You Shall Worship One God

O.P. Rev. Fr. Marie Dominique Philippe

Description

It is by means of worship that man recognizes his absolute dependence upon God, comes into His presence, and gains practical knowledge of His goodness and sovereign majesty. Father Marie-Dominique Philippe, founder of the Congregation of St. John and one of the twentieth century s most profound theological and pastoral minds, takes us back to the First Commandment, back to the primacy of worship, in You Shall Worship One God. For only by recognizing the singular importance of worship, of making ourselves an offering of love before God, can we hope to fulfill the other commandments and develop a deep and lasting spiritual life. Divine revelation, says Father Philippe, presents true worship to us in the form of sacrifice. The Old Testament stories in which goods and lives are offered to God, and the holocausts and oblations of the Jewish Temple, train God's people to express their love and fidelity and penitence through sacrifice. In so doing they also prefigure and prepare us for the Passion of Our Lord on Calvary, the perfect and lasting sacrifice that completes and gives meaning to all the others. Christ s offering of Himself is at root a sacrifice of filial worship, glorifying the Father in the truest way possible and thereby effecting the greatest spiritual fruits. You Shall Worship One God is a fascinating study of the development of sacrificial worship throughout salvation history, a rich meditation on the mystery of the Cross, and a necessary reminder to our busy world that the heart of Christianity is found not in service to our fellow man, but in recognizing the Lord s supreme majesty before all. Such worship is essential to salvation, says Father Philippe, for it makes us die to ourselves in order to proclaim that God is first. New from Saint Benedict Press.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Catholic Church

Informations

• Publié par: St. Benedict Press LLC
• Date de parution: 01 septembre 2010
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781935302902
• Langue: English

