Posted on: February 4th, 2010 Adjusting to a Presence, not a Seminar
Aidan Kavanagh on the continuity between God’s gracious and revelatory act in the liturgy and his gracious and revelatory acts in the old covenant as well as the person and work of Jesus (from his On Liturgical Theology):
It was a Presence, not faith, which drew Moses to the burning bush, and what happened there was a revelation, not seminar. It was a Presence, not faith, which drew the disciples to Jesus, and what happened then was not an educational program but his revelation to them of himself as the long-promised Anointed One, the redeeming because reconciling Messiah-Christos. Their lives, like that of Moses, were changed radically by that encounter with a Presence which upended all their ordinary expectations. Their descendants in faith have been adjusting to that change ever since, drawn into assembly by that same Presence, finding there always the same troublesome upset of change in their lives of faith to which they must adjust still. Here is where their lives are regularly being constituted and reconstituted under grace. Which is why lex supplicandi legem statuat credendi.
