Retreat 2000
Saint Thomas Aquinas Seminary -
September 27-30 AD 2000
Conference II - "The Cross, the Mass,
Confession, and Communion."
Ave
Maria!
One
of the central difficulties encountered by modern day Catholics centers around a
lack of understanding—or positive misunderstanding—of the Holy Sacrifice of
the Mass. In this conference, we will try to put the Cross, the Mass,
Confession, and Holy Communion into proper perspective. To do this, we are
going to follow the example given us in Saint Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews, and
take a look first at the Old Testament forerunner of the Catholic Faith, and see
how God ordered His chosen people to worship Him before the time of Christ.
If
you are not generally familiar with the Old Testament, I would like to suggest
that sometime in the next few weeks you leisurely read through the Books of
Genesis and Exodus, and then just skip Deuteronomy and perhaps Leviticus.
But most of what we are going to cover today will probably seem familiar, even
if your Old Testament knowledge is restricted to the "Bible stories"
of years ago.
We
know, to begin with, that Adam and Eve, through their sin, had lost the ability
to communicate with God and to do things that were meritorious in His sight.
God promised a Redeemer, but the fulfillment of that promise would be many
centuries down the road. Through the pages of the Old Testament, we see
the efforts of men to deal with their shortcomings, and the opportunities given
by God to restore, at least partially, the bridge of communication and
friendship between God and man.
We
generally think of four things that make up this communication between God and
man -- we often say that their are four different kinds of prayer, or perhaps,
four different reasons for praying:
○ Adoration,
by which we praise God simply for His awesome and overpowering goodness.
○ Thanksgiving,
in which we thank God for all of the good things He has given to us and to those
around us.
○ Appeasement,
by which we ask God's forgiveness for our sins and of those around us; and
by which we ask for God's mitigation of the punishments that are due to our
sins. Make a mental note that this is, more technically, called
"propitiation." If you hear the words "propitiatory
sacrifice," you will know that they mean a sacrifice offered for the
forgiveness of sin and the remission of punishment.
○ Petition,
the fourth kind of prayer, is the one we often associate with children and
childhood, in that when we "petition" God, we are simply asking Him
for the things we feel we need in our material and spiritual lives. (All
such prayers are answered, but sometimes the answer is "no.")
All
four of these kinds of prayer are good, and show respect for God—even when we
are just asking for things—but, of course, there ought to be some balance in
our prayer life. We ought to employ all four forms in some degree. I
mention these four forms of prayer, because in a sense, man had to learn them
all over, "from scratch," as we say. And we will see elements of
them, more clearly discernable as the history of man's prayers and sacrifices
goes on.
The
word "sacrifice" is key to our understanding, because much of the
prayer offered by God and commanded by God took the form of a sacrificial
offering. That offering might be of one's time and thought, voice, or
song; what we usually just call prayer—it might take the form of fasting and
abstinence from legitimate material things, given up as a form of prayer—but
chiefly, when we use the word "sacrifice" we are speaking of a victim
being slain for God; usually a valuable animal, killed and somehow
destroyed in God's honor—a way of returning some of God's bounty to Him.
Saint
Paul tells us that "there is no forgiveness without the shedding of
blood."And that shedding of
blood began very shortly after the fall of Adam and Eve made it necessary.
Bishop Fulton Sheen, may have been stretching a bit, but he used to say that the
very first sacrifice was the one claimed by God Himself when He killed animals
in order to make clothing out of their skins to cover the newly discovered
nakedness of Adam and Eve.
It is interesting to pause and think about how this event demonstrates the
connection between sin and suffering in the world; how our sins effect
even the non-human world around us. Bishop Sheen also used to speak of our
salvation history as "a veritable river of blood," for as we will see,
it was almost always traced through some sort of bloody sacrifice -- and often
through great quantities of blood.
The
first man to act as an acceptable priest before God was Abel, the second son of
Adam and Eve.
