Sacraments are visible signs of invisible grace—they mark moments in our life when God stops our aimless wandering, turns us right-side up, and accompanies us on our journey to heaven. Sacraments are life-giving, life-changing moments where we acknowledge, with trusting joy, that we are not the authors of our life, that we do not determine the meaning and value of our life, and that everything finds its harmony in right relationship to God. The celebration of any Sacrament involves simple actions with everyday objects, and we assert that they produce unexpectedly powerful results: because the simple actions and everyday objects are not the origin of a Sacrament’s power—God is. Sacraments are God-sourced, God-driven, and God-focused. Sacraments are covenant rituals that leave us “playing with fire” so to speak—allowing us to reside in the sacred space of intimate communion with the Creator of all things.
Catholics believe there are seven Sacraments instituted by Christ and continued in the Church. Three of these are called Sacraments of Initiation because they begin and sustain our life as Christians: Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Eucharist. Two Sacraments of Healing bring the power of Christ to our sin-sick souls (Penance) and to our diseased bodies/minds (Anointing of the Sick). The two Sacraments of Vocation—Holy Orders and Matrimony—build up the Body of Christ and are oriented toward the salvation of others.
All seven Sacraments are visible signs of God’s invisible grace. These two parts—visible sign, invisible grace—are necessarily connected. One without the other means no Sacrament has occurred. Sacramental encounters with God are called “sacred mysteries” by the Church—which is what the term “sacrament” refers to in Latin. They are mysteries in the sense of being essentially beyond our ability to fully comprehend them—they are not mysteries in the sense of being a puzzle or difficult problem that needs solving. We bask in these mysteries, we relax into the mystery of God’s love because we trust in the Giver even if we cannot completely understand and certainly can’t control the gift.
We confess Sacraments to be instituted by God through the ministry and teaching of Jesus Christ. Every Sacrament has its origins in the actions Jesus took during His public ministry to bring people into covenant relationship with God. Sacraments are the culmination and perfect fulfillment of the ways in which God reached out to His Chosen People as recorded in the Old Testament.
Sacraments continue the mission of Jesus Christ during the time of the Church—that in-between time after Jesus’ Ascension to heaven and before His return in glory at the Last Judgment. Sacraments will end for us after we are received into heaven—we will have no need of signs, we will be in the true Presence of God. We will have no need of infusions of grace, we will be swimming in the ocean of grace that is the very communion of the Most Holy Trinity. Sacraments are Jesus’ gift to the Church until His return in glory at the Second Coming—they are the “life support” that sustains us until we enter into His Kingdom.
Jesus gave the Church the Sacraments so that His work would continue in a real, accessible and sense-able way. How would people born after His Ascension to heaven hear His voice forgiving their sins? How would disciples be united to His redemptive death and glorious Resurrection? How would He sanctify a husband and wife united in marriage? By working through His Apostles and their Successors as His instruments, Jesus continues His ministry and mission. When the Church celebrates a Sacrament, it is Jesus who baptizes, forgives, consecrates, and unites.
In Jesus Christ, Sacraments are not merely reminders and symbols of God’s love, but effective actions that unite us with God. They are rituals taken to renew, re-establish, repair or strengthen the covenant God makes with His people. This covenant is rooted in lifelong and life-changing promises that form a relationship between the parties—what is two becomes one, forever! From the perspective of fallen human beings, establishing a covenant relationship with God requires sacrifice and worship. We must be put right, restored, repaired, realigned. Sacraments are God’s way of incorporating us into a plan and goal that is far beyond our capacities—we are carried, by grace, to heights we could never achieve through our own abilities.
Sacraments are, fundamentally, actions of God—they require human cooperation and action, but the power, the efficacy of a Sacrament is rooted in God’s presence, not in human action. God initiates, we receive; God acts, we respond. When we celebrate a Sacrament we receive what God is doing for us as the initiator, the cause, the source and the goal.
This is what makes Sacramental grace different from magical effects. In magic, the desired effect is only achieved when one says the incantation perfectly with all the correct resources and actions. Magic is under the control of the magician—who is seeking to control, or persuade, spirits to cooperate with his will. Sacraments are not magic. We are not seeking to bend God’s will to our whims, to find a way to please or placate God sufficiently so as to receive our desired ends.
