Jesus tells the woman at the well in today’s Gospel
that “the hour is coming when people will worship the Father in Spirit and
truth”
Saint John Chrysostom, a saint in the 300’s, (whose
relic is on our rerdos back here, which, by the way, these relics were donated
by the Hopwood’s to Saint Paul’s. So the
first one, as you are looking up here left to right is Saint Basil. The next one is a relic from St. Philip the
Apostle. On the other side of the
Tabernacle is St. Gregory of Nyssa and then the one on the end is St. John
Chrysostom. Relics are meant to hearken
back to the days when the first Catholics would have Mass in the catacombs over
the dead bodies of the saints. Each
Catholic altar also has a relic of a saint in it.
Anyway, St. John Chrysostom said about this line that
Jesus speaks to the woman that the hour is coming when people will worship the
Father in spirit and in truth, that Jesus is talking about the Catholic Church as
being the place where this true worship takes place.
The Catholic Mass has been handed on through 2,000
years
There have been lots of changes through those 2,000
years, but the essence remains unchanged
There are now tens of thousands of denominations, and a
lot of those denominations strive to worship more spontaneously than the
Catholic Mass, but even then, there is a form to their spontaneous-ness. No denomination would say that complete and
utter chaos is worship, so various denominations might not be aware of the form
their worship takes, but there is always some form or another to any worship.
So the Catholic Mass has a form that has been preserved
for 2,000 years. At this and every Mass
we understand ourselves to be joining something that is already going on. Jesus
appears on this altar when the words of consecration are prayed over bread and
wine. Heaven, Calvary and this Church
are intermingled in a glorious way.
At this and every Mass, literally the hour has
come where we are worshipping the Father in spirit and in truth.
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