The Sacrifice of the Mass

http://meam-commemorationem.blogspot.com/2006/05/aparec-joint-statement-on-eucharist.html

Jeff Steele's excellent and stimulating blog Meam Commemorationem proposes for our contemplation an essay on the Joint Reformed Episcopal/APA Statement on the Eucharist, which statement appears at first glance to deny a propitiatory nature to the Mass. I offer for you, the reader, a few meagre reflections of my own.

E.L. Mascall remarks in his many works that Anglican priests and theologians tend to teach their people the Eucharistic Real Presence to the neglect of instruction on the Eucharistic Sacrifice, because it is easier to convey the meaning of the Real Presence; the sacrificial aspect of the Mass is more difficult to grasp and is liable more easily to misunderstanding. No doubt Dr Mascall, a theological genius, was right, and so I tread cautiously with that which I here attempt feebly to articulate.

The Anglican Province of America, in accordance with the Book of Common Prayer Communion Office (see the Canon, pages 80-81, 1928 BCP) and Catechism (1928 BCP page 582) and the theological paradosis of Anglican divines, unquestionably believes the Eucharist to be a sacrifice. In the American Eucharistic rite, the Holy Gifts, elements of bread and wine consecrated into the Body and Blood of Christ, are plainly offered to the Father: 'with these thy holy gifts which we now offer unto thee.' In the official rite of Priestly Ordination used in our Diocese of the Eastern United States, the Bishop, after the formula of Ordination, delivers to the ordained a paten and chalice and addresses the neo-presbyter with the phrase 'Take thou authority to offer sacrifice to God and to celebrate the Eucharist for the living and the dead in the Name of the Lord. Amen.' This is the traditional porrectio instrumentorum taken directly from the Roman and Sarum Pontificals. Lex orandi, lex credendi. Whatever Eucharistic Sacrifice is intended by Our Lord, the New Testament and the ancient undivided Church is unswervingly intended by the Eucharistic Liturgy and Ordinal of the Anglican Church. The Joint REC/APA Statement must be interpreted through the lens of the praxis of the Churches involved, and clearly the APA understands the Eucharist to possess a fundamentally sacrificial character.

The Mass 'cannot be said to be a propitiatory sacrifice to God the Father' in the sense that the Eucharist is never an additional, supplemental or collaborative sacrifice independent of the One Sacrifice of Our Lord offered once for all upon the Cross. The Mass adds nothing to Calvary and has no value or merit independent of the self-oblation of Jesus Christ for our redemption. The Mass is propitiatory, that is, it achieves reconciliation with God the Father, insofar as it is the unique anamnetic and sacramental re-presentation of the Sacrifice offered on the Altar of the Cross once in space and time. Our Saviour's Death and Passion, to paraphrase Saint Cyprian of Carthage, are the Sacrifice pleaded in the Eucharist, and therefore in that sense alone one can affirm (and should) that the Mass is a propitiatory offering of Christ in His Church to God. The Mass is Christ's offering of Himself to His Father, not a work performed separately from Christ. The Eucharist is most certainly offered for both the living and the dead, an undeniably propitiatory act, as the Prayer Book makes clear. The Divine Liturgy is nothing else but Our Lord's own personal Eternal Heavenly High Priesthood exercised in a sacramental expression on earth. The Celebrant and Consecrator of every Eucharist is Our Lord. The One who offers and is offered is Jesus Christ, so in heaven after the Ascension, so on earth in the Mass, in and through His Mystical Body, of which He is the Head and Priest.

Or elucidated deductively...

The Sacrifice of Our Lord on the Cross is the one only propitiatory sacrifice for the sins of the whole world.

The Eucharist makes present under the sacramental signs of bread and wine the One Sacrifice of Calvary. 'Do this in anamnesin of me.'

Therefore, the Eucharist is a propitiatory Sacrifice, not because it is new, additional, or independent of the Cross, but specifically because it makes Calvary sacramentally present.

The Mass is an applicative, appropriative Sacrifice, for it applies and appropriates to the faithful the merits and benefits of Our Lord's One Offering of Himself once offered.

The language of the Statement on Anglican Belief and Practice carefully avoids any strict scholastic or rationalistic definition of the Eucharistic Sacrifice (as did the ancient Church) while reaffirming the historical Anglican critique of the popular medieval theology and practice corrected at the English Reformation. The Sacrifice of the Mass, just as in Article of Religion XXXI, is not here denied or impugned. The biblical and patristic teaching is affirmed; the liturgical abuses of the medieval Roman Church are roundly condemned.