All Christians agree that God’s invisible grace is effective and real and powerful—and necessary. What other Christians don’t agree upon is that God’s invisible grace can come through the visible sign of a Sacrament. Why do Catholics keep this belief when most Protestants jettisoned or weakened it in their doctrinal statements? Because of the reality-changing nature of the Incarnation of the Son of God. Jesus is the visible manifestation of the love of the Father—He is the Sacrament (the visible sign) of God’s redeeming love. The Church, being the Body of Christ, is the Sacrament of Jesus—the visible sign of the saving mission of Jesus to all people. All the Sacraments arise from the fact of the Incarnation—without the Incarnation, Sacraments cannot happen. Without the Incarnation, there is no way to receive the true Presence of God in created matter.
God was still with His people before the Son of God became human, but He was not in created matter—He was not present in the manna, for example. Even the tabernacle and the Holy of Holies did not contain God—God’s presence was manifested in cloud and fire and wind, not in things the Chosen People could touch or receive. Now that God has taken on flesh and walked among us, we are given the possibility of handling God, of touching God, of hearing God, of feeling God.
The Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist, and in all the Sacraments, is Jesus’ gift to those who live after His Ascension—no Christian need be envious of the Apostles and those first disciples. While the desire to have witnessed things firsthand is understandable, we do not need to say, “It would have been better, my faith would have been stronger, if I could see Jesus and feel His hand on me and listen to His words.” We still do those things! Yes, it is true that these encounters happen behind the veil of Sacramental signs, but they are real encounters with Jesus Christ. The Holy Spirit is the source of these encounters—now that we are filled with the Holy Spirit of God, we can participate in worship as no human could before His coming. We worship God from the inside, so to speak. We worship God who is not just above and beyond us, but within us as well.
Sacraments are actions of Jesus Christ, enacting the will of His Father, by the power of the Holy Spirit. Sacraments depend upon human mediators who are instruments and servants of God’s grace. The effectiveness and power of a Sacramental action is God’s doing, not the doing of the minister of the Sacrament. It is not the minister’s holiness that unites us to Christ’s death in Baptism. It is not the minister’s sacred body that we consume in the Eucharist. It is Jesus. We can trust Him to be present because HE is holy, not because we or the priests are holy.
Why should God’s grace come to us through the mediation of a priest? Why can’t we simply ask for God’s grace and receive it directly? Well, to the Catholic mind, this is not an either-or question: it’s a both-and situation. We do receive, in the intimacy of private prayer and in the unique situation of our life, grace from God. This immediate, or actual, grace, is the source of our spiritual growth as a disciple. The grace of Sacraments works before, behind and with the actual grace—as sanctifying grace that changes the landscape of our soul and creates the path upon which we travel to heaven.
Sanctifying grace from the Sacraments is rooted in God’s covenant love—a love that is both corporate (the Body of Christ, His Chosen People) and individual. It has to be both. God is a communion of love—a unity of divine Persons. God calls us into relationship with Himself—and to be in relationship with God necessarily means we are brought into a relationship with His family. The grace we need on our journey to heaven is mediated because God wrote mediation into the very fabric of all creation and of what it means to be a human being—we don’t give ourselves physical life, that is given to us by our parents and sustained by the efforts of so many! We don’t give ourselves spiritual life either—that comes from God in both direct and indirect ways. The sun is responsible for the light we need whether it shines on us directly or is directed toward us by reflecting off other surfaces.
A relationship with God is impossible without mediation—Jesus Christ mediates our relationship with the Father; the Holy Spirit within us as the Body of Christ mediates our relationship with Jesus. Other people mediate our faith—in sharing the Gospel with us, in supporting and guiding our efforts as disciples, as our advocates who are given the power of the Holy Spirit to intercede on other’s behalf. Mediation doesn’t weaken the power of Jesus Christ, it amplifies it! It concentrates it! Mediation allows us to recognize that everything in God’s creation was designed to point to the Creator—creation exists as a tool to bring us into relationship with the God who called it all into being. To honor the role of created things is to honor the One who made them all—to glorify and praise and thank Him and to receive the gifts He wishes to bestow on us through Creation.
