The Sacraments

Discovering the Treasures of Divine Life

Matthew Kauth

• Publisher: Saint Benedict Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781505111439
• Topic: Teología y religión
• Subtopic: Rituales cristianos y práctica

Some of the most important and necessary building blocks of human life are so often taken for granted: water, air, fire, food.... We live each day without any sense of gratitude for these blessings that sustain our physical life.

And so it is for our spiritual life. The sacraments are the very lifeblood of our soul, yet in the midst of our busy lives, we can fail to understand their power and importance. Without them, we are spiritually dead. With them, the very life of God runs through us.

In this new book from Fr. Matthew Kauth, the Church's seven sacraments are presented in such a way that no reader will ever again take them for granted. Fr. Kauth brilliantly illuminates not only the scriptural foundation and profound spiritual realities of each sacrament but also the necessity of each as a means to living a happy and fulfilled life that leads to heaven.

Highlights include:

• How the sacraments are anchored in the life and death of Jesus and are the medium through which he pours his life into our souls.
• Discovering the purpose, meaning, and symbolism behind the matter of the sacraments: water, bread, oil, wine.
• Understanding how Christ administers his sacraments through human hands and what our own role is in receiving them.
• How Mary's strength and fortitude, attributes we don't normally attribute to her, are a model for Confirmation.
• An expert dissection of the instrumentality, effects, elements, character, and fruits of each sacrament.
• How the sacrament of marriage reaches all the way back to Genesis but finds its full meaning in the passion of Jesus.

Christ told us, "Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." Stop searching for the treasures of this world that only leave your heart empty, but instead, welcome the treasures he is waiting to give you... the treasures of his divine life.

CHAPTER 1

WHAT IS A SACRAMENT?²

THE WORD BECAME FLESH AND DWELT AMONG US

Nestled on a rocky perch overlooking the Adriatic is a town called Loreto. Catholics fortunate enough to have had some training in the recitation of the Holy Rosary may be familiar with the “Litany of Loreto.” These august titles of the Mother of God swirled historically around a small house found at the center of this town, encased in marble and further enclosed in a massive basilica. It is the house of the Mother of God from Nazareth.

This house was brought to Loreto in the thirteenth century (by the angels, as tradition has it) and is rightly an epicenter of Marian pilgrimages. The first time I went there as a young priest, I found out why. I went into this home of the Virgin Mother, knelt down, and began to pray. As I looked up toward the altar, I caught sight of a familiar Latin phrase from the Gospel of John. Inscribed in marble at the base of the altar were the words Et Verbum caro factum est, “And the Word became flesh” (Jn 1:14). What I was not expecting to see was one small word attached to this oft-quoted phrase. That word was hic, “here.” The Word of God became flesh here.

I was immediately confronted with events that were not mythical, events that were not imaginary. Here. Not nowhere. Here. An angel of God was sent to the town of Nazareth to a Virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph here. The Virgin’s name was Mary and she lived here. She touched these stones. These stones witnessed the Incarnation of the Son of God in her womb with the utterance of her fiat: “Let it be done to me according to your word” (Lk 1:38).

I remained wrapped in silent wonder, but the very stones began to cry out in my interior (Lk 19:40): “We were there! It happened in our midst and in our walls. We covered this mystery silent as stone and protected it. We stones witnessed the divine babe return from Egypt. We sheltered him from wind and rain. Here he played. Here he laughed. Here he loved.” And I was inside these stone walls, allowed into the home where my true Home was. In a certain place, at a certain time, in a certain woman, God became man. He was located and could be visited, seen, touched, and heard. Loreto does not allow the reality and particularity of God’s incarnation to turn into misty myth. It is flesh and bone. It is real and hard as stone. It happened. But why did it happen?

WHY DID GOD BECOME MAN?

Previously we asked the question: “How am I to live with such a God?” In the beginning, as the book of Genesis tells us, we lived in intimacy with God without fear or shame. While that intimacy was not yet the fullness of Divine indwelling, we did dwell in communion with him. The temptation in the Garden could only be directed to that thing which “we still lacked.” We were tempted to have the fullness of life without Life himself. We were tempted and attempted to become like God without God.

This is what tradition calls original sin. Its effect—the loss of Divine friendship—is our inheritance. The maddening irony is that we were created to be “like God.” This gift of participation in his life, by which we become more and more like him, is called grace. It makes us pleasing to him and makes us his sons and daughters. This grace of justification and sonship was lost, and the bitter tale of history, the vanity of vanities, became our lot.

