In a recent class with our adult catechumens on the sacraments, one young man raised the question, “Do I really need the sacraments? After all, can’t I encounter God on my own without the rites of the Church?” A good question, indeed. In response, I said that, yes, we need the sacraments, but also yes, they are not the only ways in which we can encounter God, e.g., through other people, contemplative prayer, the Rosary, etc.. However, the sacraments are the primary and most important ways in which we are united with Our Lord. The reason in which we need the sacraments is to meet the Lord in the ways in which He desired us to meet Him.
Christ instituted the Eucharist in the Last Supper and gave Himself to us. He specifically told the apostles to, “Do this in memory of me” (Lk 22:19). From then on, to present day, and to eternity, Christ can be found in the consecrated host. His body, blood, soul, and divinity, are truly present when bread and wine are consecrated within the holy sacrifice of the Mass. This expresses the true definition of a sacrament according to Catholic understanding. The concept, as Josef Pieper writes in In Search of the Sacred: Contributions to an Answer, “declares that in a certain special and specific situation the ‘symbols’ expressed through observable action and audible words not only mean something but also, by being acted out, transform this same meaning into objective reality…coming exclusively from God’s power” (28). It is here, in the sacrality of this action, where we meet and encounter the Lord face to face and receive Him into our very selves. In this celebration, we once again see that He desires to give himself to us as gift, and what a great cause for joy and festivity! What a great gift He has given to us—He’s given his very self! In this way, it is clear that we absolutely need the sacrament of the Eucharist.
It is in the celebration of the Christian sacraments, especially the Eucharist, that God’s real presence is found among his people (Pieper, 31), and, because of this, one is more easily able to contemplate the world as good and understand the love in which the Lord has and continues to pour out upon us.
In Joseph Ratzinger’s Theology of the Liturgy: The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence, he writes that the sacraments do not only point to the vertical dimension (i.e., “the call of God that makes a man human in the first place”), but also point beyond to the horizontal (i.e., historical) dimension of human existence. In order to live a life of holiness united to our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, we need the sacraments because, as Ratzinger puts it, “to receive the Christian sacraments means to enter into the history proceeding from Christ…that opens up to man the historical context that truly allows him to live and leads him into his true uniqueness—into the unity with God that is his eternal future” (163). It is precisely through the sacraments that we are brought into Christ’s history wherein he instituted the sacraments into time and space for man to enter into and receive for his benefit. Within the Christian sacraments, the God of Jesus Christ appears and is “here for men and is defined precisely by his being with people….[He shows Himself as the] Word that calls us, and the love that unites us” (161). In choosing to be with us, He also chooses where and how and in what ways we are to be reconciled and united with Him.
In order for human beings to participate in God’s divine life once again, God chose to send His Son to be born into the world and meet us in a human way, and He continues to meet us in a human way in each celebration of a sacrament. The sacraments open the way for our entrance into the history of Jesus Christ, and through this connection, Ratzinger writes, they provide “a liberating union with God’s eternal love…[which] has broken into his prison.” Ratzinger beautifully completes his thought by writing that “the chain of the horizontal that binds man has become in Christ the guide rope of salvation that pulls us to the shore of God’s eternity” (164). God knew He needed to enter into human history in order for us to meet Him again. In the same way, He has chosen to allow man to enter back into union with Him through the sacraments which take place in the time and space of human history.
To go further, God chose and determined the mode in which His presence would be available, but He did so in a way in which we, humans, can encounter Him. In other words, as Ratzinger puts it, if a man goes to church to receive the sacraments and understands the meaning of the sacraments, he knows he ought to receive them “not because he thinks the spiritual God needs material means in order to touch man’s spirit…on the contrary, [he does this] because he knows that he, being a man, can encounter God only in a human way…: in the form of fraternal solidarity, corporeality, and historicity.” He does this, Ratzinger continues, “because he knows that he, as a man, cannot personally control when and how and where God has to manifest himself to him” (167). It is God that chooses in His ultimate freedom to manifest Himself in the ways in which He desires and that is through the sacraments, thereby making the sacraments necessary for you and I.
If, however, we make the claim that there is no need for the sacraments, that there are, in fact, others ways in which we can encounter God and thus these sacraments are dispensable (or just other ways to encounter Him), we put to the side God’s decision in uniting us with Him in the ways He determined and longs for and hastily write them His sacraments as being equally important as other forms of encounter. This would be a grave and very sad mistake. God has given us the sacraments in order for us to enter into His history precisely to allow our complete and total reunification with Him. This is, in fact, as Ratzinger puts it, “the purpose of our going to church at all.” It is here that this love seeks man “utterly and entirely,” not just as an “isolated spirit,” but “in the body of his historicity” where man “arrives at its goal and comes to its fulfillment” (168).
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Works Cited
Pieper, Josef. In Search of the Sacred: Contributions to an Answer, 7-50.
Ratzinger, Joseph. Theology of the Liturgy, “The Sacramental Foundation of Christian Existence,” 153-168.