Perhaps the following will be a helpful guide: the sacrificial character and nature of the Eucharist was, for the Eastern Orthodox, defined in an especial way by the Council of Constantinople, May 1157, which rejected the heretical teaching of the Patriarch-elect of Antioch, who at that time maintained that the oblation offered in the Eucharist was not a real sacrifice of the Body and Blood of Christ, but one that he described as 'fantastic and iconic.' By saying that that offering rendered to God in the Mass is not an actual re-presentation of the One Sacrifice Once Offered, but an image or a symbol of the One Sacrifice, he anticipated precisely the errors of the 16th century magisterial continental reformers. The Orthodox Church responded to this heretical teaching by asserting the following:

1. The Eucharistic Sacrifice is not a mere mental or psychological remembering, a bare memorial of a past event. The word anamnesis is not be interpreted in a weak, but a strong sense. The Eucharist is not just an empty symbol or a nude sign. We do not only remember a past event or person by eating bread and drinking wine.

2. The Eucharistic Sacrifice is not a repetition of the One Sacrifice of the Cross offered once for all. Calvary can never be repeated - and the Mass does not repeat the immolation or death of the Lord. Christ's death can never be repeated. There is no re-immolation or re-crucifixion in the Mass.

3. The Eucharistic Sacrifice is no new Sacrifice: the Mass is no supplemental or additional Sacrifice to the one offered by Our Lord on the Cross once for all. There can only be One Sacrifice in the Christian Mystery, and that is the Sacrifice of Golgotha. The Mass cannot be a separate thing or reality.

4. Therefore, the Eucharistic Sacrifice is identical to the Sacrifice of the Cross. It is the same One Sacrifice made present, re-presented to God the Father. Our Lord presents to the Father in the Eucharistic Sacrifice the same offering He made to the Father on the Cross. The Eucharist is the same Sacrifice, but offered in a sacramental mode and manner, an unbloody Sacrifice, supernatural and heavenly. Anamnesis means re-presentation as Real Objective Presence, not 'representation' in the modern sense of absence.

Our Lord does on earth in the Eucharist what he does forever in Heaven now as our Great High Priest. The Mass is the Action of Christ, the very Intercession of Jesus Christ our only Mediator and Advocate. It is Christ Himself, actualising and exercising His Priesthood in His Church on earth under sacramental form, according to His own institution and promise. For this cause He instituted the Eucharist at the Last Supper, to be celebrated on Apostolic Altars until the end of time.

The acceptable all-sufficient Sacrifice of Jesus Christ consists in His Body and Blood, His glorious human nature united to His divine nature in One Person. The same glorified Body and Blood which He presents to the Father in Heaven are the same glorified Body and Blood which he presents to the Father under the sacramental veils in the Holy Mysteries. Wherever the True Body and Blood of Christ are present, there His Sacrifice is to be found in all of its fullness and redemptive power: thus the Mass is THE Sacrifice. (It is this truth regarding the Real Presence which has always puzzled me when it comes to Lutheran teaching - if the Body and Blood are substantially present in the Eucharist, then Christ's Sacrifice is present, because Christ's Sacrifice is His Body and Blood. The Lutheran view, which denies any integral Sacrifice offered by Christ in the Eucharist, on these lines breaks down).

The one Sacrifice of the Cross is made present on the earthly Altar of the Eucharist exactly because Our Lord exhibits, pleads, presents, actualises Himself as Priest and Victim, crucified and risen, before the Father in Heaven. Ascended and glorified in his immortal divinised human nature, Our Lord offers for ever at the heavenly Altar the same Sacrifice he offered once on the Cross and continues to re-present in the Eucharist, Himself.

The 'missing' link between the efficaciously sacrificial character of the Eucharist and the Death and Passion of Christ two thousand years ago is the heavenly session and glorification of Our Lord. 'He ever liveth to make intercession for us.'

To quote the 19th century evangelical writer Thomas Carlyle:

'Christ's offering of Himself is the great central and all-determining act in heaven. For this reason, because the Church is His Body, she should manifest on earth the reflection of that heavenly act. But this reflection is no mere shadow, like the acts of worship of the Old Testament, neither is it a sort of dramatic representation, but it is a living action, wrought by Christ Himself through the Holy Ghost. The relation of this reflected act to its archetype in heaven is the same as the relation in which the Church herself stands to her Head, the Lord Jesus. As she is not the Lord Himself and yet is one with Him and filled with His life, ever so is her celebration of His offering one with it and filled with His energy. The offering in heaven is the personal act of Christ... the celebration of the memorial of the same on earth is the same act... fulfilled by the Church in whom the Holy Ghost dwells and Christ works' (Concerning the Right Order of Worship, 2-3).

And another quote:

'For that which by His minister He doeth on earth, He is engaged in fulfilling in heaven: and His Body and Blood, which after the manner of material substances are in the presence of God, where He Himself pleads His sacrifice on the Cross and offers His intercession, are also here... where we, in His Name, plead the same sacrifice, and seek acceptance only through His intercession.'

Whereas in the other Sacraments, the grace of Christ and the Holy Ghost is communicated and conferred to the recipients, in the Eucharist, Christ Himself is contained and is offered to us and for us. In essence, the Mass is Christ. Thanks to be God!