Yet, in a deeper wisdom and perfect act of divine irony, God became man and offered his life in perfect obedience, even unto death on the cross. This act of Redemption is now the means through which you and I can have access to God and truly become sons and daughters in the Son. In other words, we desired to become like God, now God has become like man, but man obedient unto death, man crucified and risen. We wanted to become like God, and now we receive what we wanted. We must become like God—but now the Godman crucified in order to become like the Godman risen.

The means by which this is accomplished in us are the sacraments. As the old adage goes, God became man so that man in turn might become like God. This sublime possibility was not relegated to first-century Palestine. As Adam was the “head” of all men in creation, Christ is the Head of all men in the new Creation. To be part of his Body is to be a member (like my hand is a bodily member) of his Mystical Body, the Church. This does not mean that others live with the memory of his actions and imitate him. While well-intentioned, such banalities as “what would Jesus do” leave us in a sphere of activity that is merely human. What is he doing now?³ The Head and Body act together as one. Redemptor mundi, salva nos! Redeemer of the world, save us! He is at work saving us. He does this by incorporating us into his life (literally making us into the Body). He acts now in the world, employing instruments both living and non-living to bring all things into one in him (Eph 1:10).

HOW DID HE REDEEM US?

Christ assumed to himself a human nature in the bridal chamber of Our Lady’s womb. It was there, as we noted, that he forever united to himself in a perfect union the two natures of God and man in his Person as Son. Christ is God and man, one Person with two distinct but not divided natures. For our purposes, a nature is what you are born with, that principle of determination and power. What kind of nature does something have? We can answer that by watching what it can do.

Action follows upon being. Fish can swim, birds can fly, and humans can reason and love. It is a kind of power directed toward a certain end. Jesus Christ, having assumed a human nature to himself in the womb of the Blessed ever-Virgin Mary, has, therefore, two natures, divine and human. This means, of course, that he has the power to walk as a man and walk on water by the power of God. His human nature is like ours in all things but sin. His divine nature is omnipotent. These natures are neither confused nor separated but are perfectly united in the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, the Son.

What does his human nature allow him to do which his divine nature alone “cannot” do? Recall the scene of the Wedding Feast at Cana. The Blessed Mother says to Jesus: “They have no wine” (Jn 2:3). No doubt she sees further than the simple lack of preparation. Is this the time of fulfillment? Is this the moment when the true Bridegroom will provide “pure choice wine” for his people in the wedding feast of God with his people (Is 25)?

In a terse yet powerful response, Christ asks his mother in turn: “O woman, what have you to do with me?” (Jn 2:4). His hour, the hour of his passion, the hour in which he would provide the true wine of his precious blood, had not yet come. Fr. John Banister Tabb poetically describes this scene, answering our question above. What does the human nature allow Christ to do? When his mother tells him they have no wine, he answers as follows (note the last line is spoken by the Blessed Mother):

What, woman, is my debt to thee,

That I should not deny

The boon thou dost demand of me?

‘I gave thee power to die.’

Christ’s human nature, assumed in the womb of the ever-Virgin Mother, gives him the power to die. Yet Christ does not merely have life, he is life. That life will confront death on the cross, conquer it, and rise to a new and everlasting life. The application of this life and our incorporation into Christ’s new risen life will follow this pattern. The sacraments are incarnational (in + carne, “in the flesh”).

INCARNATIONAL PRINCIPLE OF THE SACRAMENTS: WORD AND MATTER

What happened in that Holy House is analogous to what happens in the sacraments. The angel Gabriel spoke words to the Virgin. The Virgin received those words and commanded that it be done to her by God according to that word. And the Word himself became flesh.

What is a word? It is something sensible. I can hear it if spoken and see it if written. Yet it is more than matter. It carries with it something spiritual. It communicates an idea through the medium of matter. As St. Augustine once said, I can hear a word, but even when the sound is no more, the content of that word is not gone, it is in me. A word is an intelligible sign of something else, an idea, a concept that is communicated through the sign. In this sense, the Fathers said that Our Lady “conceived” through her ear. She heard the words and received them and conceived the Word himself.

In Sacred Scripture, God creates through his Word by speaking creation: Let there be.… His word is causative. He speaks and it comes to be. Isaiah the prophet eloquently articulates this point: “For as the rain and the snow come down from heaven, and do not return there but water the earth, making it bring forth and sprout, giving seed to the sower and bread to the eater, so shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; it shall not return to me empty, but it shall accomplish that which I intend, and prosper in the thing for which I sent it” (Is 55:10–11).