Able, called "Able the just," is even mentioned in the Canon of the
Mass, following the Consecration, as we ask God to accept our Offering, even as
He accepted the offerings made by His acceptable priests, even before the He
gave His Law to Moses.
Noe
should be mentioned, for we see that when delivered from the flood, he offered
to God a sacrifice "from all of the cattle and birds that were clean."
And we see the value of this sacrifice when "the Lord smelled a sweet savor
and said, 'I will no more curse the earth for the sake of man: for the
imagination and thought of man's heart are prone to evil from his youth:
therefore I will no more destroy every living soul as I have done."
We see that God was pleased with Noe's sacrifice of his material goods, and was
even moved by it to overlook some of our sinful inclinations as a result.
Next
mentioned in the canon of the Mass is Abraham. The story of his sacrifice
is frighteningly memorable, as he left home for the mountain on which he
believed God expected him to offer his son Isaac as the victim.
We know, of course, that this was more of a sacrifice of his will, a test of
obedience—but it also "sets the stage," so to speak, for the idea of
God offering His only Son on the Cross. Abraham was obedient, also, in
circumcising himself and his sons, a tangible symbol of his covenant with God,
as well as a sacramental shedding of blood.
And
closely associated with Abraham is the priest and king of Salem, Melchisedech.
Actually he preceded Abraham in the Scriptural account, mentioned immediately
after the rescue of Lot from Sodom.
Of all the Old Testament priests, Melchisedech seems to be the one who most
closely foreshadows our Lord and the New Testament priesthood. He is
mentioned in the Psalms, and is commented on at relative length by St. Paul
in the Epistle to the Hebrews. Every Sunday at Vespers we pray a Psalm
that is universally acknowledged as referring to the coming Messias:
“Thine
is princely power in the day of Thy birth ... before the daystar, like the dew,
I have begotten Thee.... Thou art a priest forever according to the order of
Melchisedech.”
King,
and priest, and forever—three concepts that will certainly pertain to Jesus
Christ in the New Testament.
We
don't know much about the worship of the Jews during their captivity in Egypt.
There is a several hundred year void in the accounts after Joseph, the great
grandson of Abraham, became steward for the Pharaohs in that pagan land across
the Red Sea in Mediterranean Africa. By the other end of that period,
God's people have been reduced to slavery and yearn to be free. In
retrospect, we can look back and see this a symbolizing the slavery of mankind
to sin. But God sends a "deliverer," a sort of semi-Messias in
the person of Moses.
Moses,
of course was a Jew, but one put into a basket and set adrift by his mother to
avoid the sentence of death passed on all Jewish male children; one who was
found and raised as her own by the Pharaoh’s daughter .
It was this same Moses who grew up, and became God's instrument for the
deliverance of His people. The story, if you are not familiar with it, can
be found in the first few chapters of the Book of Exodus, and is also summarized
in Psalms 104 and 105.
What
is significant for our purpose today is the sacrifice commanded by God before
the final plague is sent on Egypt to force the release of Israel. After
frogs, and serpents, and locusts, and flies, and flaming hail, and water turned
to blood failed to convince Pharaoh that the Jews were more trouble than they
were worth, God sent the angel of death to destroy all the first-born in Egypt;
from the son of Pharaoh on down to the first-born even of the animals.
And God arranged to protect the first-born children of the Jews by having them
offer a wonderful sacrifice, known even to this day as the "Passover."
Each
Jewish family was to sacrifice an unblemished male lamb, and to consume that
lamb with unleavened bread and wild lettuce. Whatever remained was to be
burned in the fire, except for the lamb's blood, which was to be used to anoint
the doors of the Jewish homes, so that the angel of death would know to
"pass-over" the houses of the Jews and spare their first-born from
death. And God commanded that this Passover sacrifice be an annual event,
celebrated each year from the 14th to the 21st of the lunar month of Nissan.
