Concluding Rite of the Mass – the Priest’s blessing

In the liturgy of the Roman rite of the Catholic Church, only the priest can use the words, May the Lord bless you.

If a lay person is conducting a communion service, or the liturgy of the hours, they can only use May the Lord bless us.

Why is this so? The answer is in the Bible.

Numbers 6:22-26:
The Lord God spoke to Moses and said, ‘Say this to Aaron and his sons:
“This is how you are to bless the sons of Israel. You shall say to them:
May the Lord bless you and keep you.
May the Lord let His face shine on you and be gracious to you.
May the Lord uncover His face to you and bring you peace.”
This is how they are to call down My name on the sons of Israel, and I will bless them.”

May the Lord bless you is directly taken from Numbers 6:24

When God gives a directive like this for a priest to use His words, then when that directive is obeyed by the priest, God’s power to bless is released over the people.

We are more used to thinking like this when the priest obeys the directive of Jesus and says,
This is My body; This is My blood.

May the Lord bless us, in contrast, is really only a prayer request.

God desires to bless His people:

Deuteronomy 28:1-2:
But if you obey the voice of the Lord your God faithfully, keeping and observing all those commandments of His that I enjoin on you today, the Lord your God will set you high above all the nations of the earth. All the blessings that follow shall come up and overtake you if you only obey the voice of the Lord your God.
(Then there is a long list of the kinds of blessings to expect.)

When was this blessing expected to take place? At the conclusion of the liturgical rites.

Sirach/Ecclesiasticus 50:13-21:
When all the sons of Aaron in their glory, with the offerings of the Lord in their hands, stood before the whole assembly of Israel, while he (Simon, high priest, son of Onias) completed the rites at the altars, presenting in due order the offering for the Most High, the Almighty, reaching out his hand to the cup, and pouring a libation of the juice of the grape, pouring it at the foot of the altar, an appeasing fragrance to the Most High, the King of all, then the sons of Aaron would shout and blow their trumpets of beaten metal, making a mighty sound ring out as a reminder before the Most High; and immediately the people all together would fall on their faces to the ground, in adoration of their Lord, the Almighty, God Most High, and with the cantors chanting their hymns of praise sweet was the melody of all these voices, as the people pleaded with the Lord Most High, and prayed in the presence of the Merciful, until the service of the Lord was completed, and the ceremony at an end. Then he would come down and raise his hands over the whole concourse of the sons of Israel, to give them the Lord’s blessing from his lips, being privileged to pronounce His name; and once again the people would bow low to receive the blessing from the Most High.

When pronouncing these words of blessing, May the Lord bless you, the priest isn’t speaking in his own name, but in God’s name.

Sadly some priests are using May the Lord bless us instead of God’s words.

Perhaps that is because they wish to make things feel inclusive and team-like.

Perhaps that is because it feels like they are ‘missing out’.

They will never ever miss out when using God’s directive May the Lord bless you.

Acts 20:35 St Paul speaks to the elders of the church of Ephesus, it is a farewell speech:
‘I did this to show you that this is how we must exert ourselves to support the weak, remembering the words of the Lord Jesus, who Himself said, “There is more happiness in giving than in receiving”.’

Luke 6:38 Jesus says:
‘Give, and there will be gifts for you: a full measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over will be poured into your lap; because the amount you measure out is the amount you will be given back.’

We often think this passage only refers to temporal things. But it applies to blessings too.

Give blessings, and there will be blessings for you, a full measure…. etc.

God cannot be outdone in generosity.

Whenever a priest uses God’s formula for a blessing, May the Lord bless you, God’s grace and blessing flow out to the people, and the more he blesses people using God’s words, the more grace and blessing he will himself receive. God’s word guarantees it.
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​In the readings for the 13th Sunday of Ordinary Time Year C we see both Elijah and Jesus seemingly brusque and impatient with Elisha and with three men invited to become full time disciples. This is confronting behaviour which feels quite unreasonable.

Why is it so?

There are two reasons. The first is that the context of these encounters is rarely explained to us. The second is that none of us like admitting that God has an absolute right to do with us what He wills, because He is our creator and redeemer.

So what’s the context with Elisha?