In this image, the word of God returns to him. He speaks and that word returns, having fulfilled the purpose for which he spoke. This word is unlike our words. This word is his Wisdom. This Word is his Son. St. John thus writes, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God” (Jn 1:1). This Word was spoken in time to the patriarchs and prophets. A prophet is someone who speaks another’s word. This is indicated by the formula so often repeated by the prophets: “The word of the Lord came to me thus” and “thus says the Lord.” The word of God is spoken by another. This can only ever be in varied, limited, and fragmentary ways (cf. Heb 1:1). When the Word assumes to himself a human nature, we have the fullness of Revelation. The Word of God will accomplish the purpose for which he was sent, namely, to reveal, to redeem, and to ultimately save.

Christ the Eternal Word uses words, and those words have power. The Roman Centurion knows this. When he asks Christ to heal his servant, he pleads for the Master not to come. Rather, “Only say the word, and my servant will be healed” (Mt 8:8). Christ is said to be one who speaks with authority, not like the scribes (see Mt 7:29). When asked why they did not capture Jesus, the soldiers reporting to the chief priests and Pharisees simply stated as their reason for failure: “No man ever spoke like this man” (Jn 7:46). The Apostles, too, know the power of his words, for even when all had left him on account of his teaching on the Holy Eucharist, they could not. When Jesus asks them: “‘Will you also go away?’ Simon Peter answered him, ‘Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life; and we have believed, and have come to know, that you are the Holy One of God’” (Jn 6:67–69).

Even though Christ’s words are efficacious (meaning they accomplish what they signify), he nevertheless often employs matter in his actions. Why does he make clay out of dirt and spittle, refashioning a blind man’s eyes (Jn 9:6) when he could simply have spoken? Why does he put his fingers into a deaf man’s ears? Why the spitting and touching the man’s tongue while proclaiming, “Be opened!” (Mk 7:33–34)? Whether Christ speaks words or uses his hands to touch and heal, he employs his human nature as an instrument of his Divine nature. Before, we noted that his humanity gave him the power to die, but it also is the instrument through which he gives life, ultimately through his very death.

In summary, the Word became flesh, and that Word speaks through human words to reveal. He acts through a human body to heal. He dies in a human body to give life. Finally, in fulfillment of a passage from the prophet Jeremiah: “Your words were found and I ate them, and your words became to me a joy and the delight of my heart” (Jer 15:16). The Word made flesh would also give himself as food, to be not only heard, seen, and understood but devoured, consumed, and to become our joy and the delight of our hearts.

What Christ once did in the flesh, he now does in the sacraments.⁴ The sacraments take their power from those very events in the life of Christ, principally from his passion. Just as water and blood flowed forth from the side of Christ (a sign not only of Baptism and the Holy Eucharist but of all the sacraments), so too do the sacraments now come forth from Christ in his Mystical Body, the Church. How does he do this? In a manner analogous to the Incarnation, Christ the Word acts. The Word brings forth his power by uniting his efficacious words with matter through a minister. We will explore this reality in each of the sacraments, but first we must understand what is meant by instrumentality.

INSTRUMENTALITY OF THE SACRAMENTS

We are all familiar with using instruments. The word in Greek is organon, which is where we get the word organ (whether those in your body or the one in your church which is played on Sunday). If I write a letter, I employ a pen. That pen has certain capacities which allow me to communicate my concepts through the mediums of ink and design to arrive at another creature who has the capacity to read them. Am I doing one thing and the pen doing another? On the contrary, it is one act of writing a letter. I, the principal agent, am the one who can give through that pen something spiritual, namely, the concepts being transmitted. It is more truly said that I write the letter and not the pen. Nevertheless, I do not write the letter without the pen. We act in a unified manner.

Christ used his humanity as his conjoined instrument, perfectly united to him, to affect our redemption in death. His Divinity is the principle agent of giving us Divine life. His human nature cannot give Divine life. Yet that Divine life is given to us through Christ’s human nature as the Head of the Body, the Church. The sacraments are Christ’s actions whereby he gives Divine grace through his humanity and employs further instruments as causes. For example, the pen is not part of my nature as my hand is. It can be said that I use my hand as an instrument which is part of my nature and the pen as that which I hold. The latter is less united than the former. So too the sacraments are “held” by Christ like a pen. He instrumentally employs water, oil, bread, et cetera. The Principle agent is Christ, and the secondary agents are elements of matter and the human ministers. They act, however, in a unified way to achieve something together infinitely beyond what the created elements alone could achieve.

There is, however, one more aspect that needs to be considered. Words. As I noted, the Incarnation was the Eternal Word taking flesh. So too the sacraments are a union of word and matter employed by Christ to bring about a determined end (new life, forgiveness of sins, union with his Body, et cetera). The power of the “spoken word” is seen in the act of creation, in the actions of Christ (he rebukes the storm in Lk 8:24) but also has its occasions in the Old Testament by the ministers of God.⁵

THE ROCK AND THE WORD...