God did create Beings who do not require mediation or the use of created things—they are the angels. The angels’ relationship with God does not depend upon a Sacramental system. Because they are non-corporal spiritual beings, they cannot receive grace through visible, sensate signs. We, however, are embodied souls. We are a union of the spiritual and material world—spirit and matter. And so God designed us with the unique ability to worship and unite with God using both the spiritual and material worlds. God created us in this way. God chose to redeem us in this way—sending His Only Begotten Son to unite His divinity with our humanity and save us by becoming one of us. Jesus didn’t just think sacrificial thoughts to redeem us, He went through with it in His Body—He incarnated His love by truly dying on the cross. The Sacramental system Jesus established continues the effect of the Incarnation into the generations and centuries of the Church’s history—until the time of His return.
“If angels could be jealous of men, they would be so for one reason: Holy Communion.”
St. Maximillian Kolbe
The Church has developed and guarded the Sacramental treasures from the beginning—obeying Jesus’ mandate to go out to all the nations to baptize (Mt 28:19) and to “do this in memory of me (Luke 22:19).” Jesus didn’t leave detailed instructions about how these Sacramental encounters should be celebrated—that was something the Church established based on the wisdom and witness of the Apostles. They had been told by Jesus to carry on the work that the Father had given Him (see John 20:21-23); and the Apostles were trusted with the details of what that would look like.
Therefore, our belief that the Sacraments were instituted by Christ does not mean that Jesus gave us the Liturgical Rite of each Sacrament and that this Rite has remained unchanged from the time of Christ. Since Sacraments are encounters with Christ that come through visible signs, it makes sense that the way the Sacraments are celebrated would change as our “sign language” is refined and deepened over time. The Church’s doctrine, rooted in Jesus Christ and the teaching He handed over to the Apostles, cannot change. But the expression, application and understanding of a doctrine does change over time. For example, the Church’s baptismal rite has always rested on the use of water and the Trinitarian formula (baptizing in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit). But the words used to bless the water used in Baptism have been reworded to more clearly express the doctrine of Baptism—that the sacramental sign of water points to all of salvation history, for example.
The celebration of the Mass and the consecration of the Holy Eucharist is another example. We have, from the time of the Acts of the Apostles, gathered together on the first day of the week (Sunday, the day of the Resurrection) to join together in the Breaking of Bread (see Acts 2:42 and 1 Cor 11:23-29). The structure and sign of the Eucharist have remained the same—even as the setting, the script and the customs of worship have changed over time and across cultures. The bedrock, the foundation, of every Sacrament is the work of God that we receive and the work of worship that we offer—the form and matter of the Sacrament. It is the task of the Church, through the Magisterium, to identify the non-negotiables and the non-essentials—so that the majesty and power of the Sacramental sign can be understood and received. The Church takes this role very seriously. The priest (or bishop or deacon depending upon the Sacrament) who is the celebrant is instructed not to change the script (the Rite of the Sacrament)—but to “say the black” (the text of the Rite) and “do the red” (actions described in the Rite) as it were.
What is our role as recipients or participants in the Sacraments? We form God’s priestly people, the royal priesthood, the family of God. Our role is to worship: to offer the sacrifice of our praise and to unite, with one heart and mind, the Body of Christ in worship of the Head, Jesus Christ. We open ourselves to receive the grace of the Sacrament or to intercede on behalf of those who are receiving. We participate in the Rite, we are not spectators or judges or bystanders.
The worship of God is serious business—in fact, it is the primordial role and privilege of all human beings. When God created Adam and placed Him in the Garden of Eden, Adam served as the primordial priest, the one who worships, sacrifices and serves God in the Temple. Jesus comes as the perfect High Priest, the one Mediator through whom all mediation gains its efficacy. He commands us to worship the Father in His name and to worship as members of His Body united by the Holy Spirit. All Sacraments rest upon this corporate worship—this sacred responsibility tracing all the way back to our life with God in the Garden before sin sundered us.
Sacraments restore the harmony and order that was God’s design for Creation. Sacraments are covenant rituals involving sacrifice, and they are necessary since the Fall. Sacraments are made possible because of the Passion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ—who provides for us the true once-for-all sacrifice of the new covenant between God and humanity. Sacraments require agents, actors who receive and respond to God’s grace, rather than passive or unwitting beings without free will.
