DOUBLEDAY
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To Kimberly

“Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and eat with him, and he with Me… After this I looked, and lo, in heaven an open door…” —Revelation 3:20, 4:1

THIS REMARKABLE BOOK brings together several powerful spiritual realities—all of them important to the believing Christian, and all of them apparently so diverse as to superficially appear unrelated: the end of the world and the daily Mass; the Apocalypse and the Lord’s Supper; the humdrum of daily life and the Parousia, the coming of the Lord.

If you are a cradle Catholic like myself, Dr. Hahn is likely to leave you with a whole new appreciation of the Mass. If you entered the Church or are thinking of coming into full communion with it, then he will show you a dimension of Catholic Christianity that you probably never thought about—its eschatology, or teaching on the end of time. In fact, relatively few Catholics realize the link between the celebration of the Eucharist and the end of the world.

The salient feature of The Lamb’s Supper is its moving and lucid appreciation of the reality of the Liturgy of the Eucharist, the act of worship given to us by our High Priest on the eve of His sacrificial death. Dr. Hahn explores this mysterious reality with all the zeal and enthusiasm of a new convert.

I can only contrast this with my own experience—this year I will celebrate (quietly) my fifty-seventh anniversary as an altar boy. Yet when Scott called me and asked me somewhat cautiously to write a foreword to his new book, based on the very ancient eschatological interpretation of the Eucharist given by the Eastern Fathers of the second to the sixth centuries, I responded with “Well, of course, this is what I thought about the Eucharist for decades.”

The Mass, or, as it’s more accurately called in the Eastern Churches, the Divine Liturgy, is so rich a reality that there are as many valid theological approaches to it as there are to the whole mystery of Christ Himself. The Eucharist is part of the great living mountain which is Christ, a simile drawn from the ancient saints of the Holy Land. This mountain can be approached from many sides. This eschatological approach is one of the most intriguing and fruitful.

I always feel a twinge of annoyance when I see in a college or a hotel a list of “religious services” and observe the Mass listed at 9 A.M. The Mass is not a religious service. When Catholics say morning prayer or the recitation of the rosary or even have Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, that’s a service. It’s something that we do for God, similar to the public prayer of any religious denomination. But the Holy Sacrifice of the Eucharist, the Divine Liturgy, is not precisely—in its essence—done by man at all.

Let me tell you, I’ve been a priest for forty years and I never conducted a “service” called a Mass. I was a “stand-in” for the High Priest, to use the words of Church teaching, I was there functioning *in persona Christi—*in the person of Christ, the High Priest of the Epistle to the Hebrews. People do not come to Mass to receive my body and blood, and I could not have given it to them if they did. They come for communion with Christ.

This is the mysterious element in all Christian sacraments—including baptism. For this reason, in case of great necessity anyone can function in persona Christi to give baptism, because it is Christ who actually baptizes. It is Christ who forgives sin, Christ who prepares thy dying, Christ who ordains and who blesses the marriages.

Like Catholic and Orthodox Christians who think about it (as well as some Anglicans and even some Lutherans), I believe that Christ is the Priest of all the sacraments, just as He speaks to us from every page of Sacred Scripture. He ministers to us in every sacrament—and we experience in this way the vitality of His mystical body.

When you read Dr. Hahn’s account of the Eucharist as the heavenly worship spoken of in Revelation, as he indicates so well, you should begin to tingle with the vitality of grace.

The Mass on earth is the presentation of the marriage supper of the Lamb. As Dr. Hahn points out, most Christians either sidestep the Book of Revelation and its mysterious signs or they spin their own peculiar little theories about who is who and where it’s all going to end. As an inhabitant of New York City (the twentieth-century candidate for Babylon), I’m perfectly delighted with the prospect of it all ending soon, even next week. But I am tired of all these prophets of doom and their interpretations. Promises, promises! Early in this century, I lived through the careers of several guys who were on the short list of candidates for the big antichrist, and no show.

My love for Revelation is not based on all this Star Wars paranoia, but on the wonderful view of the heavenly Jerusalem in the final chapters of Revelation. These come as close as you can to describing what eye has not seen nor ear heard. Now with the reading and rereading of The Lamb’s Supper, many other chapters are open to me much more clearly—describing in symbolic form what the eternal life of the saints may be like, to use St. Augustine’s phrase.

It was St. Augustine, you know, who insisted on putting Revelation as well as Hebrews in the New Testament Canon at an African bishops’ council held at the end of the fourth century. Again, to quote Augustine, we may in prayer by His great mercy “touch for an instant that Fountain of Life where He feeds Israel forever.” But apart from these special moments of contemplation, we may see symbolically at the daily celebration of Mass the realities of the heavenly worship of the High Priest and His mystical body.

I am grateful to Dr. Hahn for finding and bringing back to life this vision of the early Fathers of the Church. The only thing that we ever do in this world that is real participation in the life we hope to live forever is to worship with Christ at the Liturgy. However humble the appointments of the church buildings, however limited the spiritual insight of the participants, when we are at the Liturgy of the Mass, Christ is there and mysteriously we are for that moment standing at the Eternal Supper of the Lamb. Read carefully this book, and you will learn how and why.