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

YOUCAT Question n. 185 - Part III. 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 1166 a) "By a tradition handed down from the apostles which took its origin from the very day of Christ's Resurrection, the Church celebrates the Paschal mystery every seventh day, which day is appropriately called the Lord's Day or Sunday" (SC 106). The day of Christ's Resurrection is both the first day of the week, the memorial of the first day of creation, and the "eighth day," on which Christ after his "rest" on the great sabbath inaugurates the "day that the Lord has made," the "day that knows no evening" (Byzantine liturgy).          

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 1166 b) The Lord's Supper is its center, for there the whole community of the faithful encounters the risen Lord who invites them to his banquet (Cf. Jn 21:12; Lk 24:30): The Lord's day, the day of Resurrection, the day of Christians, is our day. It is called the Lord's day because on it the Lord rose victorious to the Father. If pagans call it the "day of the sun," we willingly agree, for today the light of the world is raised, today is revealed the sun of justice with healing in his rays (St. Jerome, Pasch.: CCL 78, 550).           

 
(The next question is:  What is the liturgical year (the Church year)?)