“… Three basic truths: God is all-powerful; God has a great love for me; God is faithful to his promises. It is He, the God of mercies, who fills me with confidence. With Him, I do not feel alone, or useless, or abandoned, but involved in a plan of salvation that one day will lead to Paradise.”
Pope John Paul I, Address (September 20, 1978)
The grace given by a Sacrament comes to us by God’s power—and it is imperative that we prepare for that grace and recollect ourselves. For what happens when God’s pure and powerful light vibrates within a vessel scarred and chipped, weakened with cracks and grime? The vessel cannot shine; in fact, the vessel may self-destruct. That’s why St. Paul warned the Church in Corinth about the danger of receiving the Eucharist “without discerning the body” of Our Lord—we would be eating and drinking our own judgment (see 1 Cor 11:27-30).
If a Sacrament were merely a symbolic way to remember Jesus’ actions a long time ago, then there would be no reason for this warning. Some people act as if Sacraments are like children’s games where we pretend to create reality: as if some children lit a candle and pretended that it was a blazing fire. But Sacraments are not like child’s play. Sacraments are God’s playground—where we get immersed in His reality. We get tossed into His furnace, which, out of compassion for our weakness, He usually cloaks and veils to be experienced by us as like a candle’s flame.
Every once in a while, the veil gets lifted from our eyes and we experience, with a mix of terror and joy, the “holy fear” of the saints as they encounter the presence of God. We are shaken to our core, as we realize, as Jacob did, that this Sacrament is a gate to heaven and we did not know it! (Genesis 28:16-17) That happened to me through a dream. I dreamt I was present at a Mass in the beautiful, cavernous St. Joseph Church in downtown Salem (the Church I attended as a child). In my dream, I was distracted at Mass and seemed to be taking on the role of ushering and directing people and spent the greater part of the Mass in whispered conversations, moving about throughout the nave of the Church. Communion time came, and I, at the last minute, realized what was happening and hurried up to join the line and receive the Eucharist. As I approached the priest, I raised my hands to receive the Eucharist and waited. The priest never said, “The Body of Christ.”
I looked up and into his eyes. He was searching me, gazing right into my soul and knew the state of my heart and mind. I watched as he took a step backward away from me and placed his hand over the ciborium, shielding the Eucharist from me. As I realized what he was doing, I fell to my knees and cried out, “Please.” I began sobbing, and at that moment I woke up.
I remember feeling shaken and vulnerable, exposed to the truth of my own hypocrisy and lack of discernment. There were times long ago in my past, I am so sorry to say, that I approached the Eucharist improperly—in a state of mortal sin, with a feeling of entitlement, with a presumptuous and careless attitude of deserving “it” because I wanted it. There have also been so many times where I have gone through the motions—going to Mass and receiving the Eucharist as if it was just one more thing to mark off my “to do” list with little recollection or reverence. That dream revealed the faulty thinking that allowed me to justify “getting” the Eucharist even when I had done nothing to live according to the covenant it embodied.
After that dream, I remember getting on my knees and offering God a prayer of true contrition. I promised God that I would never again jeopardize my worthy reception of the Eucharist. I had received the Eucharist unworthily in my past—my future, I pledged to the Lord, would be different. From that moment on, I sought more awareness about Who I was approaching when I moved forward in the Communion procession. I realized Who was responsible for this encounter, and Who was calling me to communion. I see each communion as a pledge I receive and as a pledge I make—to live as one who lives within the One who gave His life for me.
“Brothers and sisters: I say to you on behalf of the Lord God that He wants to come into your souls and establish His kingdom of peace.”
St. John Avila
That’s the joy, the purpose, the meaning of a Sacramental encounter. Each one is a preparation for that eternal encounter that will require no Sacramental sign, no veil, no “eyes of faith.” Sacraments make us heaven bound, heaven blessed, heaven touched. They are God’s way of bringing heaven to earth, in a way that we can take in now to sustain us. They are God’s “appetizer course” for the wedding banquet of the Kingdom.
Flourish Catholic 