The Catechumenal School
The
Christian mystery is centered on the historical and human event of the paschal
mystery of Jesus Christ, his suffering, death and resurrection.
The paschal mystery of Jesus Christ,
patterned after the paschal sacrifice of the Exodus event, celebrated yearly as
the Jewish Passover feast, is his way of realizing in his own flesh and in
human history, that is, within the concrete history of the Jewish nation, that
vestige of ancient Israel, the Universal law of love of God, which is the
supreme law of sacrifice pictured in the Tree of Life said to have been placed
in an archetypal garden of Eden, in order to perpetually remind man about the
staff of life which will bring about the perfection of the immutable natural
law of Hierarchy or Evolution.
The Christian mystery is the
re-living of that paschal mystery by the individual Christian, and by the
Christian Church as a whole, on the practical and concrete level in the world.
It is the Christian’s way of serving
the God of life, by faithfully worshiping Him daily through the sacramental
life of the Church of God.
What are the Christian sacraments of
serving the living God through worship?
They are the sacraments of Baptism and the Eucharist.
The sacrament of Baptism is the
Christian way by which one becomes truly a Christian, not only nominally but
functionally, by discovering the meaning and true essence of the Christian
faith, following the gospel injunction, “Go, therefore, make disciples of all
the nations, baptize them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the
Holy Spirit…” (Mt. 28:19 ).
The sacrament of the Eucharist is
the Christian way by which, after becoming a Christian by means of baptism, one
shares the Christian life by “observing all that the Lord commands” together
with the rest of the Christian community in a life of communion with the
universal Church, as a way of implementing the second part of the evangelical
injunction, “teach them to observe everything that I have commanded you”.
The work of initiation into the
Christian mystery, copying the school of faith during the Exodus period and of
the school of faith which Jesus Christ himself have undergone in the desert, is
the apostolic work mandated by the above-mentioned injunction of making the
members of the Church from the stage of conception and giving birth, from
an infantile up to the attainment of
a mature stage of Christian faith. It is
actually the work of separating the
“chaff from the grain” (Mt. 3:12), where
those members who have less mature faith are separated from those who have
matured by the grace of God through their discovery of His Personal Presence by
means of the daily living out and submitting themselves in obedience to the
Word of God. This selection or separation of Christians among the others is the
realization of the evangelical pronouncement where it says, “Many are called,
but few are chosen” (Mt. 22:14), as a way of calling and preparing the more
mature members of the Christian Church to the more important and primary work
of ministry and mission. One way of doing this is to plant now and again the
seed of Christian faith through the pastoral work of evangelization, so that it
will bring forth the full grain of the Christian life in the people through the
pastoral work of sacramentalization.
