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Salvation as Process Rather Than Event

All Souls Day : 3 November 2013  : 1 Peter 1: 3-9

Suppose a time machine could transport us this morning back to the high middle ages to a large parish church in a reasonably prosperous community. Two features would immediately strike us about the church interior.

The first would be the fenced off sanctuary with a screen that, while it allowed you to look within to the altar, had gates that prevented you entering within, unless you had a liturgical job to do and priestly permission to do it. The screen was rather like the insulation walls that surround a modern nuclear reactor. It shielded you from something going on within that was powerful, mysterious, and that if handled correctly and safely had the potential to be immensely beneficial.

The other possible interior feature would be a side chapel, probably fenced off too, known as a chantry chapel in which daily masses would be said for the repose of the souls of those who had endowed the chapel and its resident priest. The priest would be stipended from the bequests of the chapel’s wealthy and now departed patrons to do nothing but celebrate this daily mass with special intention for releasing the people prayed for from purgatory into heaven.

The assumption behind this continual Eucharistic activity was that every time the sacred meal was celebrated it connected those present and those prayed for to the saving power of what Christ had done on the cross for the salvation of humankind. It wasn’t repeating the sacrifice of Calvary on the altar, but it was placing before the Father symbols of what he had achieved in his death and resurrection, and by so doing activated the power of that saving event on behalf of those interceded for. The ignorant, the misinformed and those prone to superstition and exaggeration might suppose that the priest had power to confect Christ on the altar, and then offer his body and blood to the Father as a way of obtaining favours from him, but that wasn’t what the church taught or understood itself to be doing in the central act of Christian worship. Nevertheless chantry chapels, though popular with many, especially the well off who were anxious about their chances of salvation, came in for searching criticisms from the protestant reformers, who eventually succeeded in shutting them down right across England.

The protestant reformers had some strong points to make in their criticism of the practice. If what Christ achieved for us on the cross was so powerful to save, if that one event changed everything in the universe to secure our salvation, than why was it necessary to go on nagging God in this anxious and insecure way as if he needed reminding about our eternal salvation? And if one talked about reactivating the power of the cross through the sacrifice of the Mass was that saying that Calvary diminished in its saving significance the further one moved away from it in time? Again, if Calvary was the powerful saving event whose effects are continually radiating out though all ages and all places then surely it doesn’t need human agents to switch on its salvific powers in a particular time and place. And if chantry priests were the Eucharistic technicians who switched on the power of the cross for their paying customers didn’t that make them a special caste with powers and privileges that marked them off from the rest of the people of God?

After the Reformation the whole argument went away for a few hundred years. Although the Church of England was woolly about its Eucharistic theology the general consensus was that it didn’t believe in the doctrine of Eucharistic sacrifice any more, and it dropped the practice of praying for the dead – that was something that only Papists did. In as much as it had a doctrine of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist it was probably close to Cranmer’s Calvinistic take on the sacred meal. Instead of bringing heaven down to earth the Holy Communion took its participants up to heaven for that brief time of worship, there to feast with the risen Christ, with his presence being generally found in the atmosphere of the Service, rather than in the bread and wine. The whole language of the Book of Common Prayer Communion Service is infused with this sense of a mystical repast in the heavenly realms.

What started the whole debate up again was the second phase of the Oxford movement in the latter half of the 19th century when Anglo-Catholic priests returned to the ceremonial and ritualist practices of the middle ages. In a way they had gone looking for trouble as the best way of generating recruiting publicity for the cause, and they certainly got it as rioting mobs and imprisoning courts tried to shut them down.

