During the time that I was a deacon, and before I was priested, the then Vicar, Neil Follett, spent a lot of time with me teaching me to celebrate – to say Mass. He was pretty High Church and that was at the top of his agenda. While I am happy to be somewhat lower down the candle, I am grateful for his tutorials.
It seems to me that the extremes in the Church – terribly catholic and frightfully evangelical – are both unhelpful. But presiding over the Eucharist with an appropriate degree of dignity is important to me. Neil made me go through the Eucharistic Prayers line by line, and to think about what I was doing, and whom I represented, at each stage. And, indeed, who was represented at every stage by what we are doing.
Thus it’s a pity that at a Sunday 8.00 o’clock, and at a Thursday 9.45 Holy Communion, we don’t have a procession to bring up the bread and the wine. The point of a procession is that it represents all of us. At the beginning of a Sung Eucharist, the choir and clergy come in, preceded by a Cross. They represent all of us, following our crucified and risen Lord.
When, at a Sung Eucharist, we have a Gospel procession, the Gospel is read, facing West, from the middle of the Nave, by the deacon. The procession is not just an excuse for some exercise: processions are symbolic. This one symbolises the idea that we preach the Gospel from within the Church to those outside it. That’s why we (in Godmanchester, anyway) face West. The altar at the East represents the presence of God; and we are not reading the Gospel to God. He already knows it.
Maybe we ought to explain it a bit more. When, on odd occasions, the church is full of non-regulars, it is upsetting to see so many folk at the front staring eastwards and with their back to the procession. It would be good if they joined with us in facing the Cross, the candles and the reader – and felt part of the proclamation of the Word. Maybe we ought to explain more.
So, when the bread and the wine are brought up, they represent us, you and me. We say so in the liturgy. Through your goodness, we have this bread to set before you: which earth has given and human hands have made. I am a child of the earth, and I am what human hands – those of my parents, my siblings and my friends – have made me. We are used to be more plain speaking: the words were once We have this bread to offer. I think the wording was changed from respect to evangelicals who feared we might be talking about the sacrifice of the Mass in rather Roman language. So we now say: We have this bread to set before you.
But we nowhere talk about making a new sacrifice of Jesus. As far as I can see, the Roman rite doesn’t either. Suspicion and superstition are not so fine if the object is to avoid Christian unity. On Ash Wednesday evening, David forgot the new words and used the old ones: We have this bread to offer. Good. That bit of the service is called The Offertory because in it we offer ourselves. The collection is not the offertory: it is the collection. But there too we recognise that what we give was God’s to start with: All things come from you and of your own do we give you. The political implications of that are quite staggering. We are, I am sorry to say, not staggered enough. There is a sermon for every day of the year in that. We mess about with our internal squabbles, worrying about our attitudes to gays and lesbians. And all the while, our fellow human beings starve. And we ought to be more aware. Let’s go back to the Eucharist and what it means – or ought to mean.
Bread and wine have been brought up in procession – or, at an 8.00 o’clock or a Thursday 9.45 – sneakily put on the altar. It’s at that stage that I say the first of the prayers that catholics would call the secrets.
At a Sunday 8.00 o’clock, or, if I am presiding on a Thursday, I put the bread and wine on the altar. And only then do I wash my fingers. We offer ourselves with unclean hands, because we can’t offer ourselves in any other way. I can’t keep up the symbolism at 9.45 because there is so much going on and it would be discourteous to the others involved to get all fussy.
But whenever I wash my fingers in what we fancifully – not to say oddly – call the lavabo, I say a private prayer based on a verse in Psalm 26: I will wash my hands in innocency that I may go about your altar Lord; and lift up my voice in thanksgiving to tell of all your marvellous works. There is more than one translation, of course.
It is at this point that I throw all my principles overboard. I usually try to be as academically correct as possible when handling the biblical text. But the man who wrote Psalm 26 thought he was morally irreproachable – innocent. I don’t for a moment think that is true of me. And so I reinterpret the words to mean that I wash my hands in the innocence of Jesus.
The picture that comes to my mind is that of the penseive in the Harry Potter stories. The Headmaster Dumbledore has a bowl in his study that is full of thoughts. He – or you – can reach into it with your wand and pick a few out and pop them into your mind. That’s what I fell like when I want to wash my hands in the innocency of Jesus.
I said I betrayed my principles in two ways. I pray I wash may hands in innocency – not mine, you understand – that I may lift up my voice in thanksgiving. In Greek, the word for Thanskgiving is Eucharist.
The Psalms were translated from Hebrew into Greek in about BC 200. You would hope that the word in Psalm 26 had been translated as Eucharist. But sadly it was not. Should I worry? Well, not if I am in the company of St Matthew, whose Gospel is a string of mis-interpretations. So blame Matthew.
We come to the Sursum Corda. The first written record of it was in about BC 215, so presumably it had been in use for some time before then; and, if you think that the Christian Church had begun not much more than a hundred years before, clearly we are into something very old indeed. St Paul’s account of the first – or last – supper – was written in about AD 50, and we have another, non-biblical, account that may go back to within a decade or two of that.
The Sursum Corda comes in three parts.
Neil did not tell me what conclusions I was to reach as I thought about it all. But it seemed to me that that third item was a request to the congregation for permission to represent them. Oddly enough, although we all know the words by heart, everyone seems to have their heads buried in the book. So you may not notice that I bow to you when you respond with It is right to give him thanks and praise. I have your permission to proceed for us all.
The service is very wordy – too wordy, a lot of us think. But there is a little silence. At once point, when I receive, or take up, the bread, I use a verse from tonight’s Psalm: 116. I will offer you a sacrifice of thanksgiving, and call upon the name of the Lord. I will pay my vows in the presence of all his people. Once again, I traduce my principles. When they translated the Psalm into Greek, they did not use the word Eucharist for the word Thanksgiving. When I am given the wine to pour into the chalice, I base my prayer on the same Psalm: I will lift us the cup of salvation, and call upon the name of the Lord; I will pay my vows in the presence of all his people.
Now I entirely agree that these prayers are a distortion of the scholarly way we might handle them – in a theology class. Is it wrong to do distort them so in Sunday-by-Sunday worship? During the Christmas season, Evening Prayer include a refrain before the Magnificat:
When peaceful silence lay over all, and night was in the midst of her swift course: from your royal throne, O God, down from the heavens, leapt your almighty Word.
It comes from the book of Wisdom – not included in all our Bibles – and it looks perfect for Christmas. In fact it was not about Christmas at all. In its original context it was about the angel of death, destroying the Egyptians at the time of the Exodus. Crumbs; what are we to think? I think that words now describe where we are now. The Bible is more like a Prayer Book than a history book. We are allowed to use words where they fit. Like the prayers I say at the Eucharist – even if they are a bit unscholarly. But they do come from the Psalms; and the Psalmists were sometimes more interested in liturgy than in history. It may come as a shock, but that is true of a lot of the Bible.