- Feast of Corpus Christi, Year B, June 22, 2003 -

BY FR. ROBIN KONING, S.J.

One way in which we Catholics speak of the Eucharist is as the 'Sacrifice of the Mass.' This language highlights the intimate links between the Mass and the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross. Such sacrificial language can seem strange, and can easily be misunderstood, both in relation to the cross and to the Mass. One way to examine what we mean by this teaching is to look at it in terms of the Trinity, examining the roles of each of Father, Son and Spirit in the cross and in the Mass.

Firstly, the Father's role. This can be the most problematic if we look at Christ's sacrifice on the cross through the eyes of pagan sacrifice. For then it's easy to fall back into a mindset of the Father as an angry God, hell-bent, if one might say so, on punishing us for our rejection of Him, needing to be pacified, out to get blood unless we find some way to appease Him. In this view, the Father doesn't particularly mind whose blood He gets, as long as it's blood, so when his Son offers himself in our place, then that's enough to satisfy God's blood-lust. It's a picture that fits in so well with how we humans often enough behave in our angers and resentments and hatreds and squabbles and desire for vengeance and revenge. So it has the comfort of familiarity, or resonance with our human experience - an eye for an eye - a neat business transaction. And there are some scriptural passages, even in the New Testament, which can be construed to fit this image if we so wish.

The problem, though, is that this is not the God revealed in Jesus Christ, the God who did not send his Son as a final gesture of anger, but because he so loved the world that he yearned to be reconciled with us whom He had created, from the overflow of His love, in His own image and likeness. The God revealed in the parable of the prodigal Son - prodigal, extravagant in His expressions of love and mercy, running to embrace us with open arms. This God, the God of Jesus, has lived from all eternity pouring out love to His Son. And in the Incarnation of the Son, in the Word becoming flesh, he gives us his Son - puts Him into our hands, in an expression of His trust in us, His unending love. This was the Father's sacrifice - sacrifice in the sense of freely offered, self-giving love, giving us what He most treasured, His only Son who had rested in His bosom from all eternity.

Secondly, the Son's role. Saturday was the feast of St Aloysius Gonzaga, a patron saint of youth. He died while still a young Jesuit student, having contracted the plague while tending plague victims. A friend of mine joked that that's what you need to become a saint - to die a horrifically gruesome death. Of course that's not true - though it can help! But there are many saints, the majority of them, I presume, like St Thomas Aquinas, the patron of this church, who didn't die a gruesome death. Yet all of them offered sacrifice - not the sacrifice of stoically gritting your teeth and doing what you hate doing, but the sacrifice of self-giving love in faithful obedience to the God who first loved us. Finding the awesome love of God for them, the saints fell in love with God. And with all the recklessness of someone passionately in love, they were willing to offer sacrifice - the sacrifice of self-giving love, for Jesus and for the least of His sisters and brothers - even if that primary sacrifice meant sacrificing other things - like their own comfort, honour, wealth or, in the extreme, their lives.

And this is the heart of Jesus' sacrifice, too - self-giving love. The essential element in what he offered to God and to us was not the gory bloodiness of the details of his passion and cross. These could have been suffered by someone who was totally deluded, cut off from God, stoically accepting the burden with a heart full of hatred for those who were killing them. Jesus' sacrifice, what he is really offering in the cross, is self-giving love - loving, faithfulness to a loving Father and to their common mission to redeem humanity. The deal is that Jesus will live in the world fully revealing the love and mercy of God and doing this faithfully until the end, whatever that end might be. In a sinful world which deals badly with prophets, faithfulness at this level often leads to a gruesome and bloody death. But it is not the Father who demands blood - that is our demand, the demand of our sinfulness and blood-lust. What the Son offers is love - love that will go the distance.

This point, that what Jesus offers at heart is self-giving love for the Father and for all humanity, is a key part of our understanding of the Mass as sacrifice. For we need to keep two things in mind if we are to properly understand the Mass as sacrifice, two things which are absolutely clear in the whole tradition of Church teaching on the Eucharist. Firstly, in the Mass, we offer the same sacrifice that Christ offered on the cross - that the very sacrifice of Calvary is made present in our midst. Secondly, that this sacrifice is here offered in an unbloody manner. These two statements - that this is the same sacrifice, present here and now in our midst, and that it is not a blood sacrifice - highlight that the essence of the sacrifice of the Cross is not blood and guts but self-giving love, Christ loving us to the end [Jn 13.1]

This talk of Christ's sacrifice being now present in our midst brings us to the role of the Spirit in the Eucharist. For it is the Spirit, the Spirit of Pentecost, which empowers the Church to make Christ present in every time and every place - to be the Body of Christ in every time and every place. And in the unsurpassable gift of the Eucharist, as the Pope calls it in his latest encyclical, the Spirit makes Christ present in tangible, visible, real form. The Spirit, too, offers sacrifice, in a sense, for sacrifice is self-giving love and the Spirit is the self-giving love poured out continually between the Father and the Son. In the Eucharist, the Spirit draws us into pouring out of mutual love which is the inner life of the Trinity. The Spirit transforms our unbelievably simple and poor gifts - a morsel of bread, a sip of wine - into the Body and Blood of the Son of God, making present to us the Father's sacrifice - His self-giving love manifest in the gift of His beloved Son to us. And the Spirit also makes present again the Son's sacrifice - Christ's self-giving love manifest in faithfulness to the end, to His Father and to us, in His passion and cross.

But the Spirit does more than this. For we are not present here as spectators, like the disciples watching the passion from afar. Rather, we are present like Mary at the foot of the cross, united intimately with Jesus in His offering and sacrifice [CCC #1370]. We offer far more than just the bread and wine we bring to the altar. More importantly, we offer God the gift He gives us, Christ in his body and blood. This is what we pray in each of the Eucharistic prayers after the consecration. For example, in the 1st, we pray: "From the many gifts you have given us we offer to you, God of glory and majesty, this holy and perfect sacrifice, the bread of life and the cup of eternal salvation." And again, in the 4th, we pray "We offer you his body and blood, the acceptable sacrifice which brings salvation to the whole world." We, the body of Christ, join Christ the Head in offering his self-giving love to the Father and to the world.

But that is not all of our part in this wondrous sacrament. For we cannot offer Christ without offering His Body, which is ourselves, the Church. As the Catechism puts it, "In the Eucharist the sacrifice of Christ becomes also the sacrifice of the members of his Body. The lives of the faithful, their praise, sufferings, prayer, and work, are united with those of Christ and with his total offering, and so acquire a new value. Christ's sacrifice present on the altar makes it possible for all generations of Christians to be united with his offering." [CCC #1368] This is our deepest participation in any Mass, our sacrifice, our self-giving love. To unite ourselves and everything in our life - every goodness and hope person we love, every worry and fear and struggle and burden - to unite it all to the self-giving love of Jesus for His Father and for the world, to surrender it lovingly with Jesus into the hands of the Father. And there, in the heart of the Trinity, it will be lovingly held and take on eternal value - to the glory of Christ, our paschal lamb who has been sacrificed. [1 Cor 5.7]