The Assembly
There are more people at Mass than those in the pews. The Greek word for “church” is ekklesia ― “the assembly.” But who’s being assembled? Arriving, we look around and see the normal congregation: Bob and Kathy are where they should be. The cantors are setting up. We settle in: “It’s just us. ”
It is not.
The Mass assembles a particular local community ― that is true. But that community is the minority. That is the ancient understanding. You can’t see it, but you can hear it — especially when the priest consecrates the bread and wine. “With the angels,” he says, “and all the saints we declare your glory.” The angels and all the saints? That’s an extraordinary number to be alongside.
“Angels surround the priest,” Saint John Chrysostom wrote in the fourth century. “The whole sanctuary and the space before the altar is filled.” This was why Saint Paul talked about Christians behaving and dressing a certain way at Mass — “because of the angels” (1 Cor 11:10). The rite even accords roles that are primarily for the angels. In the Old Testament, seraphim are found chanting: “Holy, holy, holy is the Lord of hosts. The whole earth is full of his glory” (Is 6:3). They chant it again in the Book of Revelation (4:8). When we chant those same words at Mass, we join underneath what they have always done. It is their chant. We are permitted to participate.1
But there are also the saints — saints from up and down the centuries. The priest prays that the Mass will take place “in communion with … the glorious ever-Virgin Mary … and blessed Joseph, her Spouse.” Evidently Joseph and Mary are there. He says the “blessed Apostles and Martyrs” are there. In the long form, he mentions “Linus, Cletus, Clement, Sixtus, Cornelius, Cyprian, Lawrence, Chrysogonus, John and Paul, Cosmas and Damian.” Apparently they ― whoever they are ― are all there. A lot of these guys were old martyred popes. All of them have been dead for hundreds of years.
Hundreds of years!
If you glance at the sanctuary’s Easter Candle, emblazoned starkly on its front will be the present year. Your watch will read the present time. What are Linus and Cletus ― the second and third popes from nearly two-thousand years ago ― doing here?
The vision at Mass contracts at one moment upon our particular time and place, but then it expands. It is in the present, but also in the ancient past. You take your seat and think “it’s just us.” Here are “my people.” It’s just you and your spouse and your kids and your community. You have the burdens of this morning. But then the vision expands and, somehow, Mary is here. Somehow, the angels are here. Somehow, Linus and Cletus and every other pope is here.2
The Irish Catholic writer James Joyce had his own definition for the Church: “here comes everybody.”3 The Eucharistic Prayer says the Mass is offered in the presence of “all the saints,” with “the angels,” with those “who have pleased [God] throughout the ages.” That means there’s more than just Linus and company. That means, too, that there are far more people at Mass than those in the pews. So settle in. It’s just us. It’s just Mary, Joseph, a few thousand angels and saints. It’s just everybody.
See, for the Chrysostom quote, and for the role of the angels at Mass, Jean Danielou, “The Presence of Angels at the Eucharist,” in The Angels & Their Mission (Sophia Institute Press, 2009).
See Jeremy Driscoll, What Happens at Mass (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 2011), 9.
Joyce, of course, meant something else entirely by this…