Prior to this encounter with Elijah, the prophets of Baal have been slaughtered and Queen Jezebel being hopping mad wants Elijah dead a.s.a.p. Elijah having nothing left in the tank tells God that he wants to die. Then the angel of the Lord wakes Elijah up and gives him the nourishment necessary to travel to Horeb, the mountain of God. Here God reveals that Elijah is not alone, others have not bent to Jezebel’s ways, and that God has three strategic tasks for him to do: to anoint two new kings, and to anoint Elisha to continue Elijah’s prophetic ministry.

There are then at least three reasons for urgency:
Jezebel’s henchmen are on the lookout to kill Elijah.
Elijah needs to find and anoint the two new kings before the henchmen catch up to him.
Elijah doesn’t know how much time he has left, and he needs to pass on to Elisha as much training and instruction as possible before that finale comes.

So what’s the context with Jesus?

This is the Gospel of Luke, where Jesus has a lot of time in ministry around Galilee until the time of the Transfiguration, and then Jesus sets out on the one-way journey to Jerusalem to die on the Cross for our salvation. Jesus is not going to pass by these towns again, this is their last chance to see Jesus, and to experience His ministry. The time left is counted in weeks.

On the way Jesus has encounters with 3 men.

The first is attracted to follow Jesus, and Jesus disabuses him of any romantic notions the man has by describing one of the harsh realities.

The second one has definitely been called by Jesus as a full-time disciples, but he wants to fulfil his family duty first, and Jesus doesn’t mince words saying the call on his life to preach the Gospel far outweighs any family obligation.

The third one is also attracted to following Jesus, but wants to say goodbye to his parents first, and Jesus quotes Elijah’s words to Elisha to him. Once you say Yes, it has to be a complete and unconditional Yes.

When you look at the short amount of time of public ministry left to Jesus before Calvary, the need for urgency becomes clear. This is a one-time opportunity which will never be possible again: to walk, and talk, and live with Jesus and the disciples in the last days of public ministry. That time with Jesus on the road to Jerusalem is what will distinguish a valid witness to Jesus from anything less; and the kingdom of God being built needs as many valid witnesses as possible. There’s no time to go and do something else and catch up later.

The call to be disciple to Elijah and the call to be witness-disciple to Jesus are extraordinary privileges beyond fathoming when looked at from our vantage point in salvation history.

The call is worth the cost.
Like the parable Jesus taught us, it is the immense treasure to be had for the price of the field it is buried in.

Now we need to come to terms with why both Elijah and Jesus were so insistent on an immediate and unconditional Yes.

For this we will need an analogy or two.
A very rich and influential king is visiting a far-flung region of his kingdom and comes across a person working in the fields. For reasons of his own, the king invites the worker to come and live at the palace and to become a courtier, dining every day at the king’s table. Would such a worker dare to hum and haw about the offer? Would such a worker dare to delay in giving an affirmative answer? Would such a worker dare to delay entering the king’s service? No and no and no. Any delay and any refusal would be an affront to the king. Even if the worker has only a tiny idea of how immense this invitation is, the king is fully aware of it. Chances are the expectation would be for the worker to join the king’s retinue there and then. Anything in the worker’s life would be set at naught and thought irrelevant compared to the king’s invitation.

Replace the king with God, and Elisha and the three men with the worker, and we begin to understand.

Those of you who watched the West Wing series on TV or DVD would remember how staffers in the White House when given a presidential request would reply, “I serve at the pleasure of the president of the United States”. That is the kind of immediate readiness needed to respond to whatever the King of Kings asks of us. That’s the kind of response the holy angels always give to God Almighty, and which we are called to emulate.

Also consider a high-ranking army officer planning a surprise attack on the enemy. Every part of that strategy would be on a need-to-know basis. Each part of the attack would need precision timing. At least one part of the strategy would need a reliable and trustworthy officer to obey a seemingly weird command immediately and without question. It would be necessary for that officer to not comprehend the bigger picture, and to have no prior knowledge of the command before it arrives. Those kinds of officers tend to be a rare breed. Only a few officers would have sufficient trust in the high-ranking army officer to do that seemingly weird thing immediately and without question. Success or failure of the attack would be dependent on that officer’s prompt obedience.

Replace the high-ranking army officer with God, and the officer with any one of us, and we begin to comprehend the amount of confidence God places in us when He asks us to drop everything to immediately comply with His command. That changes everything, doesn’t it? We will then comply with great willingness.

It certainly goes against the grain of our habitual independence to realise that God has the perfect right at any time to require a big and unconditional Yes from us with next to no prior notice or preparation. But it is the truth.