Extrait

You Shall Worship One God
You Shall Worship One God
The Mystery of Loving Sacrifice in Salvation History
by Marie-Dominique Philippe, O.P.
Saint Benedict Press Charlotte, North Carolina
Original title : UN SEUL DIEU TU ADORERAS
Original translation by Dom Mark Pontifex Revised by the Brothers and Sisters of Saint John
PERMISSU SUPERIORUM O.S.B
Scriptural quotations are taken from the Catholic Edition of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible (except for cases where the author provides his own translation). Copyright 1965, 1966 by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
___________________________
Nihil Obstat: Hubertus Richards, S.T.L., L.S.S.
Censor Deputatus
Imprimatur: E. Morrogh Bernard
Vicarius Generalis
Westmonasterii: Die XXVII Maii MCMLIX
The Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur are a declaration that a book or pamphlet is considered to be free from doctrinal or moral error. It is not implied that those who have granted the Nihil Obstat and Imprimatur agree with the contents, opinions, or statements expressed .
2010 Community of St. John
All rights reserved. With the exception of short excerpts used in articles and critical reviews, no part of this work may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in any form whatsoever, printed or electronic, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Cover design by Milo Persic. [e-mail]
Cover image: The Ghent Altarpiece: main panel depicting The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, 1432 (oil on panel) (detail of 61235) by Hubert Eyck (c. 1370-1426) Jan van (1390-1441) St. Bavo Cathedral, Ghent, Belgium/ Paul Maeyaert/ The Bridgeman Art Library. Nationality / copyright status: Flemish / out of copyright.
ISBN: 978-1-935302-90-2 1-935302-90-6
Printed and bound in the United States of America.
Saint Benedict Press Charlotte, North Carolina 2010
C ONTENTS
I NTRODUCTION
1. T HE O LD T ESTAMENT S ACRIFICES : T YPES OF THE S ACRIFICE OF THE C ROSS
S ACRIFICES B EFORE THE L AW
The Sacrifice of Abel
Noah s Sacrifice After the Flood
The Sacrifice of Isaac
S ACRIFICES U NDER THE L AW
The Passover
The Sacrifice of Elijah
The Sacrifice of the Seven Brothers and of Their Mother
2. T HE S ACRIFICE OF A DORATION ON THE C ROSS
T HE M YSTERY OF C HRIST C RUCIFIED
T HE M YSTERY OF THE C ROSS : W ORSHIP IN S PIRIT AND IN T RUTH
3. C HRIST C RUCIFIED , O UR W ISDOM : T HE R EVELATION OF G OD S M YSTERY
T HE S ACRIFICE OF THE C ROSS : T HE R EVELATION OF THE M YSTERY OF THE L OVE AND S IMPLICITY OF THE F ATHER
T HE S ACRIFICE OF THE C ROSS : T HE R EVELATION OF THE M YSTERY OF THE J USTICE AND M ERCY OF THE F ATHER
T HE S ACRIFICE OF THE C ROSS : T HE R EVELATION OF THE F ATHER S O MNIPOTENCE AND H IS P RESENCE IN A LL T HAT E XISTS
T HE S ACRIFICE OF THE C ROSS : T HE R EVELATION OF THE E TERNITY AND H OLINESS OF THE F ATHER
C ONCLUSION
About the Author: F ATHER M ARIE -D OMINIQUE P HILIPPE
I NTRODUCTION
O NLY insofar as man recognizes his Creator s sovereign rights over him can man fully be himself. If he does not discover God and does not recognize God s rights, but rather sees himself as his own master, he fails to discover the One who is his source and end. He is then like a traveler who has lost his way, knowing neither where he comes from nor where he is going.
That is why God attaches such importance, in His education of mankind, to the revelation of His mystery and to the first commandment, which enjoins worship. For it is by means of worship that man recognizes his absolute dependence upon God and enters into a personal relationship with his Creator and his Father. It is by means of adoration that man comes into God s presence and gains a practical knowledge of the goodness and sovereign majesty of his God.
Once man forgets the demands of the first commandment and allows himself to be carried away by sensible goods, by ambition for worldly glory and power, he diminishes himself and loses his true nobility. Instead of aiming at the knowledge and love of God, and thereby at gaining godlike ways, man turns back in on himself and seeks only to know and love himself. He supposes that man s true greatness consists, not in aiming at a God who is distant, hypothetical, and even perhaps purely imaginary, but in serving his fellow men, in loving and helping them and forgetting himself for their sakes. He supposes that true religion consists, not in adoring an unknown God, but in devoting himself to the well-being of his brethren and drawing them closer together. We must recognize that such a substitution (putting man in the place of God, turning the adoration of God into a means for social betterment) may be extremely attractive to one who has ceased to know what God is, or has never known, or at least has but a faint memory of it, and vaguely pictures God as an object of fear, a master always ready to punish. Such a substitution is surely nothing but a demonic secularization of what is most intimate to the Christian mystery.
At the Cross, Mary, the Woman, the Mother of mankind, took John in Jesus place. Is she not to receive John as a mother to help him and dwell with him? As if this would cause her to give up her pure silent adoration! This ultimate union of love, which the Father brought about at the Cross between the Mother of His Son and John, was indeed a union achieved through the double observance of a single commandment: to love God and to love our neighbor-to love God in our brother, and our brother for God s sake, to recognize Jesus in His members and to love them with that same love which is reserved for Jesus. Thus, to the believer, there is no substitution brought about at the Cross since man is not put in God s place; but God raises man to Himself and presents man as His own: When you did it to one of the least of my brethren here, you did it to me (cf. Mt. 25:40).
The act of adoration is not abolished to make way for mere service to mankind, but God makes use of worship that is silent, hidden, and spiritual to allow men to love one another more, to unite them in the bonds of a closer love, uniting mother to son and son to mother. That is the loving service which religion ordains and which should be practiced by the members of Christ in the new humanity purchased with Christ s blood. The jealous pride of the devil cannot endure such an exaltation of mankind. He seeks by every means to disfigure this new union of the Cross and to offer us a seductive caricature, which puts the Cross far away from us: God is dead. Men have slain God. They must now put themselves in God s place. They must shake off the tyrannical slavery of religion, which makes them acknowledge themselves as creatures of God. They must become aware of their own sovereignty, of their own absolute freedom. True religion should be philanthropic: man saves himself and saves his brethren. The Christian, however, instead of seeking for a new world and being seduced by this new religion, this discovery of the new greatness of man, must understand with new clarity the act of adoration he performs so often yet so imperfectly. Faced with the false mysticism of the superman who is raised above all, the Christian must understand that more than ever he should, in the name of all humanity, worship his God, the Creator and Father of all life.
The Christian should be convinced that this is the most effective, indeed the only entirely effective, answer that he can give to his brethren who have rejected God and do not wish to hear about Him.
God Himself tells us this, and teaches it with the greatest emphasis in the Old Testament, when the people of Israel in Egypt, under the yoke of Pharaoh (the pharaohs are good representatives of the power of purely human efforts), allowed themselves to be seduced by prosperity, riches, material abundance, and earthly glory. They then forgot that they were called by God. God had called them and chosen them to be His people, to witness before all other nations that the Lord is the only God. God wished to snatch them from this tyranny; He could not suffer the misery and forgetfulness of His people. So He revealed Himself to Moses and told him what He willed: I have seen the affliction of my people who are in Egypt, and have heard their cry because of their taskmasters; I know their sufferings, and I have come down to deliver them out of the hands of the Egyptians, and to bring them out of that land to a good and broad land, a land flowing with milk and honey (Ex. 3:7-8).
It was by worship in the desert that the Lord wished to educate His people once again, to bring them back to Himself and to teach them their calling. Long contact with the riches and power of the Egyptians had turned Israel away from its God. In spite of this, the Lord watched over His people. And, in order to reawaken them to the truth, He wished to lead them into the desert and there, by means of adoration, set them face-to-face with their God in order to teach them to come into His presence.
Worship, then, is a voluntary act by which the creature freely and deliberately recognizes all the rights that God the Creator has over it. Through worship, the creature recognizes that God is at the source of all that it is, that all that it is depends ultimately on God and is derived from Him, that the creature s whole life is subject to Him, and that He alone has the power of life and death since He is the author of life.
By means of adoration, the rational creature disappears before the face of God, recognizing that before the supreme majesty of the Creator he is nothing at all and knowing that he is not worthy to present himself alive before God: mortal man cannot see me, and live to tell of it, Scripture says (cf. Ex. 33:20). This, then, is what worship brings about: it makes us die to ourselves in order to proclaim that God is f