As
you probably know, the Passover supper just before our Lord's crucifixion was
the basis for the Sacrifice of the New Law, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
But
before we get ahead of events, we should also mention that God required many
more sacrifices of the Jews once they escaped from Egypt, wandered in the
desert, and finally built His temple in Jerusalem under King Solomon. The
sacrifices that began in the desert are extremely important, for with them God
adds several new dimensions to the worship He expects from His people -- many of
which continue on, even into the worship of the New Covenant of Jesus Christ.
First,
God describes the plan of a portable sanctuary that the Jews are to make out of
the finest available materials, and set up wherever they made camp in the
desert. The Temple in Jerusalem would be set up in a similar manner, with
even more detailed specifications.
The description, found in Exodus 25-30 and 36-40, goes into precise detail.
Everything is sumptuous; with purple and scarlet drapes, and gold ornaments, and
the best available woods. Not only is there a walled off place for prayer,
but there is an altar, and candle sticks, and various items of equipment for
conducting the sacrifices. There is a table for the unbloody sacrifice of
hot loaves of bread that will be replaced with fresh ones when they cool.
There is the "Ark," a gold plated wooden box that will eventually
contain the tablets of the Commandments, a sample of the miraculous "bread
from heaven" with which God fed His desert wanderers for forty years, and
the staff of Aaron, His first officially designated priest.
Second,
there is to be a "holy of holies," a section of the sanctuary that is
curtained off from the sight of men -- the place in which God Himself will
dwell, seated on a throne above the Ark of the Covenant. Please understand
what I am saying -- the Jews had the Real Presence of God in their sanctuary.
When they traveled through the desert He guided them, a pillar of cloud visible
by day, and a pillar of fire at night. When the cloud settled over the Ark
they would stop, when it lifted they would again move through the desert.
When they settled down in Jerusalem, the Real Presence of God would dwell in the
holy of holies in the Temple until the day of our Lord's crucifixion—when the
curtain would be "torn from the top to the bottom"—torn by forces
from above, rather than by those below.
It
is only with God's revelation of His Law to Moses, and with the construction of
this traveling sanctuary, that God requires a special group of men be set aside
for Him as His priests. Up until this time, we have seen that the offering
of sacrifice to God was largely the concern of the father of a household, or
perhaps, a king for his people. But now, the work of sacrificing would
belong exclusively to the sons of Moses' brother Aaron.
And the number, kind, and frequency of sacrifices would dramatically increase.
You
can get an idea of the complexity of the Jewish sacrificial system in the first
eight chapters of Leviticus. Only clean animals from the herd or the flock
(cattle or sheep) could be offered; not old, not blind, not in any way
imperfect. The poor might offer turtledoves or pigeons.
There were also cereal offerings; fine flour or grains, or flour baked or fried
into cakes; always unleavened, always wheaten.
There
were holocausts, in which the entire sacrificial victim, "a male without
blemish" was destroyed by fire after having its blood poured out.
There were peace offerings, made in celebration when someone had fulfilled a
vow.
There were sin offerings; either on behalf of the priests, or the nation, or of
its rulers, and even for private persons.
There were offerings for guilt, and for purification from uncleanness.
Some of the sacrifices were
incompletely consumed by the fire, with a portion going to feed the priest and
his sons; others to feed the priest and his entire family. The peace
offerings might be eaten by anybody who was ritually clean, so the one offering
the sacrifice might invite his friends and family for a sacrificial dinner.
In
all cases, sacrificial or otherwise, the Jews are to drain the blood of the
animal. Sometimes it is just poured out, sometimes it is ritually
sprinkled on the altar or even the people, but it is never taken as food or
drink. Blood is the symbol of sin and forgiveness, of uncleanness and
purification, of life and death -- absolutely never a part of the Jewish diet.
“Since
the life of a living body is in its blood, I have made you put it on the altar,
so that atonement may thereby be made for your own lives, because it is the
blood, as the seat of life, that makes atonement.”
