ELIZABETH Harrington’s workshops, to ready us for the revised Roman Missal (In the Parishes, CL Easter 2011), are to be recommended.
One of the many changes delivers a complex word for us ordinary Catholics: consubstantiality.
At first blush we may be set back on our heels to encounter such a word in a Creed that already has interesting vocabulary.
Perseverance will reward us since even Pope Benedict uses the reasoning behind the significance of this word as a climax in the very last paragraph of Volume 1 of “Jesus of Nazareth“.
He regards the term as a “stable formula”, describing what emerged as incomparably new and different in Jesus’ way of speaking with the Father, capturing Israel’s theology of election as embedded in the Nicene Creed.
Fr Francis J Moloney, Australian Scripture scholar, says the consubstantiality of the Father and the Word in St John’s Prologue (John 1:1-18) is stated as “the Word was turned towards God”.
This emphasis on a “face to face” encounter means that what God was, so was the Word also.
Paul Evdokimov, a moral theologian of the Orthodox Church, also describes how there is a parallel literary formula with St John’s Prologue in Genesis 2:18 that describes the consubstantiality of man and woman: “a helper (woman) turned towards him (man)” that is, face to face; co-beings; equals; what man is, woman also is.
Consubstantial, like transubstantiation, can lead to a transparency of meaning but some effort is required to bring this word into our familiar vocabulary.
It resolves our understanding of Jesus and our understanding of our mutual being as male and female.
By learning to live within the word “consubstantial” we experience biblically that woman is to man as Jesus is to his Father.
VINCE HODGE
Paddington Qld
