The purpose of the sacraments is to sanctify God’s people, to build up the Body of Christ and, finally, to give worship to God. Because they are signs, they also instruct. They not only presuppose faith, but by words and objects they also nourish, strengthen, and express it. That is why they are called “sacraments of faith.” The Sacraments are “powers that comes forth” from the Body of Christ, which is ever-living and life-giving. They are actions of the Holy Spirit at work in his Body, the Church. They are “the masterworks of God” in the new and everlasting covenant.
Every time we receive a Sacrament, we too bind ourselves by oath to Christ who never ceases to sanctify us and make himself communion with us…The recipient of the sacrament enters into a deeper, supernatural relationship with God and other people.
Chapter 1 of St. John’s Gospel reveals: In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God. All things came to be through Him, and without Him nothing came to be. What came to be through Him was life, and this life was the light of the human race; the light shines in the darkness and the darkness has not overcome it.... And the Word became flesh and made His dwelling among us, and we saw His glory as of the Father’s only Son, full of grace and truth.
We read how God the Father sent his Only-Begotten Son into the world to dispel our fear of being alone, unloved, unwanted, and isolated from God and one another because of sin. Through the Word of God, we know for certain that Jesus promised never to leave us and that he would be with us until the end of time. But knowing that he is not with us physically, how does Jesus remain with us? We know that he established the Church, the visible sign of unity and salvation for the world and that as members of his Body, we share in his life-giving Sacraments. St. Leo the Great said, “What was present in Christ has passed over into his sacraments.”
So, the Sacraments of the Church are God’s way of saying, “I am present among you in a real and tangible way.” We can define a Sacrament as an efficacious sign of grace instituted by Christ and entrusted to the Church, by which divine life is dispensed to us through the work of the Holy Spirit (cf.CCC 1131). There are Seven Sacraments of the Church. The Latin word “sacramentum” simply means “oath” or a pledge or promise to give something, like the covenant promises given in the Old Testament. In the early Church, it became associated with an action: the ritual worship of the Christians. “Around the year 112, a Roman governor named Pliny the Younger said that the Christians in his province of Bithynia met before dawn to sing hymns and bind themselves by oath to Christ, as they shared “an ordinary kind of food.”
Every time we receive a Sacrament, we too bind ourselves by oath to Christ who never ceases to sanctify us and make himself communion with us. The Greek word used for Sacrament, mysterion, stresses the invisible power of the sacramental sign; this term finds its root from the Greek verb “to close one’s eyes.” It stresses the invisible effects of the Sacrament. Because they are external or perceptible promises of the immense reality of grace, of God’s covenant of mercy with his children, Sacraments are signs, but they are effective signs, not merely symbolic ones. They cause what they signify. We see these prefigured throughout the Old Testament and thus fulfilled and instituted by Jesus Christ in New Testament.
Each Sacrament consists of two parts, matter and form. The matter is essentially the physical element, such as water for Baptism, and the form is the words that are used. Moreover, through the Sacraments, God communicates something to us that we cannot necessarily see, but we know by faith it has the power to transform our wounded nature. It is what we call grace.
Grace can be defined as a free and unmerited gift of God that generously strengthens, elevates, and sanctifies our sinful nature and enables our free-will to choose his life-giving Commandments in order to give us a share in the divine nature or as St. Peter said so well, “His divine power has bestowed on us everything that makes for life and devotion... that through them you may come to share in the divine nature.” So why would God choose this way of communicating himself to us? Or better yet, why would God choose to save us this way?
To say that God became flesh speaks volumes. God became flesh in order to take on our sinful human nature and crucify it to the Cross. By dying in the flesh as a human being, Jesus, both God and man, raised our corruptible nature and clothed it with immortality. St. Bernard once said, “Through flesh came sin and death, so through the flesh our salvation must come.”
When you really think about it, Catholicism is a very sensual (corporeal/physical) religion. God utilizes tangible, visible, ordinary, humble elements of the natural world, such as bread, wine, olive oil, and water in order to communicate his grace to us.
David Lang, author of Why Matter Matters, illustrates the importance of material reality in the life of a Christian. He states that “God, in his great wisdom, has joined together the material and spiritual realities so as to design a sacramental universe where humble, ordinary natural materials signify divine mysteries, and thus convey grace for our salvation. It is through this conjunction of matter and form that we grasp the meaning of a sacrament and what it accomplishes.”
We learn that, by God’s almighty power, using these humble signs as instruments, the recipient of the sacrament enters into either a different, or else deeper, supernatural relationship with God and other people. The recipient may be empowered to carry out some new tasks that will be meritorious toward everlasting happiness in heaven. (This is what happens most notably in the Sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation, Holy Orders, as well as Matrimony, but each sacrament has its own unique or special purpose.) If received worthily, every sacrament imparts to the soul the gift of an enhanced participation in God’s very own eternal life. Pope Benedict XVI said that “God touches us through material things, through gifts of creation that he takes up into his service, making them instruments of the encounter between us and himself.”
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