These
sacrifices went on, more or less continuously, from the time of the Exodus
(approximately 1440 B.C.) until the Babylonian Captivity, and then again
until the Roman destruction of Jerusalem in 70 A.D. — roughly 1,500
years. And it was into this culture that our Lord Jesus Christ was born in
about 6 or 7 B.C.
If
I might digress briefly, our Lord's birth was one of the things that
distinguishes the Judeo-Christian religion from virtually all others. Our
God personally intervened in human history—not just in legend, and not just
through prophets or other human representatives—but personally.
"The Word" who was "with God" "in the beginning,"
and "through whom all things were made" "took flesh of the Virgin
Mary and was made man."
More than a prophet like Mohammed, more than a legend like Rama and Crishna or
Mars and Jupiter, more than a philosopher like the Buddha or Confucius—God the
Son of God entered into the history of people in fact and in the flesh.
When
Jesus was born the Romans controlled Judea, but they were, by the standards of
the time, "enlightened rulers," who went out of their way not to
disturb the religion of their conquered peoples. By all accounts, Mary and
Joseph were able to live the normal religious life of Jewish people. Their
major observances are recorded in Scripture and observed in the Church's
liturgy. The were betrothed according to Jewish custom.
Our Lord was circumcised on the eighth day of his life, the first shedding of
His holy blood. Forty days after
His birth they went to the Temple, where, because He was the firstborn Son, he
was redeemed with a sacrificial offering; and where Mary, even though she
was utterly without sin, offered another sacrifice to commemorate her
purification from the blood of childbirth.
Every year at the Passover, the
Holy Family returned to the Temple in order to offer the Passover sacrifice
there -- a seventy-five mile trip or so, long before automobiles and interstate
highways. That pilgrimage was the occasion of our Lord being
"lost" and then found in the Temple.
It
was just before the Passover that our Lord changed water into wine at Cana of
Galilee—a foreshadowing of changing wine into His precious blood; that
first Passover of His public life, on which He drove the money changers out of
the temple, and spoke of rising from the dead on the third day.
It was just before the following
Passover that He fed 5,000 people through the miraculous multiplication of
loaves of bread (another foreshadow of the Holy Eucharist), and walked upon the
water.
And at the very same Passover, our
Lord spoke to the crowds, "I am the Bread of Life.... if anyone eats of
this Bread he shall live forever ... and the Bread that I give is My flesh for
the life of the world."
This
we have to look at more closely—indeed, every Catholic ought to re-read that
sixth chapter of Saint John's Gospel every six months or so. (And, while
you are at it, read John's account of the Last Supper as well). In John
vi, Our Lord is absolutely explicit: He was going to give them "bread
from heaven," just like their forefathers had received the Manna from
heaven during the Exodus.
But Jesus' Bread, quite unlike the Manna, would bring eternal life to those who
ate It. Those who did not eat It "would not have life" in them.
"I am the Bread of life.... the Bread that I will give you is My flesh for
the life of the world." "He who eats My flesh and drinks My
blood abides in Me and I in him."
Not
surprisingly, there were scoffers: "How can He say,’ I have come
down from heaven.'"? "How can this man give us His flesh to eat?" "This
is a hard saying. Who can listen to it?" And the Scriptures
record that "From that time many of His disciples turned back and no longer
went about with Him."
These were the rationalists of His time, the forerunners of those who would deny
the Real Presence of our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. They had seen Him
multiply loaves, walk on water, heal the sick, and even raise the dead, but this
was too much for their limited faith.
And
notice: He did not call them back! Certainly, if our Lord was not
completely serious about giving us His actual flesh and blood in Holy Communion,
He would have clarified His words. He would have chased after them;
"Come back! You misunderstood Me. I didn't really mean
it!" But, of course, He said no such thing. He let them go with
little more than the comment that "no one can come to me unless he is
enabled to do so by My Father." Not everyone, apparently, has the
gift of Faith. Not everyone, apparently, can accept the saving reality of
the Real Presence. But he who does? Our Lord completes the sentence:
"no one can come to me unless he is enabled to do so by My Father, but he
who does, I will raise him up on the last day."
