You shall do His work

An edited version of the Sermon preached on the Feast of S. Maria Goretti V. M. (6 July 2009) in the Priory Church of Our Lady and S. Cuthbert, Worksop on the occasion of the First Mass of Father Philip Corbett

by Father William Davage

Priest Librarian and Custodian of the Library, Pusey House, Oxford

GOD has been waiting for all eternity for this moment: a new priest approaches the altar, a new priest chosen and privileged to offer the Divine Sacrifice for the first time: the first of many times. It is pre-eminently a privilege and an awesome responsibility for him but it is a privilege also for all of us to be with him. And we must not long delay the pressing task that he has to perform tonight. He has been given the highest and greatest privilege and the most daunting of tasks, to make present for us and for our salvation the Body and Blood of Christ in the Holy Mass.

Father Philip will well remember the altar in the Blessed Sacrament Chapel in Pusey House. There, day by day, at the Offices and the Mass he saw that on the front of the altar is a depiction of the Annunciation of Our Lord to Our Blessed Lady by the archangel Gabriel, the Word of God made flesh in Mary’s womb. On the altar itself is the tabernacle in which is housed for our perpetual adoration the Body of our Lord in the most holy Sacrament of the Altar. That is our Bethlehem, our house of bread, the manger of the Nativity. Behind the tabernacle stands a silver crucifix upon which hangs our Lord in the agony of his death. Above the ciborium stands the resurrected Christ rising from the tomb, triumphant over death. His eye would travel further upward to the east window and see there Christ the King enthroned in glory after his Ascension into heaven. And, finally, in the ceiling of the ciborium, garlanded and surrounded by disporting angels and cherubim sounding trumpets is the dove of the Holy Spirit set in a golden sun irradiating to all corners of the world. There it all is – all the essential matter of our salvation. In those mysteries set out in silver and gold, in stained glass and plaster lie our hope and our promise. But there they are, locked in gold and silver, locked in glass and stone and plaster. There is something missing, something that will unlock the mysteries. What is missing is a priest standing at the altar. Without a priest the means and the instruments of our salvation would be locked in the past, twenty centuries distant. The priest unlocks the past and makes it present for us here and now. He celebrates Mass and makes present on the altar in Pusey House Chapel, on this altar in this Priory Church, as on countless numbers of altars throughout the world that one “full, perfect and sufficient sacrifice” for us and for our salvation. The priest stands at the altar as a channel through which Christ’s sacraments can be celebrated and divine grace can flow into the world and into the lives of numberless individual souls. The priest stands at the altar to represent all of the people to God, so that our common priesthood can be expressed and articulated. The priest is God’s instrument and our servant. He is called by the Church from among us, from among the community of the faithful to offer prayers and praise to God; and he is called from among us by God to be his own, to be the icon of his Son in the world.

As a priest, Fr Philip will spend only a tiny fraction of his time at the altar celebrating Mass but it is the most important act that he will do on any and every day. And our Readings this evening tell us why that is so; why the cross and the altar cannot be separated.

Our Lord’s Passion, Agony and Crucifixion happened at a particular moment in human history and in a specific place. The pain of Calvary, the humiliation and dereliction of the cross, the agony have ceased, have long ceased, two millennia ago: “By a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are sanctified.” It is never repeated because there is no need for it to be repeated. There is no need for it to be repeated because it continues. It continues every time a priest goes to the altar. The priest does no more and no less than to make present in the here and now what was accomplished there and then. Completely configured to Christ the great High Priest, every priest continues the sacrifice which Jesus Christ offered, and offered fully and willingly in the hour of his Passion. “Greater love hath no man than this that he lay down his life for his friends.”

We say that the priest continues, re-presents the sacrifice but it is Christ himself who continues the sacrifice of love through his priests. Christ is priest and Christ is victim. We must needs remember that the events of Our Lord’s Passion, Death and Resurrection may be viewed in several scenes but they are the several parts of one great event, one complete drama, one great fact. It was not only at the Last Supper that Our Lord gave himself, gave his own Body and his own Blood with his own hands: “And he took bread, and when he had given thanks he broke it and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body which is given for you’ … And likewise the cup after supper, saying, ‘This cup which is poured out for you is the new covenant in my blood.” But he also offered himself in expiation for us on the cross.