Thankfully it is far more normal for an awareness of a calling from God to unfold over an expanse of time. But we do need to be reminded that some of God’s perfect plans require that we drop absolutely everything and immediately do what He asks – and that whenever that happens our immediate response is of the utmost importance to the bigger picture that only God can see in fullness.
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Let’s pray
O God, my creator and redeemer, all wise and all kindness, I acknowledge You to be the Lord of everything and the Lord of me. The thought of dropping everything and going on a completely different path scares me silly. But I will trust in You, because You have been so faithful, so generous and so provident towards all of us. I understand that should You ever ask this of me, that the stakes must be very high. I want to express my willingness in advance, because if and when that moment arrives I might not be capable of rational thought. I also want to express my confidence in Your ability to look after anything and anyone I leave behind so much better than I ever could, and my awareness that it is impossible for You to do otherwise. Help me to never delay my Yes to You. Amen.

The Gospel for this Sunday, the 24th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B, is taken from the end of Chapter 8 of St Mark. Between last Sunday and this Sunday (Mark 8:1-26) there has been a second multiplication of loaves, a demand for a sign, a warning against the leaven of the Pharisees and the healing of a blind man at Bethsaida. In this part of Mark:8, while they are on their way to the villages around Caesarea Philippi, Jesus interrogates His disciples.

But before we get to that, if the ministry itinerary of Jesus seems strange, well it kind of is. Why would Jesus push on to Sidon after going to Tyre, and why is He off to Caesarea Phillipi?

The answer is in the map of Israel at the time of Joshua, and where the territory of the various tribes were apportioned within Israel.
https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e6/a6/de/e6a6dec8f6ced5c5fcc09f40fe6df877.jpg

Tyre and Sidon are where the tribe of Asher settled, and the area around Caesarea Phillipi is where the tribe of Dan settled. In the time of Jesus these places were foreign territory, but if you were looking for descendants of the lost tribes of Israel, you would look in these places. This speaks of an incredible commitment of Jesus to seek out the lost, and of God giving a message through these missionary journeys that God has not forgotten His covenant with the descendants of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, even if they have forgotten Him.

Jesus opens up this deliberate interrogation by asking ‘Who do men say I am?

The answers are interesting:
John the Baptist is one answer, recognizing that Jesus and John preached the same message ‘The kingdom of God is close at hand. Repent, and believe the good news.’
Elijah is another answer, recognizing that with His miracles Jesus is on a par with the greatest prophet of Israel. Remember that at the Transfiguration, Moses represented the law, and Elijah represented the prophets.
Or one of the other prophets was the third answer the disciples provided, recognizing that Jesus carries a powerful message from God, and is a catalyst for the destiny of Israel, and this will bring Him into conflict with those who do not fear God and don’t walk in God’s ways.

Then Jesus puts them all on the spot and asks;
‘Who do you say I am?’
Peter responds, ‘You are the anointed one’.

When Israelites were hoping and longing for the anointed one of God, the Messiah, what did they expect the Messiah to be and to do?
-That the Messiah would usher in a new covenant. Jeremiah 31:31
-That the Messiah would be a prophet like Moses. Deuteronomy 18:15-19
-That the Messiah would be the Son of Man. Daniel 7:13-14
-That the Messiah would be greater than David. Psalm 110:1-4
-That the Messiah would be a descendant of David. 2 Samuel 7:12-16
-That the Messiah would be the coming one to whom the scepter belongs. Genesis 49:10
-That the Messiah would be the descendant of Abraham through whom all nations would be blessed. Genesis 12:3

When David was King, an extraordinary king who took God as His commander, Israel was united, and Israel had rest from the enemies that normally besieged or enslaved them. David carried that triple calling of priest (worshipper of God), prophet and king; and was seen as a type of the Messiah to come.

Peter and the others were likely to be hopeful of being close retainers of king Jesus in a new earthly Davidic kingdom following a swift and painless overthrow of the Roman occupation.

But Jesus starts teaching them about the Messianic prophecies they’ve never ever considered before. All of that suffering servant stuff in Isaiah, and some of that gruesome stuff in Psalm 22 and other places.

Whoever we think Jesus to be
Jesus Himself insists that God’s plan for the Messiah is rejection, suffering, death and resurrection
and that to belong to Him
and indeed even necessary for salvation,
we have to be willing to walk exactly the same path.

