ELIZABETH Harrington’s points are well made when she says: ‘One very important aspect of the Eucharist that is sometimes overlooked is the understanding of it as a sacrament of reconciliation … But perhaps we need to recapture the understanding that was strong in the early Church … namely that our participation at Mass grants forgiveness through word, gesture and sacrament’ (CL 19/8/01).
The words we say in the Confiteor, Kyrie, ‘Lamb of God’ and ‘Lord I am not worthy’ indicate that the person saying them acknowledges his sinfulness. The basic format of the Mass was in place by the time of Justin Martyr (c 100-165 AD), long before the individual Sacrament of Penance that we know. In the Old Testament, the chosen people as a whole are described as sinful. There is the feeling that sin is a matter of collective responsibility. Jesus too points to a certain common responsibility in sin when he says to the pharisees that they commit their crimes so ‘that upon you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth’ (Mt 23:35) And when we read in John ‘Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world’ (Jn 1:29), we see that the evil committed by man is taken to be one great sinfulness. It is the sin, not the sins that is taken away. This shows the community dimension of all sin. This is clear in the Mass.
The early Christians were so overwhelmed by the gift of baptism that removed all previous sin that they didn’t expect to have many public sinners. Restoration was to be, if at all, only after a humiliating public confession, an ‘exomologesis’. When it was realised that people remained human and prone to sin, contrary to the Montanists, Donatists and Novationists, who were holding on to a pure Church, the official Church, in the person of Pope Callixtus, was more lenient and less severe on those who had fallen. Over the years some confessors have been seen as too judgmental and too juridical and this explains the popularity of the Third Rite among many Catholics. Perhaps we are once again seeing ourselves as a community and never more so than when we participate in the Mass and receive the Eucharist.
JOHN COUNIHAN Bethania, Qld
