distinction of the role of priest and congregation is a feature of the teaching of Pope John Paul II, pp. 21–23.
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33 See Stevenson, op. cit., passim.
34 Text drafted for the Church of England Liturgical Commission. Cf. Power's treatment of this theme: ‘the prayer of remembrance, which is known as a prayer of thanksgiving and praise, is also a prayer for forgiveness, reconciliation and nourishment. It is the pleading (my italics) of the blood of Christ for mercy, the church's part in the intercession that Christ makes at God's right hand’ (The Sacrifice We Offer, p. 185).
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