Lost in Translation #145
After the Unde et Memores, the priest prays:
Supra quæ propitio ac seréno vultu respícere dignéris: et accepta habére, sícuti accepta habére dignátus es múnera púeri tui justi Abel, et sacrificium Patriarchae nostri Abrahae: et quod tibi óbtulit summus sacerdos tuus Melchísedech, sanctum sacrificium, immaculátam hostiam.
And which I translate as:
Upon these [the Host and Chalice], may You deign to look with a favorable and serene countenance, and to have them accepted, as You deigned to have accepted the offerings of Your just servant Abel, and the sacrifice of our patriarch Abraham, and that which Your high priest Melchizedek offered to You, a holy Sacrifice, an unspotted Victim.
The prayer could have used the more direct “to accept,” but instead it uses circumlocution with “to have accepted” twice. This literary device creates a certain distance between the human and the divine at the same time that it invites a space into which we can enter.
A marvelous aspect of this prayer is that it recapitulates, in a way, all of sacred history, and enfolds this narrative into the Paschal mystery. Somehow, the Passion of the Christ builds on and consummates all of the good sacrifices made before Him from the beginning of time to the present day. We, in turn, like dwarves on the shoulders of giants, benefit from this last and perfect and ongoing sacrifice.
Three figures are named from this sacred history: Abel, Abraham, and Melchizedek.
The sacrifice of Cain and Abel
Fr. Dieter Böhler, S.J. notices that even though Abel made a genuine sacrifice by immolating a lamb, his offering is called munera (offerings) and not sacrificium. “Abel,” Böhler observes, “is not an Israelite, but a representative of all humanity…. Thus, his sacrifice is an act of natural religion.” [1] The Lord accepts Abel’s offerings, even though Abel has acted only in response to a natural impulse rather than any divine revelation.
Melchizedek is not an Israelite either, but even as a pagan he somehow worships the true “God Most High, the Creator of heaven and earth.” (Gen. 14, 19) Moreover, he is designated as both a king and a priest, and his offering of bread and wine clearly foreshadows the Eucharist. Hence, even though unbloody offerings in the Old Testament (such as grains and vegetables) are not called sacrifices or victims, the Supra quae propitio elaborately refers to Melchizedek’s offering as “that which he offered to You… a holy sacrifice, an unspotted victim.”
Together, the sacrifices of Abel and Melchizedek point to the Eucharist: Israel’s liturgy and the aspirations of all human reverence towards the divine are thus taken up and fulfilled in the Eucharistic sacrifice. The sacrificial matter of Abel (the lamb) and of Melchizedek (bread and wine) lend themselves to this interpretation, since the Eucharistic sacrifice of bread and wine makes present the sacrificed Lamb (see Rev. 5, 6) [2]
But the real mystery is the sacrifice of Abraham. Böhler first establishes that the sacrifice of Isaac was designed by God to be a test not of Abraham’s obedience but of his faith. Specifically, Abraham had to have faith that God would fulfill His promise to make Abraham’s descendants a great nation through Isaac, even though Isaac was to be killed before he could sire any offspring. This meant only one thing: Abraham had to believe in the resurrection of the dead, in this case, the resurrection of his ostensibly-soon-to-be dead son Isaac. That is why Abraham remains our Patriarch, even if we do not share his bloodline; he is a towering figure of great faith in the key doctrine of Christianity.
The sacrifice of Abraham
And his sacrifice? It was not Isaac, who was spared. And for Böhler, it was not really the ram that Abraham substituted for Isaac. Böhler notes that rams had only one meaning in the Levitical sacrifices: “they were the classic sacrificial animal of cult inauguration,” [3] such as initiating priestly ordination. The cult inauguration here on Mount Moriah is an anticipation of the cult that David and Solomon would inaugurate centuries later in the same location (later renamed Mount Zion) and the new cultus that Our Lord would inaugurate again in the same location in the Upper Room on Holy Thursday. Rather, for Böhler, “The sacrifice of Abraham was a sacrifice of himself by himself. He surrendered himself will all his hopes, his love, his faith, into the dark night of God’s will. It was a self-offering.” [4] It is indeed fitting that this knight of Faith be remembered in the Canon.
