Scott Hahn - Scott Hahns Study Guide for The Lamb s Supper

Also by Scott Hahn

The Lambs Supper: The Mass as Heaven on Earth

Hail, Holy Queen: The Mother of God in the Word of God

First Comes Love: Finding Your Family in the Church and the Trinity

Lord, Have Mercy: The Healing Power of Confession

Swear to God: The Promise and Power of the Sacraments

Letter and Spirit: From Written Text to Living Word in the Liturgy

Reasons to Believe: How to Understand, Explain, and Defend the Catholic Faith

Ordinary Work, Extraordinary Grace: My Spiritual Journey in Opus Dei

Signs of Life: 40 Catholic Customs and the Difference They Make

Understanding the Scriptures: A Complete Course on Bible Study

Scripture Matters: Essays on Reading the Bible from the Heart of the Church

Understanding Our Father: Biblical Reflections on the Lords Prayer

A Father Who Keeps His Promises: Gods Covenant Love in Scripture

Rome Sweet Home: Our Journey to Catholicism (with Kimberly Hahn)

Living the Mysteries: A Guide for Unfinished Christians (with Mike Aquilina)

The Catholic Bible Dictionary (General Editor)

An Image Book

Copyright 2010 by Scott W. Hahn

All Rights Reserved

Published in the United States by Image Books/Doubleday Religion, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

www.crownpublishing.com

IMAGE , the Image colophon, and DOUBLEDAY are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Hahn, Scott.
Study guide for the Lambs Supper / Scott Hahn.1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Hahn, Scott. Lambs Supper. 2. Mass. 3. Lords SupperBiblical teaching. 4. Bible. N.T. RevelationTheology. 5. Catholic ChurchDoctrines. I. Title.
BX2230.3.H35 2010
264.0203607dc22 2010009194

eISBN: 978-0-307-58906-4

v3.1

The millennium was waning, and a variety of folksfrom televangelists to computer scientistswere wringing their hands over what might come at the end of the countdown. As the calendar rolled over to 2000 (Y2K, for the headline writers convenience), would the supercomputers go haywire and the power grid crash? Would Christ come upon the clouds and rapture up the Christians, leaving the remaining rabble to descend into moral and material chaos? If you channel-surfed the television for a few minutes, you could gather many conflicting answers to those questions.

I was no stranger to such speculation. I was born into a mainline Protestant family. As a teen I underwent a deep conversion and gravitated toward evangelical Christianity. As an adult I was ordained to the ministry and served as a pastor and teacher. Those were the years when books like The Late, Great Planet Earth sold tens of millions of copies. It was a religious culture in which you could identify yourself by your opinions about the last book of the Bible, the Book of Revelation. There were many options, and those who held them had long since hardened into factions. Were you a dispensationalist? A premillennialist or postmillennialist? An amillennialist? A preterist? It mattered. As the millennium wound down, many people considered it a matter of life and death.

Like so many of my fellow evangelicals, I was studying the Book of Revelation closely, intensely, and prayerfully. I immersed myself in the history of interpretation. And it was that study that led me to an unexpected place: the Roman Catholic Church.

As the year 2000 approached, I had been a Catholic for a decade and a half, and I had watched millennium fever spread even to some folks in the Catholic Church. Influenced by evangelical pop culture, they felt tremendous anxiety about the tribulations that now seemed inevitable and imminent. These were the days when the Left Behind series, a fictionalized rendering of the Last Days, was enjoying sales in the millions.

Thus, when Doubleday approached me and asked if I would be interested in writing a book, I didnt hesitate to answer yes. The Catholic Church had a consistent and compelling interpretation of the Book of Revelation; and, unlike the prediction industry, the Church hadnt changed its understanding to fit the passing events. History vindicated the saints again and again.

The ancient Fathers believed that the Book of Revelation presented an icon of the liturgythe Massthe Churchs ritual public worship. This doesnt mean that it was irrelevant to historical events. It means that the liturgy is the key to understanding historical events.

So, while Catholics have always cultivated a healthy sense of awe about the Mass, we have been spared the disordered fear of the end times. The message of the Book of Revelation is the message we were hearing, in those premillennial days, from Pope John Paul II: Be not afraid.

We believe in the real presence of Jesus Christ in the Holy Eucharist. Thus, since the first generation of Christianity, we have lived in joyful expectation of his coming in glory, his Parousia. We believe that a world is indeed, and always, coming to an end; but that is good news, because a better world awaits us. We begin to live in that new creationin the Kingdom of God, in heaven!even now, as we live out our Eucharistic lives on earth.

Yet so many Catholics were missing out on this message, distracted instead by interpretive schemes devised by people who could not see the liturgical sense of the Apocalypse, because they had never known the liturgy.

I was eager to write The Lambs Supper. I believed there was a need for it.

I was not, however, prepared for what followed. Rather quickly, the book sold out in its first printing. At one point it shot to number-five ranking on Amazon, passing Harry Potter and other epic best sellers along the way. The Eternal Word Television Network (EWTN) asked if I would appear on a thirteen-week series of interviews based on the book; and I did.