He was offered because he willed it. He consented to carry his own cross along the Via Dolorosa: “he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows.” In his silence before his judges he co-operated, he was complicit, in the very injustice that Pilate inflicted on him. Bystanders called on him to save himself: “He was despised and rejected by men; a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief.” And he could have saved himself. He could have called on God to release him, called for the legions of angels to rescue him but instead “he bore the sin of many and made intercession for the transgressors” and laid down his life of his own will and volition, at a time of his own choosing: no man could take his life from him; he laid down his life. Christ is the victim: Christ is the priest. This is the atoning sacrifice he celebrated and the un-bloody sacrifice that is offered tonight, and everyday until the end of time, is that sacrifice: “he shall be exalted and lifted up … upon him was the chastisement that made us whole, and with his stripes we are healed.” In this Mass Christ continues on earth the work he began on earth, bringing the love and the mercy of God to man. Operating through the consecrated hands of his unworthy priest, it is Christ himself who blesses the bread and transforms it, blesses the wine and transforms it, breaks the bread, offers the bread and the wine, distributes that which is transformed.

Sometimes priests forget the terrible responsibility we bear. Sometimes it takes something like a First Mass of a new priest embracing those responsibilities, to take us back and to remind us about what it is that we are really about and to remember that it is liberating and not a crushing responsibility.

It would be derelict to deny that the exercise of that sacramental priesthood is not much valued throughout the Church of England but it remains one of the precious gifts recovered by the Oxford Movement. The modern church in its understanding of priesthood is markedly uncomfortable with the language of a sacramental economy and would much prefer to employ the jargon of an indifferent episode of The Apprentice: enabler, facilitator, social worker, empowerer, encourager, co-worker in mission, psychologist, plant manager, neo-Marxist moralist.

Our terms of reference are different. The priest is an icon of Christ, but perhaps even more, he is at the celebration of the Mass an alter Christus. He is configured forever to Christ so that he may serve as the instrument of Christ in and for his Body, the Church. The priest has been elevated to a sublime dignity which even angels do not possess. This may seem a wanton extravagance of language but it speaks of the most extravagant gift and privilege, although it is one bought at a price. In the Catholic tradition we hold a high doctrine of the priesthood, a high doctrine of the Mass, a high doctrine of the Church but we do so only because we have a high doctrine of Jesus Christ, of God become man, of the Word made flesh sacrificed for us on the Cross, risen again for us from the dead.

High our doctrine is and it is not always easy to live up to so high a calling: there is a constant struggle between the realities of our human nature and our propensity for error, and our need for forgiveness, with the high calling to which we are bidden. But we come back time and time again to our need for the love and mercy of God. And we find them in the Sacraments which are the life-blood of the Church, and the means by which God communicates directly and personally to us, the means by which he changes and transforms us, the tangible reality of his unseen presence. Within the sacramental economy, which is the economy of the love of God, God calls us to what stands at the heart of his message and at the foundation of all that we seek to do. W e are called by God to participate in the sacramental life and by the means of grace to live the life of holiness for our benefit and to his glory.

The priest stands at the point of articulation between the mysterious and the concrete, between the seen and the unseen worlds, between the perfection of our lives with God and the consistent tragedies and mundane matter of human life. His is to offer the prayers, the tears and joys of all men and women to God and dispense the love and mercy of God to us all. It is a gift of God for the benefit of each and every one of us, the whole Body of Christ. John Henry Newman said, “God has created you to do Him some definite service. He has committed some work to you which He has not committed to another … you are a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created you for naught. You shall do good, you shall do His work.”

We are not alone. We are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses: angels and archangels and all the company of heaven, not least the angel who will bear this sacrifice to heaven. Pre-eminent among them is Our Lady to whose everlasting protection we commit ourselves and this new priest, and also to those glorious northern saints who make the North East of England such a Holy Land, and let us co-opt that canny lass S. Maria Goretti to that company tonight: S. Cuthbert – who in the perfect, divine symmetry shares the dedication of this Priory Church with the Mother of God – the shepherd of the flock, S. Benet Biscop, who, in another divine congruence, a few miles from Sunderland brought from Rome devotion to the Cross, St Oswald, the warrior for the Faith, St Bede, the historian and scholar. May they surround this new priest and support him as he holds aloft in priestly hands the Body of the Crucified and the cup of His Blood.