The Right Altar

There is an ancient temptation in religion which is far more subtle than outright unbelief. It is not the temptation to reject God, but to approach Him on our own terms; to retain His name while altering His worship, to profess His truth while reshaping the manner in which that truth is received, and finally to convince ourselves that sincerity can sanctify whatever our own hands have fashioned.

Sacred Scripture gives no such liberty to man. From Genesis to the Apocalypse, there runs a principle which is at once simple and severe: God determines the manner in which man approaches God. Again and again, that approach is bound up with an altar—with sacrifice, priesthood, covenant, communion, and the terrible privilege of drawing near to the Holy One.

The question, then, is not merely whether we have an altar. Man has always been remarkably capable of building altars. The question is whether we have the right altar.

The Altar Which Man May Not Alter

When God gave Israel instructions concerning an altar of stone, He commanded that the stones remain untouched by the craftsman’s chisel: “If thou make an altar of stone unto me, thou shalt not build it of hewn stones: for if thou lift up a tool upon it, it shall be defiled” (Exodus 20:25).

There is something profoundly beautiful in that command. Man might gather the stones, but he was forbidden to carve himself into them. The altar was not to become a monument to his imagination, his taste, his ingenuity, or his improvement upon the things of God. It was a place of surrender, not invention.

That principle appears again with dreadful clarity in the account of Nadab and Abihu. These were not heathen men standing before an idol. They were sons of Aaron, priests of the true God, ministering in the sanctuary of Israel. Yet they offered before the Lord “strange fire, which he had not commanded them,” and fire came forth from the presence of God and consumed them. Moses then gave the explanation: “I will be sanctified in them that approach to me” (Leviticus 10:3).

Their error was not that they refused to worship. They worshipped wrongly. They presumed that what God had not commanded might nevertheless be offered to Him.

It is difficult to reconcile this with the modern notion that the outward form of religion matters little so long as one is sincere. Scripture gives us precisely the opposite lesson. Sincerity does not rule the altar. Personal preference does not rule the altar. Even religious enthusiasm does not rule the altar. God does.

The King Who Was Not a Priest

The lesson becomes more striking in King Uzziah. He entered the Temple intending to burn incense before the Lord. He had the right God, the right Temple, the right altar and, at least outwardly, a religious intention. Yet the priest Azariah confronted him: “It doth not belong to thee, Ozias, to burn incense to the Lord, but to the priests, that is, to the sons of Aaron, who are consecrated for this ministry” (2 Paralipomenon 26:18).

Uzziah was king, but he was not priest. His royal dignity could not ordain him; his sincerity could not consecrate him; his desire to worship could not bestow a ministry God had entrusted to another. When he resisted, leprosy rose upon his forehead before the altar.

There was a divine order, and even a king had no authority to change it.

The coming of Christ did not destroy this principle; it fulfilled it. The shadows of the Old Covenant gave way to their substance. The sacrifices found their perfection in one Sacrifice, and the priesthood found its perfection in one eternal High Priest, Jesus Christ. Yet precisely here the Epistle to the Hebrews makes a remarkable declaration concerning Christians:

“We have an altar.”

Not merely Israel had an altar. Not merely Christ once died upon the Cross. The Apostle speaks in the present tense, and he speaks within a letter saturated with the language of priesthood, sacrifice, blood, sanctuary and covenant.

We have an altar because we have a Sacrifice, and we have a Sacrifice because we have a Priest.

The Sacrifice Upon the Christian Altar

An altar without sacrifice is merely furniture. Throughout Scripture the altar exists because something is offered there, and the Christian altar is no exception.

The Catholic Church has never taught that Christ is sacrificed again as though Calvary were insufficient. There is no second Christ and no second redemption. Christ “offered one sacrifice for sins” and entered forever into the heavenly sanctuary. Yet the same Lord who offered Himself once upon the Cross commanded His Apostles on the night before He suffered: “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this for a commemoration of me.”

The Mass does not repeat Calvary; it makes sacramentally present the one Sacrifice of Calvary. The Victim is the same. The Priest is the same. What differs is the manner of offering. Upon the Cross Christ offered Himself in blood; upon the altar that same Sacrifice is made present sacramentally beneath the appearances of bread and wine.

This is why the architecture of Catholic worship has always gathered around an altar rather than merely around a pulpit. The Scriptures are proclaimed, the Faith is preached, prayers ascend and hymns are sung, but the liturgy presses onward toward something greater than instruction. It moves toward sacrifice.

At the heart of Catholic worship there is not merely a discourse concerning Christ, but Christ Himself: Priest and Victim, offering and offered.

Partakers of the Altar

St. Paul makes the sacrificial nature of Christian Communion astonishingly plain in his First Epistle to the Corinthians. “The chalice of benediction, which we bless, is it not the communion of the blood of Christ? And the bread, which we break, is it not the partaking of the body of the Lord?”

He then immediately interprets that Communion through the language of altar and sacrifice: “Behold Israel according to the flesh: are not they that eat of the sacrifices partakers of the altar?” (1 Corinthians 10:18).

That phrase ought not to be hurried past: partakers of the altar.

To eat the sacrificial food is to enter into communion with the altar from which it comes. Paul applies this principle to Israel, to pagan sacrifice, and in the same argument to the Eucharistic chalice and bread. Communion therefore cannot be reduced to a private encounter between the individual Christian and Jesus. It is communion with a sacrifice, a priesthood, a covenant, a faith and a Church.