Apparently,
this eternal life is something more than spiritual; it includes physical
life as well. "He who eats My flesh and drinks My blood has life
everlasting, and I will raise him up on the last day."
There, He says it again. Beyond spiritual immortality we have a promise
bodily resurrection on the last day of the world—a promise that is keyed,
clearly, to the reception of the Blessed Sacrament.
On
the third Passover of our Lord's public life, we see these promises take on the
nature of reality. During Holy Week each year we re-live the events of
this unfolding reality. In the traditional Mass we read each account of
the Last Supper and Crucifixion. With very good reason, we do not
abbreviate them and read the accounts of the Crucifixion in isolation from the
Last Supper. Saint Matthew's account is read on Palm Sunday, Saint
Mark's on Tuesday, and Saint Luke's on Wednesday.
Then
an interesting thing happens: since Saint John does not describe the
institution of the Blessed Sacrament, we read his account of the washing of the
apostles' feet, following Saint Paul's description of the institution in his
letter to the Corinthians.
That same night—Holy Thursday, the night of the Last Supper—the priest
consecrates not one, but two, large Hosts. One he receives in Communion,
before distributing Communion to the congregation as usual. The second
Host is reserved overnight for the liturgy of Good Friday, at which St. John's
account of the Crucifixion is read, and the priest alone receives that second
Host in Holy Communion. The Friday liturgy is essentially the culmination
of the Mass of Holy Thursday, in just the same way as the Sacrifice of the Cross
was the culmination of the Last Supper. According to the Jewish reckoning,
by the way, these events took place on the same day, which extended from sundown
on Thursday until sundown Friday.
Quite
purposefully, the tabernacle remains empty until the day of the Resurrection.
What
we observe in Holy Week—and, indeed, every time Mass is ever offered—is our
Lord, gathered together with the Apostles to celebrate the final Passover
sacrifice. He takes bread and wine into His hands, things that had been
ordered by God centuries ago, and gives the two to the Apostles:
"This is My body, which shall be given over for you.... this is My blood
which shall be poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins....
do this in memory of Me."
And
almost immediately thereafter they go out to the Garden of Gethsemane, where in
fact His body is "given over" by the traitor who rested his hand on
the Lord's table; He is taken into captivity, and by three o'clock the
next day His blood is in fact poured out. There is no symbolism here, but
reality—the harsh reality of the God-man offering Himself up in sacrifice for
the redemption of all and for the forgiveness of the sins of many.
There
is no symbolism here, for the words of our Lord, spoken that Thursday night and
spoken day in and day out by His priests are the fulfillment of the
promise—"This is My body" and "This is My blood" are to be
taken completely literally because our Lord told us to take them literally back
in that sixth chapter of Saint John's Gospel. Remember? He did not
call back the scoffers who would no longer walk with Him. He did not call
them back and tell them that He was going to give them a symbol of His body and
blood; He said nothing about giving them a subjective presence that
depended upon the will or the faith of the congregation; He said nothing
about being present by virtue of the congregation being the body of Christ.
What He did say was that He would give us His flesh and His blood, and if we did
not eat and drink them we would not have life in us. Nothing symbolic in
this at all.
Likewise,
not symbolic, are the words and actions of His priests in re-presenting His Last
Supper and Crucifixion each day in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. The
priest is not a narrator or a presider as some mistakenly hold, he is taking the
place of Jesus Christ in offering the sacrificial bread and wine. He is
"alter Christus," "another Christ." He is the human
agent through whom Jesus Christ makes His body and blood present to us, and
allows us to stand at the foot of the Cross to witness His eternal Sacrifice, no
matter how far we may be separated from It in time or space. Two thousand
years and seven thousand miles or so are reduced to the time and distance it
takes us to drive to daily Mass!
