Quote of the Week: Durrwell on Prayer and Redemption
“Jesus died at the ninth hour (three o’clock in the afternoon). Those who handed on such precise information were Jewish Christians. They knew the importance of the ninth hour as the official hour of Israel’s prayer. Jesus accomplished his work at that hour by praying.
Instead of resorting to the analogy of human justice that is so different from God’s, why doesn’t the theology of redemption let itself be guided by the analogy of prayer? The Epistle to the Hebrews placed the redemptive drama within the framework of a prayer being heard (cf. Heb 5:7-9). It compared Christ’s redemptive moment to the liturgy of entering the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement. Hence, the mystery of salvation is a liturgy in which all sins are forgiven.
The redemptive act and prayer are very much alike. They are both an ascent to God. Jesus ascended there on behalf of all, becoming prayer for us, an eternal supplication for our salvation. Prayer is an entrance into communion. Through death, Jesus rejoined his Father, fulfilling in himself the covenant between God and his people. Prayer is an act of submission in which humans open themselves up to the fatherhood of God and let themselves become children to him. Jesus died begotten on behalf of all. He became redemption by becoming prayer.
Prayer results in grace, not because it offers gifts to God to which God has to respond with other gifts, but because prayer openly welcomes God’s gift. The grace of salvation is likewise gratuitous, and Jesus opened himself up to salvation both for himself and for the world. The prayer of a Christian obtains salvation for others because it opens itself to grace and thus becomes for others a source of that grace. Jesus said: “For their sakes I sanctify myself, so that they also may be sanctified” (Jn 17:19). The mystery of salvation is that a person (Jesus) became prayer for the whole world, and it was heard.”
F.-X. Durrwell, Christ Our Passover: The Indispensable Role of Resurrection in Our Salvation, p. 54.
Brett Salkeld is a doctoral student in theology at Regis College in Toronto. He is a father of two (so far) and husband of one.
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Could we say that prayer is a kind of death?
I think so. And that death, done right, is a kind of prayer.
Much to think about. Thanks.
Indeed, most of the Fathers and the Medievals, and indeed the continuous liturgical and sacramental teaching of the Church, insists that Calvary was, by Christ’s work, a place of prayer, the Cross his altar, and he both the High Priest and the Lamb of sacrifice, promised of old by Abraham to Isaac. Indeed, while the internal disposition of sacrifice, the most crucial element, is made up of a desire to show God the honor he is due out of the love we have for him, all sacrifice in this life calls for something to be done to something external. This can be something quite small, but is most explicit in the holocausts of the Old Covenant, which, being altogether burnt, we thus wholly and irrevocably dedicated and given over to God.
The deep mystery here, of course, is that Christ’s work is also a sin offering, which the High Priest offered for the sins of the people. Here, in this one instance, the sin offering, by which in one and the same act God is both honored and loved and some return is made to God in blood, without remainder, there is no stand in, no substitute, no creature to die in place of sinful man nor any sinner called to make of himself a blasphemous oblation. Rather, Christ is both Priest and Victim, the spotless Host, who does not take his life, nor have it taken from him, but lays it down, and takes it up again. By the power of God he enters the Holy of Holies not made by human hands, and there presents eternally before the Father the Sacrifice, pleading his most Precious Blood. He is the Lamb once slain, who never dies again, and by being made one body with him, his one oblation of himself once offered becomes our oblation, really ours because we are really joined to our Head to make up the one Christ.
This is why the Mass is, in pious language altogether true, the best thing this side of heaven. It is our participation in worship which both fulfills everything every other sacrifice of old tried to be but was not and puts an end to sacrifice. He has become our Sacrifice, our Passover, and we can authentically offer true worship, indeed the only true worship, by being made one in him, and through his Spirit, making of our lives a living sacrifice of praise.
This just in. Ratzinger deals with this in Behold the Pierced One. Starting on page 22, he expounds the thesis that:
“Jesus died praying. At the Last Supper he had anticipated his death by giving of himself, thus transforming his death, from within, into an act of love, into a glorification of God.”
Durrwell needs to be more widely read, by the way. Great theologian and a great writer at the same time.
Thanks for this quote, Brett!