Patriarchy Properly Understood
A long side-note is in order on why the 2011 ICEL’s translation of Patriarchæ nostri Abrahae as “Abraham, our father in faith” is ill-advised. [5] “Patriarch” and “patriarchy” are, of course, dirty words today, thanks to the influence of feminism, which uses the term to denote men’s systemic oppression of women. [6] Strictly speaking, however, patriarchy denotes not male rule or misrule in general but a specific form of male authority found only in the Judeo-Christian tradition. The word itself is a biblical neologism, appearing first in the Septuagint translation of the Old Testament in reference to: 1) the heads of the twelve tribes of Israel (1 Chronicles 27, 22); 2) the heads of families within a tribe of Israel (2 Chronicles 19, 8; 26, 12); and 3) Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. (4 Maccabees 7, 19; 16, 25)
In the New Testament, St. Stephen confirms this convention by referring to the sons of Jacob as the “twelve patriarchs” (Acts 7, 9) and St. Peter, while preaching during the Church’s first Pentecost, develops it further by also calling King David a patriarch. (Acts 2, 29) Later Christian usage expands the patriarchal franchise to include pre-Abrahamic figures such as Adam, Abel, and Noah (the so-called “antediluvian patriarchs”) and to post-biblical bishops presiding over the chief sees of the early Church, e.g., Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Constantinople. Today, a number of prelates in the Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, and Oriental Orthodox churches continue to bear the ecclesiastical title of Patriarch. The word was not used outside of Christian circles, and it was not secularized until the eighteenth century to signify any kind of male rule.
All of which is to say is that patriarchy in its true sense is a specific model of fatherly authority tied to Divine Revelation, and anchored in a covenantal bond between God and man that – judging from how the term is used biblically and ecclesiastically – is essentially positive and beneficial. As Jesus admonishes His apostles:
You know that the princes of the Gentiles lord it over them; and they that are the greater, exercise power upon them. It shall not be so among you: but whosoever will be the greater among you, let him be your minister: And he that will be first among you, shall be your servant. Even as the Son of man is not come to be ministered unto, but to minister, and to give his life a redemption for many. (Matthew 20, 25-28)
Here “lord it over them” signifies not rule per se but exploitative rule, a wielding of power for the sake of selfish gain. Christian rule, by contrast, may involve an exercise of power, but that exercise is directed exclusively to the betterment of the ruled even if it is at the expense of the ruler. The greatest example of this self-emptying and altruistic mode of rule is that of Jesus Christ, who “loved the Church and delivered himself up for it.” (Ephesians 5, 25)
In other words, if generic patriarchy is the problem, Christian patriarchy is the solution. And if Christian patriarchy is the solution, we need to take back the word and not be ashamed to call Abraham our patriarch. [7]
Previous Sacrificers
And as for the rest of the prayer, it is out of chronological order. Historically, Abel came first, then Melchizedek, then Abraham. But the order of the prayer is Abel, Abraham, and Melchizedek. Why? Because Abel offered a bloody sacrifice, Abraham offered an almost-bloody sacrifice, and Melchizedek offer an unbloody sacrifice, a build-up to the unbloody sacrifice of Our Lord Jesus Christ in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. As the Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom prays:
You became man, unchanged and unchanging. You were appointed our High Priest, and, as Master of all, handed down to us the priestly ministry of this liturgical and unbloody sacrifice. [8]
The sacrifice of Melchizedek
I believe this is the reason why that the Supra quæ propitio dwells on the sacrifice of Melchizedek in such a loving way, not going directly to his offering but lingering in a beguiling way on “that which Your high priest Melchizedek offered to You,” and then elaborating with “a holy Sacrifice, an unspotted Victim.” For Jesus Christ is a priest according to the order of Melchizedek, as the Bible insists (see Ps. 109, 4; Hebr. 5, 6; 5, 10; 6, 20; 7, 11) and so is every priest validly ordained celebrating this Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
Notes
[1] Fr. Dieter Böhler, S.J., “Sacrificium Patriarchae nostri Abrahae: The Aqedah in the Bible and the Canon of the Mass,” in The Sacrifice of the Mass, ed. Matthew Hazell (Smenos Publications, 2024), 25.
[2] Ibid, 26.
3] Ibid, 34.
[4] Ibid, 32.
[5] 2011 Roman Missal, 641.
[6] As Iris Marion Young puts it, “The system of male domination, most often called ‘patriarchy’, produces the specific gender oppression of women,” in Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1990), 21, emphasis added. Bell Hooks explains that “patriarchy” has replaced “male chauvinism” and “sexism” as the preferred term for the male oppression of women in “Understanding Patriarchy,” in The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (New York: Washington Square Press, 2004), 17–25.
[7] ICEL, on the other hand, is correct in identifying Abraham as our father in faith even though the original Latin makes no mention of this fact. Citing St. Paul, Peter Kwasniewski writes: “Not by descent of blood but by imitation of faith, Abraham is our patriarch, the patriarch of orthodox Christians—not the patriarch of the Jewish people as an ethnic or religious group... Abraham is the patriarch of all who have faith in Christ—of the Hebrews, like himself, who longed for the Messiah and who were delivered by Him from the limbo of the fathers, as well as of the Jews and Gentiles from the time of Christ down to the present who have been baptized into Christ.” (Once and Future Roman Rite, 242)
[8] After the Cherubic Hymn.