And
again, we take this literally, because our Lord did not restrict the need to eat
His flesh and drink His blood to the few people in the crowd—in fact, He told
His Apostles to go out into the world and "make disciples of nations ...
teaching them to observe all I have commanded you, and behold, I am with you all
days, even unto the consummation of the world."
Note that He did not say: "I will be with you
symbolically...." We also take it literally because it was taken
literally by the Apostles and the early Christians -- those who were in the best
position to know what Christ said and what He meant, even where not recorded in
detail in Scripture. Remember that "there are many other signs that
Jesus worked in the sight of His disciples (and many other things that Jesus
did) that are not recorded in this book."
Moments
ago, I referred to "the final Passover sacrifice," the day on which
the Passover lamb yielded to the true "Lamb of God who takes away the sins
of the world." Our Lord "came
not to destroy the law and the prophets, but to fulfill them." The sacrifices of
the Old Testament were commanded by the Father for the sanctification of His
ancient people—they were good in their time and place—but they have now
given way to something better—imperfection must yield to perfection.
Let
me read just a few "snatches" from Saint Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews
-- which, by the way is "must"; reading:
“He
is the mediator of a superior covenant, enacted on the basis of superior
promises.... in saying ‘a new covenant’ He has made obsolete the former one,
and that which is obsolete and is grown old is at its end....
When Christ appeared as high priest of the good things to come, He entered once
for all into the greater and more perfect tabernacle ... not by virtue of the
blood of goats and calves, but by virtue of His own blood, into the Holies,
having obtained eternal redemption.... He has appeared for the destruction
of sin by the sacrifice of Himself.... Christ was offered once to take
away the sins of many; the second time with no part in sin He will appear
unto the salvation of those who await Him....
And then saying, "Behold, I come to do Thy will, O God," He annuls the
first covenant in order to establish the second. It is through this will
that we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ
once and for all.
Now,
there are just a few more details that we must consider while all of these facts
are fresh in our minds.
The
first is that by the shedding of His precious blood, by His death on the Cross
and then by His Resurrection on Easter Sunday, our Lord conquered sin and death.
Each and every son and daughter of Adam and Eve was redeemed—each and every
one—Jew and Gentile alike—was made radically capable of eternal happiness in
Heaven. Our Lord had, as we say, opened for us the gates of heaven that
had been closed by the sin of Adam and Eve.
Nonetheless,
it remains for each person to respond to that opportunity for salvation as an
individual. We are not saved as a group, or a committee. There is a
need for personal faith, the belief in the things that God has revealed to us
about Himself. There is a need for personal good works, the doing of the
things that God has revealed that He wants us to do in this life. We must
live the virtues of Faith, Hope, and Charity, and keep God's Commandments, and
practice the various works of mercy toward those around us. Some of these
things will be the subject of another conference during this retreat.
But
we ought to recognize from what we have learned in this conference that God has
also allowed us to benefit from the Sacrifice and Resurrection of our Lord in an
individual way, for our specific salvation; as well as we benefit from it
in the general sense of mankind's redemption. I am speaking, of course,
about the Mass and the Sacraments. All of the Sacraments can be understood
to derive their power from the Sacrifice of the Cross:
Baptism
has its efficacy precisely because Christ was able to reverse the effects of
original sin. Through it (or at least the desire for it) we die to sin and
rise with Christ as we come out of the waters. Sacramental Baptism marks
our souls with a "character," an eternal sign that we have been united
to the Trinity through the Church.
In
Confirmation, the soul that has received the created graces of Baptism receives
within itself the uncreated grace of God the Holy Ghost dwelling within
it—something quite impossible if our Lord had not renewed human nature on the
Cross, or had not gone to the Father to send us "the Advocate, the Spirit
of Truth."
The
Holy Eucharist, the Most Blessed Sacrament of the Altar, is obvious. Here
we are invited by the Eternal High Priest to share in the sacrificial meal, just
as the people of the Old Testament shared the Passover sacrifices or the Peace
offerings we mentioned earlier—but the sacrificial Victim of whom we receive
is God the Son of God Himself. Greater holiness on earth would seem beyond
all human capacity.
