Youcat commented through CCC – Question n. 185 - Part I.

YOUCAT Question n. 185 - Part I. Why does the liturgy repeat itself every year?      

(Youcat answer - repeated) Just as we celebrate a birthday or a wedding anniversary each year, so too the liturgy celebrates over the course of the year the most important events in Christian salvation history. With one important difference, however: All time is God’s time. “Memories” of Jesus’ life and teaching are simultaneously encounters with the living God.         

A deepening through CCC     

(CCC 1194) The Church, "in the course of the year,… unfolds the whole mystery of Christ from his Incarnation and Nativity through his Ascension, to Pentecost and the expectation of the blessed hope of the coming of the Lord" (SC 102 § 2).      

Reflecting and meditating 

(Youcat comment) The Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard once said, “Either we are contemporaries of Jesus, or we can have nothing at all to do with it.” Following the Church year in faith makes us indeed contemporaries of Jesus. Not because we can imagine ourselves so precisely as part of his time and his life, but rather because he comes into my time and my life, if I make room for him in this way, with his healing and forgiving presence, with the explosive force of his Resurrection.          

(CCC Comment)

(CCC 1165) When the Church celebrates the mystery of Christ, there is a word that marks her prayer: "Today!" - a word echoing the prayer her Lord taught her and the call of the Holy Spirit (Cf. Mt 6:11; Heb 3:7- 4:11; Ps 95:7). This "today" of the living God which man is called to enter is "the hour" of Jesus' Passover, which reaches across and underlies all history: Life extends over all beings and fills them with unlimited light; the Orient of orients pervades the universe, and he who was "before the daystar" and before the heavenly bodies, immortal and vast, the great Christ, shines over all beings more brightly than the sun. Therefore a day of long, eternal light is ushered in for us who believe in him, a day which is never blotted out: the mystical Passover (St. Hippolytus, De pasch. 1-2 SCh 27, 117).         

 
(This question: Why does the liturgy repeat itself every year? is continued)