To receive from an altar is to belong, in some real sense, to that altar.

This explains why the ancient Church never understood the Eucharist as an isolated symbol which could be detached from ecclesial communion. One Eucharist belonged to one Church, gathered under one apostolic ministry around one sacrificial mystery.

The altar reveals what sort of unity Christianity actually possesses. It is not merely the invisible unity of people who happen to admire the same Savior while contradicting one another concerning His sacraments, His priesthood, His Church and even the means of salvation. Christian unity is incarnational and sacramental. It can be seen, touched and received.

The Altar of Ahaz

The tragedy of King Ahaz shows what happens when man decides the divine pattern may be improved. Visiting Damascus, Ahaz saw an altar which pleased him, sent its design back to Jerusalem, and commanded that another be built according to its pattern.

The corruption began not with atheism but with preference. He saw another altar and liked it better.

There is something painfully familiar in that impulse. Man seldom begins by declaring that he intends to overthrow the religion of God. He simply wishes to adjust it—to make it more suitable, more convincing, more useful, more successful, more agreeable to his age. Yet once man assumes the right to redesign the altar, he has already claimed authority over the religion represented by it.

And altars multiply.

My interpretation, my doctrine, my communion, my church, my Christianity.

The result is painfully visible in the religious world around us: thousands of competing bodies appealing to the same Scriptures while contradicting one another concerning baptism, salvation, priesthood, the Eucharist, justification, marriage, authority, predestination and the nature of the Church herself. Each may insist that Scripture alone formed its altar, yet the altars do not agree.

Against this stands the language of St. Jude: “the faith once delivered to the saints.”

The Faith is delivered before it is interpreted. It is received before it is defended. It is inherited before it is explained. Christianity did not begin when I opened my Bible, nor when a preacher founded his congregation, nor when a reformer concluded that fifteen centuries of Christians had misunderstood some essential doctrine. The Faith was entrusted to the Apostles and handed down.

The Christian is therefore not primarily an inventor, but a recipient.

Hezekiah and the One Altar

This brings us to Hezekiah, who did what religious pluralism has always found offensive: he tore down the unauthorized altars and called Israel back to the worship God had established. His enemies even used it against him. The Assyrian messenger mocked the people of Jerusalem: “Is not this he, whose high places and altars Ezechias hath taken away, and hath commanded Juda and Jerusalem, saying: You shall worship before this altar?” (4 Kings 18:22).

To those attached to the high places, Hezekiah must have seemed intolerant. Men had prayed at those altars. Families had worshipped there. Traditions had formed around them. Surely they could claim sincerity and antiquity of their own.

But the question was never which altar Hezekiah personally preferred. Hezekiah himself possessed no authority to invent another. The question was which worship God had established.

That distinction is crucial to the Catholic claim. Catholicism does not say that Rome invented a particularly successful form of Christianity and now insists that others adopt it. The Church claims something far more radical: she has no authority to invent Christianity at all.

The Pope cannot create another Gospel. A bishop cannot create another Eucharist. A priest does not own the Sacraments. The Church is the steward of something received. Her authority exists not to alter the deposit of Faith but to guard, teach and hand it on.

She may deepen in her understanding of what she has received; she may define against error what was always contained within that deposit. But she may not replace the altar with one of her own making.

The Altar Before the Throne

The mystery finally opens into heaven itself. St. John sees beneath the altar the souls of the martyrs; he sees an angel standing before the golden altar with incense, offering “the prayers of all saints”; he sees the Lamb standing as though slain before the throne.

Heaven is not stripped of liturgy. It is filled with it.

This is why the Catholic altar makes sense only when understood as participating in something greater than itself. At Mass, the Church does not create a worship service and attempt to send it upward toward God. She is drawn into the eternal worship of heaven. The Lamb adored by angels is the Lamb upon the altar; the Victim who offered Himself upon Calvary is the Victim sacramentally present beneath the veils of bread and wine.

The earthly sanctuary opens, as it were, upon the heavenly one.

This is the terrible beauty of the Catholic altar. Man does not climb to God by the strength of his own religion. God comes down to man according to the manner He Himself has ordained.

And so the deepest question is not, Where do I feel closest to God? It is not, Which church suits my temperament? Nor even, Which interpretation seems most convincing to me?

The question is older, harder and infinitely more important:

Where is the altar Christ established?

Where is His Sacrifice, His priesthood, His Eucharistic communion, His apostolic Faith? Where is the religion that understands itself not as an invention of sincere men, but as something received from the hands of Christ and guarded through the centuries?

Follow that question far enough and it ceases to remain abstract. Somewhere a priest stands before an altar. Bread and wine are brought forward. The words received from Christ and handed down through His Church are spoken. The priest genuflects, the bells sound, and the faithful bow before what appears outwardly unchanged.

Yet Faith sees what St. Thomas saw when he fell before the risen Christ:

“My Lord and my God.”

Here is the High Priest and the Victim. Here is the Sacrifice and the Communion. Here is the Lamb once slain and forever living. Here heaven touches earth, and Calvary stands sacramentally in our midst.

We need not build another altar.

We need only find the one God has given us.

We have an altar.