In
Penance, the priests who offer the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass are able to
dispense some of Its forgiving graces to us as individuals. It is no
coincidence that our Lord established this Sacrament only after He established
His priesthood, and carried out His Sacrifice. The priests of the new law
can forgive sins or "retain" them precisely because they "other
Christs," other "offerers" of the one Holy Sacrifice.
For
precisely the same reason, when one of us is sick, we "bring in the priests
of the Church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of
the Lord. And ... and the Lord will raise him up, and if he be in sins
they shall be forgiven him."
The priests and their oil can forgive sins and raise the sick only because the
sacrifice of the Cross has won victory over sin, suffering, and death.
The
connection of Holy Orders to the Cross is obvious; a priesthood without a
sacrifice would be meaningless, as would be a sacrifice without a priesthood.
We need only to ask you to pray for many good and holy vocations to the
priesthood of Jesus Christ.
Our
Lord raised matrimony to the dignity of a Sacrament for the baptized who receive
it. The sacrifices involved in this Sacrament may be quite different from
those of the Cross, but they are real nonetheless. This Sacrament of love
is a living representation of God's love for His people; and perhaps only
parents can appreciate the concept of God sending His only-begotten Son into the
world.
Finally,
let me suggest that the Mass itself, if we can somehow distinguish it from the
reception of Holy Communion, is the ultimate source of forgiveness and grace.
It is a sort of "time machine" that brings us to the foot of the Cross
and allows us to be associated with the unique sacrifice that replaced all of
the blood of the Old Testament.
Holy
Mass makes us more than we could otherwise be, and makes our prayers the prayers
of Christ and His Blessed Virgin Mother. For a few moments, God looks down
and sees not a sinful man standing at the altar, but sees and hears, instead,
Jesus Christ Himself. What
more hallowing experience could there be than to speak those words in the person
of Christ, "This is My body..." and then to have the Father look down
and agree? What could be more hallowing for those who are not priests than
to join with the priest and the Church in offering the sacrifice of the Cross?
What could be more profitable than to join our prayers with the prayers of
Christ in offering the perfect gift to God the Father?
Pray
the Mass with attention, preferably with a missal in your hand if you are unable
to hear or understand everything that is being said; at least meditate on
the mysteries of the Rosary if a missal in unavailable. If nothing more,
remember the words we say at the Offertory:
Accept,
O Holy Father, almighty and eternal God, this spotless victim, which I, Thine
unworthy servant offer unto Thee my living and true God, to atone for my
numberless sins, offences, and negligences; for all here present and
likewise for all faithful Christians, living and dead, that it may profit us as
a means of salvation unto life everlasting. Amen
Whenever
you go to Mass, from now on, understand that you are giving worship to God in
the perfection of sacrificial worship that began many millennia ago.
NOTES:
Genesis
xvii: 23-27; xxi: 1-5.
Exodus
xxviii & xxix; Leviticus
viii & ix; Deuteronomy
xviii: 1-8
Matthew
i: 18; Luke i: 27;
(Espousal - January 23rd).
Luke
ii: 21; (Circumcision - January
1st).
[26]
Luke
ii: 22-24;
(Candlemas - February 2nd).
Luke
ii: 41-52; (Holy Family - 1st
Sunday after Epiphany).
John
ii: 1-25;
(2nd Sunday after Epiphany)
Matthew
xiv: 13-36; Mark vi: 34-58;
Luke ix: 12-17; John vi: 1-21 (4th Sunday of Lent; Saturday after Ash
Wednesday).
John
vi: 22-72 (Ember Wednesday in
Lent; Corpus Christi; Masses for the Dead).
John
vi: 44; reiterated in 66.
John
xiii: 1-15; 1 Corinthians xi:
20-32.
Matthew
xxvi; Mark xiv;
Luke; Luke xxii;
1 Corinthians xi: 20-32.
