Transcript

So, let's start in with a prayer.

Name of the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.

Amen.

Lord, we ask you to send your Holy Spirit into our hearts so that we may come to a deeper love and appreciation for the gift of the sacrifice of the Mass, through Christ our Lord.

Amen....

Son, and the Holy Spirit.

So, in this episode eight of our Eucharist course, we're gonna look at some objections to the sacrificial dimension of the Mass, um, objections very strongly raised by the Protestant Reformation.

So, we saw in the last episode that for the first 15 centuries of the church, the sacrificial dimension of the Mass was pretty much taken for granted by all, and we saw that in the Fathers.

Everyone cites the prophecy of Malachi 1:11, um, seeing the Eucharist as the realization of that prophecy of a clean oblation, that is a sacrifice offered from the rising of the sun to its setting, right?

And that's made its way into the, um, second Eucharistic prayer.

Um, but in the 16th century, in the Reformation, Luther rejected the, the sacrificial dimension of the Mass and was followed by pretty much the entire Protestant world.

Nothing, can't say anything of all Protestants, but, um, for, um, the great majority.

So, Luther said...

So, let's look first at Martin Luther and his objections, and then give a response from the Catholic perspective.

So, Luther's attack on the sacrifice of the Mass, um, began in 1520 with his, um, seminal book, um, The Babylonian Captivity of the Church, right?

So, a very influential book in the year in which he broke from the church.

And in this book, he saw the Mass understood as a good work and sacrifice as the third captivity of the church, and an invention of the devil, although he admitted it was seen as a sacrifice for centuries and centuries by the tradition of the church.

Right?

And so he had to basically hold that the whole tradition of the church got this fundamentally wrong.

And the reason why he focused so much on this issue was because it was intimately tied to his doctrine of justification by faith alone and not by works, and he saw the Mass as an attempt by Catholics to, um, justify ourselves by works, um, the work of the offering of the sacrifice of the Mass, which he opposed to justification by faith.

Um, a good summary of Luther's position is given by Joseph Ratzinger, who says this, quote, "In the final analysis, for Luther, there are only two ways, opposing ways of relating to God, the way of law and the way of faith." Right?

So it's a dialectical kind of thought, um, law and faith or law and Gospel.

"The direction of faith is diametrically opposite to that of the law." This is still a quote by Ratzinger.

"It is receiving divine favor," the way of faith, "not offering gifts.

Consequently, Christian worship, by its very nature, can be receiving only, not giving.

It is acceptance of God's saving deed in Christ Jesus which suffices once and for all." Unquote.

Now, we saw in the last talk and, and many of the episodes that, um, the Eucharist, um, involves an alternation of ascending and descending movements.

And that makes sense because it's the act of Jesus Christ, the high priest, our perfect mediator, the mediator between God and man who mediates by offering sacrifice and receiving blessing.

And we saw that was the case also with Noah and with all the other sacrifices of the world, with the difference that Jesus offered the one perfect sacrifice that gives to God super abundant honor and glory, and thus has this ascending dimension which then is what merits to receive, um, the graces and above all the grace of Holy Communion.

We receive the very victim who was offered in sacrifice.

Now, for Luther, um, that twofold direction of the Mass, um, he thinks i- well, it's simply anathema for him.

It can only be one direction, receiving.

So this is not a small, um, problem, right?

This is, um, challenging.

We could say the very essence of the Mass as this ascending as well as descending, um, um, movement.

Right.

So basically from Luther, one can only receive from God and can't give.

It's only Jesus who gives, right, and we can't.

And this is maybe the key flaw of Luther's, um, conception of salvation.

Right?

Christ is our savior precisely by configuring us to him, and therefore configuring us and making us participants in his perfect offering.

And of course he does that by giving us gifts so that we can offer ourselves back.

Right?

And this, um, stems from Luther's understanding of s- not just the Eucharist but all the sacraments.

He sees all of the sacraments as simply a receiving.

Now it's true that the other six sacraments are principally a receiving.

It's only the Eucharist that is also a sacrifice as well as a sacrament.

And so therefore, Luther argues from a definition of sacrifice, I'm sorry, a definition of sacrament which is only, um-...

a visual promise of the forgiveness of our sins through faith in Christ's work of redemption on Calvary.