If there was one particular point that that detonated the opposition it was the reintroduction of Eucharistic Vestments by ritualist priests, especially the Chasuble, this poncho like outer garment I am wearing. The point of wearing it was to state that the celebrant believed in the sacrifice of the Mass, that not only was Christ powerfully present in the consecrated bread and wine, but that this happened because the earthly gifts of bread and wine had been transported to the heavenly altar, and by being made available for God’s purposes in this way had been infused with his presence in a unique way and been returned to the earthly worshippers. What further riled those opposed to the reintroduction of these ancient ways was that prayers for the dead were back in fashion in these ritualist churches, and that often this happened during the Eucharist, with some of these Services being offered with special intention for the repose of the souls of the faithful departed.

Here we are on All Souls day, which wasn’t even commemorated by the Victorian Church, and at the 10.30 Service we will be remembering by name many of the departed who are dear to our congregations. Are we repeating the mistaken theology of chantry chapels, and trying to twist God’s arm about people whose eternal destiny he has already made up his mind about?

When I try to picture in my mind’s eye what is going on here I think of the way God’s trinitarian love is continually circulating through the world in an invisible manner. Jesus the Son is continually moving towards the Father in a momentum of love and praise and obedience, which the Father joyfully accepts, and then returns in rich blessings as the Holy Spirit is breathed out on the world, and comes to the Son in this continuous exchange of love and knowledge. The death of Jesus on the cross took place once in time in an unrepeatable way, as Anglican liturgies often state. But this saving death was what this continually movement of the Son towards the Father in glad obedience and love and praise looked like when projected on to the screen of human misery and sin. The incarnation, Christ’s biological life on earth, was but one instance of what is going on all the time within the life of the Trinity.

When we celebrate the Eucharist we are plugging in to this continual movement of the Son to the Father. We are drawn in to this momentum like a surfer riding a wave, and as we do so we bring with us our hopes and fears and concerns, including our desire that the dead who matter to us will be united with God forever. What we receive in communion is this circulating rhythm of the Fathers return blessings in the power of the Spirit as he gives us the risen life of his Son under the signs of bread and wine. We only present before the Father what Jesus did on the cross in as much as he is doing that all the time – we join in by association, ride on the coat tails of what he is doing without our assistance.

Nor is the priest a member of a special caste completely separated from the priesthood of all believers, functioning like a celestial electrician who can plug the parish into the circulating rhythm of Trinitarian life. He is delegated by the wider church and the local congregation to symbolically represent it and lead it in an act of worship in which the whole church assembled in that place is indeed the celebrant and participant, which is why we try to share worship roles as much as possible, and why the clergy are discouraged from celebrating the Eucharist without a congregation being present.

As for praying for the dead – Christianity is a communitarian business. We stand on the shoulders of many in our decision to follow Christ. We are sustained in our walk of faith by the example and encouragement of many. We leave this life usually as a work in progress still needing the sympathetic support and compassionate energy of our brothers and sisters in Christ in our last leg of the journey. And one of the things the Eucharist does is to form us into Christ’s collective presence in this place, and bring us together with Christ into the presence of the Father. The Mass starts us going in the community building exercise, which will be completed in heaven, as we become the total Christ, his body united to him as head.

When the ritualist priests began their controversial liturgical activities in the Victorian Church they didn’t have time to spell all this out in a finished theological way. It has been left to their inheritors to do that. I am going to conclude with some wise words from Rowan Williams that says it better than I can:

The glorified Christ, crucified and risen, is eternally active towards God the Father on our behalf, drawing us into the eternal movement of self-giving love that the Son or Word directs towards the source of all, the God Jesus calls "Abba." The sacrifice of the cross is, among other things, the "transcription" into this world’s terms of the Son’s movement of love towards the Father in heaven. In the Eucharist, our prayer is swept into that current, and we are set free to share in the Son’s self-giving. The giving of thanks over the elements renews for us the covenant made by God in Christ, and the work of God in the cross is again "applied" to us, in word and action, in body and soul...the presence that is appropriate and intelligible in the Eucharist is neither the presence of an idea in our minds...nor the presence of a uniquely sacred object on the Table. It is the presence of an active Christ, moving in love not only towards the Father but towards us.