Five Sermons on the Mass 3: Offering

A name for the Eucharist which isn’t very widely used these days is “the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass”. With our partly Protestant heritage, we can find this a difficult idea, for how can the Mass be a sacrifice? surely it is wrong to talk of any further sacrifice beyond the sacrifice of Christ on the cross? surely his one sacrifice can never be supplemented? Our new Common Worship is extremely coy about such matters: the Eucharist is a sacrifice, yes, but only a “sacrifice of praise”, in no way directly connected with the sacrifice of Christ. Indeed, we are no longer even allowed to offer anything to God at the altar, only to “set them before” him.

The difficulty here arises from a question we often avoid: what actually is going on on the cross? what sort of thing is the sacrifice of Christ? The answer we often think we ought to give goes something like this:

Adam and Eve (i.e. all humanity) have sinned;
therefore God’s justice requires a punishment;
therefore only the sacrifice of a perfect human being will satisfy that justice;
therefore God sent his Son to die on the cross and to put things right.

Now, if Christ’s sacrifice is like this, clearly it stands by itself. His death is all that was required, and it makes no sense - indeed it would be quite wrong - to suggest that there could be any addition to, or expansion of, the original sacrifice.

But, actually, I suggest to you that this popular idea of the nature of Christ’s sacrifice is horrendous, totally unacceptable, and wholly wrong. Well, it is, isn’t it? How can we possibly believe in, or respect, let alone love, this sort of angry and bloodthirsty God? or a God who is subject to this kind of bloodthirsty justice? Even Abraham was not allowed to sacrifice his son, and we would be horrified at any human law which required such a deed, or any human being who committed it. So how can we accept that God might require such horrors?

No, we must get this view of the sacrifice of Christ, this idea of the “atonement”, right out of our heads. The sacrifice, the self-offering of Christ, was not a one-off historical event, the death of a really good person in order to please God - apart from anything else, if that is why Jesus came, then everything else about him is ultimately irrelevant: never mind how he lived, or what he taught, or what example he gave, as long as he died! In fact, his sacrifice was not just a single event on the cross, but something which continued from his birth to his death. He offered his whole life to God, as one perfect offering of proper, true humanity. Jesus was God incarnate, not merely in who he was, but in what he did, in how he lived. He offered his whole life in obedience to God, in obedience to the law of love. His whole life was directed towards God.

And, because he refused to turn aside from God, from love, towards any other direction, therefore his life led to the cross. We know, in fact, that any good, holy, courageous life will lead to some sort of cross: selfish lives are relatively painless, it is the self-giving ones which are costly. If Jesus had been more willing to compromise, more sweetly reasonable, more a man of the world, there would have been no cross. But because there was no compromise in the offering of his life to God, it had to end, in one way or another, on the cross. His death on the cross was the logical conclusion of that life offered to God - the whole story is of one continuous offering, one sacrifice of which the cross is the culmination and the focal point.

In this sense his sacrifice was pleasing to God, not because God delights in blood, but because God delights in a life of uncompromising love and faithfulness and truth and self-giving. And in this sense his sacrifice reconciles us to God, not because God needs blood to take away our sin, but because Christ offers us the possibility of a new humanity reconciled and attuned to God’s will, and invites us to be part of that new humanity which we see in his life and on the cross.

Christianity is not a matter of some grim “submission to Christ”, but, as Paul continually says, of being “in Christ”, sharing his life and his offering to God - indeed, Paul actually speaks of “making up in my own body what is lacking in Christ’s afflictions”. The sacrifice, the offering, isn’t limited to Christ’s death on the cross; it takes in the whole sweep of his life and death and resurrection, as almost every eucharistic prayer declares. And it doesn’t stop there: for it catches up in itself the offering of all Christians who are in Christ, who make up the Body of Christ: the Saints, whom we celebrate because their lives and deaths were so in tune with him, but also ourselves and all other Christians, who are also, however feebly and falteringly, a part of his enterprise. The whole Christian thing is one great offering to God; an offering with Christ at its centre and the cross as its focus.

And that is what we mean by the sacrifice of the Mass. The Mass is not some new or separate sacrifice, offered by ourselves or our priests rather than by Christ; but nor, emphatically, is it just a sort of holy meal at which we vaguely remember and give thanks for Christ’s sacrifice. At the Mass we are caught up in the cosmic drama of Christ’s offering of his humanity to the Father, and, because we are in him, it becomes our offering too: we dare to offer Christ, and ourselves and our world, in union with him.

At the Offertory, as the gifts of bread and wine are brought to the altar, we offer not just these things, but ourselves and everything on our hearts - and the precise nature of that offering will vary from day to day and from week to week. We consider, and give thanks for, different aspects of the Christian story as the Christian year unfolds, different saints, different events; and as time goes by we shall be praying for different people, different things in the world and in our own lives. So it makes sense to “offer a Mass” for a particular intention; but, whatever the intention, it is always offered in union with the sacrifice of Christ. There is, ultimately, only one Eucharist, of which each individual Mass is a different local manifestation; and, at this one Eucharist, at every Eucharist, as we experience the wonder of offering to God the consecrated gifts of Christ’s Body and Blood, so we are united in the wonder of his eternal offering to the Father. Amen