Our Lady Saint Mary

by J. G. H. Barry

We need to grasp this living and present character of our Lord's work if we will understand the meaning of His mediation. There is a gulf between the divine, the purely spiritual, and the human, which needs some bridge to enable the human to cross it. That bridge was thrown across in the incarnation when God and man became united in the Person of the second Person of the ever blessed Trinity. When God the Son became incarnate, God and man were forever united and the door of heaven was about to swing open. Henceforth from the demonstrated triumph of our Lord in the Ascension the Kingdom of Heaven is open to all believers, and there is an ever-ready way of approach to God the Blessed Trinity by the Incarnate Person of the Son Who is the One Mediator between God and man. Whoever approaches God, whoever would reach to the Divine, must approach by that path, the path of Jesus Who is the Way, the Truth and the Life.

He is the Way to God: and that Way is one that we follow by participation in His nature, by being taken up into Him. We do not reach God by thinking about our Lord, or by believing about our Lord: thinking and believing are the preliminaries of action. There are wonderful riches in the King's Treasury, but you do not get them because you think of them or because you believe that they are there. You get them when you go after them. And you get the ends of the Christian Religion not because you believe them to exist, but because you go after them in the way in which Christ directed. Inasmuch as He is the Way to the Father, we reach the Father by being made one with the Son, by being made a member of Him, by being taken into Him in the life of union. "No man cometh unto the Father but by me," He says. And the process of coming is by believing all that He said and acting upon His Word to the uttermost. Those who by partaking of the Sacraments are in Christ have passed by His mediation to the knowledge of the Father.

For a road can be travelled in either direction. Christ is the road by which we come to the Father, to participation in the life of the Blessed Trinity; but also we can think of Him as the road by which the Father comes to us. We can think of ourselves as drawing near to God in His Beloved Son: I love to think the other way of the road, of God drawing near to me, of God pouring of His riches into human life and elevating that life to His very Self. I like to think of the Christian life as a life to which God continually communicates Himself, till we are filled "with all the fulness of God." Can we imagine any more wonderful expression of the life of holiness to which we are called than that? We "grow up into Him in all things." That is the true account of the Christian life, not some thin and dull routine of moral duty, but the spiritual adventure of the road that travels out into the infinite pursuit of spiritual accomplishment till it is lost in the very heart of God.

This was the starting point of Blessed Mary. She was filled with all the fulness of God from the moment of her conception, and was never separated from the joy of the great possession. We are born in sin and have to travel the road to the very end. Yet we, too, begin in union, because we are born of our baptism into Christ soon after our natural birth, and our problem is to achieve in experience the content of our birthright. In other words: our feet are set in the Way from the beginning, and our part is to keep to the Way and not wander to the right hand or to the left; that this may be possible for us Christ lived and died and to-day is at the Right Hand of the Father where He ever liveth to make intercession for us. We need never walk without Christ. The weariness of the journey is sustained by His constant and ready help. The way is lighted by the Truth which is Himself, and the life that we live is His communicated life. "I live, yet not I, but Christ liveth in me." There are those who find the road godward, the road of the Christ-life, wearisome because they keep their eyes fixed on the difficulties of the way and treat each step as though it were a separate thing and not one step in a wonderful journey. The way to avoid the weariness of the day's travel is to keep one's eye fixed on the end, to raise the eyes to the heavens where Jesus sitteth enthroned at the Right Hand of the Father. The day's song is the Sursum Corda,--"Lift up your hearts unto the Lord!"

The mediatorial office of our Lord is exercised chiefly through His Sacrifice. He ever liveth to make intercession for us; and this intercession is the presentation of the Sacrifice that He Himself offered once for all in Blood upon the Cross, and forever presents to the Father in heaven "one unending sacrifice." This heavenly oblation of our Lord which is the means wherethrough we approach pure Divinity, is also the Sacrifice of the Church here on earth. The heavenly Altar and the earthly Altar are but one in that there is but one Priest and one Victim here and there. The Eucharistic Sacrifice is the Church's presentation of her Head as her means of approach to God, as the ground of all her prayers. These prayers make their appeal through Jesus Who died and rose again for us and is on the Right Hand of Power. We know of no other way of approach, we plead no other merit as the hope of our acceptance. Let us be very clear about this centrality of our Lord's mediation because I shall presently have certain things to say which are often assumed to be in conflict with his Mediatorial Office, but which in reality do not so conflict, but exist at all because of the Office.

We approach Divinity, then, through our Lord's humanity; and we at once see how that teaching, so common to-day, which denies the Resurrection of our Lord's Body, and believes simply in the survival of His human soul strikes at the very heart of the Catholic Religion. If Revelation be true, our approach to God is rendered possible because there is a Mediator between God and man, the MAN Christ Jesus. All our prayers have explicitly, or implicitly, this fact in view. All our Masses are a pleading of this fact.

How great is our joy and confidence when we realise this! We come together, let us say, on Sunday morning at the High Mass. We are coming to offer the Blessed Sacrifice of our Lord's Body and Blood. But who, precisely, is to make the offering? When we ask what this congregation is, what is the answer? The congregation is the congregation of Christ's Flock: it is the Body of Christ gathered together for the worship of Almighty God. The act that is to be performed is the act of a Body, not primarily of individuals. Our participation in the act of worship in the full sense of participation is conditioned upon our being members of the Body. If we are not members of the Body we have no recognised status as worshippers. No doubt we each one have our individual aspirations and needs which we bring with us, but they are the needs and aspirations of a member of the Body of Christ, and our ability to unite them with the act that is to be performed grows out of our status as members of the Body; as such, we join our own intention to the sacrificial act and make our petitions through it. But we are here as offerers of the Sacrifice, and may not neglect our official significance, and attempt to turn the Mass into a private act of worship.

We, then, the Body of Christ in this place, offer the Sacrifice of Christ. What is the status of the priest? He is a differentiated organ of the Body, not created by the Body, but created by God in the creation of the Body. He is not separate from the Body, an official imposed upon it from the outside, nor is he a creation of the Body set apart to act upon its behalf. He is one mode of the expression of the Body's life--the Body could not perfectly perform its functions without him any more than a physical body can perfectly function without a hand or an eye. But neither has the priest any existence apart from the Body of which he is a function. The Sacrifice that he offers is not his on behalf of the Body, but the Body's own Sacrifice which is made through his agency.

But a complete body has a head; and of the Body which is the Church the Head is Christ. We, the members, have our life from Him, the Head; we are able at all to act spiritually because of our union with Him. He is our life; and the acts of the Body are ultimately the acts of the Head. The Sacrifice which the Body offers as the means of its approach to Divinity is One Sacrifice of the Head: and the priestly function of the Body has any vitality because it is Christ Who is its life, Who functions through the priest, Who is, in fact, the true Priest. He Himself is both Sacrifice and Priest; and that which is offered here is indentical with that which is offered there.

Our life flows from our Head, is the life of Christ in us. So closely are we associated with Him that we are called His members, the instrument through which His life expresses itself, through which He acts. By virtue of the life of Christ of which all we are partakers, we are not only members of Christ, but members one of another. Our spiritual life is not our own affair, but we have duties one to another, and all the members of the Body are concerned in our exercise of our gifts, have, in fact, claims on the exercise of them.