Body and Blood of Christ 2022
Genesis 14:18-20; Psalm 109 (110); 1 Cor 11:23-26; Luke 9:11-17
If you mention that you are from Lancaster, the likelihood is that you will be asked “What is that dome that you can see from the M6?” To this, you can give a variety of answers.
Nikolaus Pevsner, who compiled a compendium of English architecture region by region, described it as “England’s grandest folly”. Being more precise, you might say that it is the “Park Structure”, though that is a particularly local term, deriving from the period of its construction, before it had achieved a formal title. You might also call it “Williamson’s Memorial” or even give it its official title of “the Ashton Memorial (in Williamson Park)”.
Warming to your theme, you might add that James Williamson the Younger, expanding the business established by his father for the manufacture of table baize and floor coverings, became known as the “Lino King”, as he made Lune Mills, of which nothing now remains apart from the derelict power station, into the largest factory in Europe; that he built the “new” Town Hall, had Queen Victoria’s statue set up in the newly laid out Dalton Square, and constructed Williamson Park from a former quarry with, as its centrepiece, the Ashton Memorial (he having been ennobled as the first Baron Ashton) in tribute to one of his first two wives, both deceased. Incidentally, in my school days, Earl Peel, father-in-law of the Lady Peel who sold Hyning to the Bernardines, was what would now be called the CEO of Jas. Williamson and Son Ltd.
Your interlocutor, being by now thoroughly enthralled, might then ask “What is in the Ashton Memorial?”, to which you would reply “Nothing”. There may be the odd display, promenade plays are now performed in its vicinity, and weddings are conducted within it, but in effect, it is a glorious emptiness, a reminder of Lile Jimmy Williamson’s lost love.
That is how we normally think of a memorial, a reminder of someone or something past. That, however, is not how the Jewish people use the term. For them, a memorial (Greek anamnesis) is the making present, here and now, of something past. That is how Jesus used the term at the Last Supper, as recorded by St. Paul, in this, the first account of the institution of the Eucharist to be put into writing.
When Our Lord said, over the bread which had become His Body and the wine which had become His Blood, “Do this as a memorial of me”, He was not thinking of a mere reminder: He was instructing His disciples to continue to make His action a present reality. The Church has maintained that teaching, and followed that instruction, through the ages: thus, every celebration of Mass makes present not only the Lord’s action at the Last Supper in transforming the bread and wine into His Body and Blood, but also all that this entailed in the breaking of that Body and the pouring out of that Blood on Calvary, and the completion of the sacrifice in the raising of that Body and that Blood from the dead.
In carrying out this memorial, we are not only eating and drinking the Lord Himself: we are entering into the totality of His self-offering to the Father. Hence it is profoundly irritating that the Missal renders “do this as a memorial of me” as “do this in memory of me” which lacks the force of the original. Whoever was responsible for this translation deserves to have his bottom very firmly kicked.
What though of the other readings? The author of the Letter to the Hebrews sees Melchizedek, mentioned in the Genesis reading and the psalm, as the forerunner of Jesus, whom he describes as a second Melchizedek, a priest forever, constantly making present His once-for-all sacrifice. Hence the Mass is not a new or a different sacrifice, but the one sacrifice of the supper room, Calvary, and the empty tomb made present for us. Meanwhile, the feeding of the five thousand is a prelude to the still more miraculous feeding of the world with the Body and Blood of Christ.
The Ashton Memorial may indeed be England’s grandest folly: the memorial which is the Mass is the world’s greatest act of wisdom.
