Worship ‘as one body’

3rd Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C
First Reading: Neh 8:1–4a, 5–6, 8–10
Second Reading: 1 Cor 12:12–30
Gospel Reading: Lk 1:1–4, 4:14–21

To appreciate this Sunday’s First Reading, we must know its background.

In 587 BC, King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon destroyed Jerusalem, including Solomon’s temple, and deported the inhabitants to Babylon. In 538 BC, King Cyrus of Persia, who had defeated Babylon the year before, allowed the Jews to return home and instructed his governors (“satraps”) to help them rebuild.

(In 1879, archaeologists discovered a clay cylinder bearing an inscription by Cyrus confirming the above Biblical account, and on April 16, 2015, Israel issued a stamp commemorating the event.)

As the new temple began to take shape, the high priest Hilkiah announced, “I have found the book of the Law in the temple of the Lord.” 

Seven months later, “the whole people gathered as one man” and “called upon Ezra the scribe to bring forth the book” and read it aloud. It took Ezra “from early morning until midday,” for it contained the detailed regulations concerning worship that God had prescribed at Mount Sinai, which fill Chapters 25–31 of the Book of Exodus.

Pope Francis referred to those regulations in his 2022 apostolic letter Desiderio Desideravi, on the “liturgical formation of the people of God.”

The authentic “art of celebrating” the liturgy is more than a mechanical observation of rubrics (at one extreme) or an “imaginative—sometimes wild”—disregard of rules (at the other). The rite is “a norm,” he said, but a norm “is never an end in itself”; it is always designed to protect “a higher reality.”

The Church’s liturgy has authority, for, like the creeds, it developed under the guidance of the Holy Spirit promised by Jesus. Accordingly, priests and other liturgical ministers must take “special care” to adhere to it, Pope Francis told the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith early in 2024.

However, he said in Desiderio Desideravi, the congregation must also adhere to it in “all the gestures and words that belong to the assembly”: gathering, processing, sitting, standing, kneeling, singing, acclaiming, looking, listening, and keeping silence. Thus “the assembly, as one body, participates in the celebration”—like the “whole people” who “gathered as one man” to listen to Ezra.

Making the same gesture and “speaking together in one voice” impose a “uniformity” that does not “deaden,” the Pope said, but “educates individual believers to discover the authentic uniqueness of their personalities not in individualistic attitudes, but in the awareness of being one body.”

“Individualistic attitudes”—like extending one’s hands in unexpected or flamboyant gestures, speaking at a different pace from everyone else, or kneeling when one should be standing and vice versa—draw attention to oneself and distract others (including the priest!) from the authentic celebration. They divide us instead of uniting us.

Pope Francis notes that “among the ritual acts that belong to the whole assembly, silence occupies a place of absolute importance.” It is expressly prescribed during the Penitential Rite, after “Let us pray,” before and between the readings, after the homily, in the Eucharistic Prayer, and after Holy Communion.

This “liturgical silence” is not “an inner haven” where we hide ourselves in “intimate isolation,” as if stepping outside the ritual, he said. Rather, it symbolizes “the presence and action of the Holy Spirit,” who animates the entire celebration.

At various points in the Mass, it inspires prayer, “moves us to sorrow for sin,” awakens “a readiness to hear the word,” “disposes us to adore the Body and Blood of Christ,” and allows the Holy Spirit to suggest changes in our lives.

In particular, the Pope says, “listening with reverence and in silence, intervening with acclamations,” is precisely how the laity participate in the Eucharistic Prayer. We must “enact” it “with extreme care.”

Just as God told the ancient Jews how to worship him, so today he tells us, but now through his Son’s Church.

You can find the rubrics on vatican.va, entitled the “General Instruction of the Roman Missal.”