That’s exactly what the scriptures have foretold that the Messiah will be.

In effect Jesus is saying here we are at A, the destination is B.
You think getting from A to B will unlock lots of glory with little effort.
Whatever you think B is, the B is bigger than you can ever possibly imagine.
God’s plan isn’t earthly and temporal, it is divine and eternal.
You are thinking far too small if you are thinking about a terrestrially based kingdom.
You are thinking far too small if you are only considering the salvation needs of this generation.

Getting to the fulness of the kingdom of God is going to take total commitment from Me, the pathway is not straight forward, and it is going to require significant suffering and rejection, and yes even an ignominious death, to get there.

The requirements for you to enter into the fulness of the kingdom of God are no different.

If you are going to come with Me from here on in,
this is what it is going to cost you.
No compromise is possible.

Either you are 100% with Me, and do it 100% God’s way,
no matter how heavy the ultimate personal cost turns out to be,
or you walk away now.

I will follow God’s path for Me even if none of you stay as My disciples.

It is decision time.

To stay with Me you have to accept this path of the Cross,
you have to live it wholeheartedly.

Are you coming with Me all the way?
Or do our ways part now?
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On your answer hangs the salvation of countless others.

The Gospel for this Sunday, the 6th Sunday of Ordinary Time Year B, comes from the first chapter of St Mark and recounts the healing of the leper and its aftermath.

When the leper comes close enough to Jesus to beg for healing, Jesus is deeply moved with compassion to heal him at once. It is one thing to feel pity for an unfortunate soul, and quite another to reach out and touch someone who is probably contagious with a horrible disease. Jesus does not baulk at touching the leper.

Images of Jesus being compassionate are frequent.
Images of Jesus being stern are not, and this is one of those infrequent times.

Jesus goes to some considerable length to remind the former leper of the official process of being reinstated as clean and healed through the priests, and to not tell anyone about how he was healed.

Why?

Because under Jewish law anyone who touched something considered unclean became unclean themselves and had to go through a lengthy process to be reinstated as clean again. If someone touched a dead body, they would be ritually unclean for 7 days.

Someone who had touched a leper would be ostracized until a reasonable quarantine period had been observed.

Any days of ostracism mean days where Jesus is unable to minister to people, to preach and to heal.

If the former leper had been obedient and kept silent about how his healing was accomplished, many more people could have been ministered to by Jesus. That’s a serious matter. God only asks us not to do something if it is important and has consequences.

Keeping silent is a legitimate request. It is not asking the former leper to lie.

Quite possibly if Jesus had been at prayer in a lonely place when the leper approached Him, the disciples didn’t know about it, and only the leper and Jesus knew what had happened.

We know what happened because the story was preserved in this Gospel and in Matthew and Luke as well. The man could not contain himself, even though Jesus had asked him so specifically to refrain from telling the story.

When God tells us not to do something, we need to take it seriously.

When Solomon in his younger days had a profound experience with God, God sternly warned him to not follow any other gods. But as Solomon got older he forgot. In order to please his foreign wives he set up altars to other gods, and incurred the anger of God. Justice came in his son’s reign when only 2 tribes, Judah and Benjamin, were left to the hereditary kingdom of David, and the other 10 tribes went with a military leader who then set about distancing those 10 tribes from worship of the true God. Those 10 tribes are still lost. This was serious stuff.

We don’t know all the ramifications of the leper being disobedient, only that it was serious enough for Jesus to be stern with him. Maybe if the leper had kept silence he would have been greatly honoured by God. Maybe if the leper had kept silence, several thousand more people may have been healed and brought into God’s kingdom. How many people didn’t get to meet Jesus in person, because the leper didn’t keep silence? Maybe the silence was a reparation for the leper being a chatterbox earlier in life.

Most of us are conflicted about this because it is one of our favourite stories of Jesus, and because we think the request for silence was too hard or too impractical. In essence we think the request was utterly unreasonable, and that Jesus was a bit touched in the head for even thinking of requesting it; we think our ways are much better than God’s ways.

The problem is: that’s how disobedient people think; that’s how the serpent in the garden of Eden thought; that’s the thinking that set Adam and Eve up for failure.

God puts a premium on obedience. Obedience pleases Him. Disobedience doesn’t, and never will.

May this Gospel account give us the grace to decide to be obedient to God no matter what. Amen.
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#GospelReflection