After Noah, the human race became one more a dysfunctional family. Chapter 11 of Genesis tells us that the whole earth had only one language and that the people joined together in a great project to build a city at the center of which would be a tower reaching up to challenge the heavens. This Tower of Babel functions as a neat biblical image of the aggressive, self-aggrandizing, and imperialistic tendencies of human beings once they have lost contact with God.

An elemental biblical truth is that in a world gone wrong, there is no communion without sacrifice. Since the world has been twisted out of shape, it can be straightened only through a painful process of reconfiguration. It is practically impossible to read any two pages of the Bible in succession without coming across the language of God’s anger, but we mustn’t interpret this symbolic expression literally, as though God passes in and out of emotional snits/ The divine wrath is a theological symbol for the justice of God—which is to say, God’s passion to set things right.

The Mass signals this transcendent dimension in a number of ways. In the Confiteor, the liturgy invokes another world: “I ask blessed Mary ever-Virgin, all the Angels and Saints, and you, my brothers and sisters, to pray for me to the Lord our God,” and the great Gloria prayer calls to mind the song of the angels early on Christmas morning. From the beginning of the rite, therefore, we are situated in a properly heavenly context that stretches beyond that of the community gathered immediately around us.

Next, through the power of the words of the Eucharistic Prayer, the elements of bread and wine are transfigured into the Body and Blood of Jesus, and the people are invited to come forward and feast on the Lord. This, once again, is the Christ of the Bethlehem manger, offered for the sustenance of the world. The participants in the Mass don’t simply listen to the teaching of Jesus’ they don’t merely call his memory and spirit to ind.