And thus, all the sacraments are only, um, essentially faith in the promise, a visual or sensible promise of forgiveness.

And so, he argues...

So I'm taking many of the quotes from Luther from a work from 1522, right after the beginning of the Reformation, called Misuse of the Mass.

And he develops further in this work what he, um, kind of set out in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church.

So he writes, quote, "Sacrifice and promise are further apart than sunrise and sunset.

A sacrifice is a work in which we present and give to God something of our own.

The promise, however, is God's word, which gives to man the grace and mercy of God.

So it is not merely false, but also incomprehensible to human reason to make out of God's promise a human sacrifice, and out of the word of divine majesty a work of a lowly creature.

How then...

How can we then, out of this pledge and seal of God, given to us as a gift, make a sacrifice and work of our own?" Unquote.

All right, so that's Luther's challenge to the Catholic tradition.

So how should we respond?

So I'm gonna respond in three ways, three points.

First of all, um, he sees, um, the sacrifice of the Mass as essentially a human sacrifice.

But that's not what it is, right?

Because we've been, as we said in the last episode and all through, the Mass is so glorious because it's not principally our sacrifice, but principally the sacrifice of Calvary made sacramentally present on the altar.

Right?

It's Jesus' sacrifice.

It's not a human work, it's a divine human work.

And yes, we're to contribute our own, um, self-oblation.

That means the offering of our lives, our Christian lives.

And we'll talk about that more in the next talk.

Um, so yes, we contribute, but the principal work is that of Jesus Christ.

Right?

And the glory of the Mass is we get to put our little offerings together with his infinite offering.

So it's not principally a human work, but a divine human work.

All right?

So that's the first point and the most important.

Secondly, the principle of participation.

Catholic theology, um, uses throughout the principle of participation.

What Christ did, he did for us so as to incorporate us into himself.

It's the doctrine of the mystical body.

Right?

If we're members of the body of Christ and he's our head, um, the life of the body and the head can't be disparate, but have to be one.

So if the head is offering, the body has to offer too.

Right?

And this is a key principle that we could say, um, we can find throughout the Catholic faith.

It ties together the Catholic faith.

The mystical body of Christ making up the whole Christ.

That's a phrase of Saint Augustine.

He loved it.

Speak of the whole Christ, Totus Christus, head and members joined together into one, um, one church.

Right?

So through her mysterious union with her head, the bride, the church, us, right?

We've been given the gift of joining sacramentally in co-offering the sacrifice of our Lord.

Right?

That's so glorious.

Just as we will share in his resurrection and as now we share in his divine life through grace.

Right?

It permeates the, all of Catholic theology, um, this doctrine of the mystical body.

All right.

Third.

Third response.

Christ is the perfect mediator between God and man, and his mediation works not just in a descending way, giving us gifts, but in an ascending way.

And Luther would certainly acknowledge that, right, and hold that, that on Calvary, um, Christ, um, glorified his father and expiate atone for sin.

We'll, we'll come back to the question of atonement a little bit further on.

Um, but, um, so if that's...

If Christ is mediator in two directions, offering sacrifice and receiving blessing, right, then it makes sense that he would want that twofold mediation to continue through the life of the church, right?

And therefore the Eucharist is that sacramental prolongation of the sacrifice of Calvary, um, making present in the life of the church that perfect ascending mediation so as to pull down, um, from the Father, right, the graces unto the world.

And that'll be the subject of our tenth talk, the graces poured down on the world from the Mass.

All right?

So the Eucharist has both an ascending sacrificial dimension and a descending sanctifying dimension.

Okay.

Another objection that Martin Luther made was rather obvious, and I think very influential today, um, among both Protestants and tragically Catholics.

Um, Jesus says, "Eat and drink." Right?

And so the conclusion that Luther draws from this is that's all we're to do with this sacrament, eat and drink.

Therefore, this is a quote again from The Misuse of the Mass.

"Therefore, he breaks it, he gives it, he tells us to take it so that we eat and drink it, and in so doing, remember him and proclaim his death.

But what we eat and drink, we do not sacrifice.

We keep it for ourselves and consume it.

To sacrifice to God and to be consumed by us are incompatible ideas."...

the Levites took the offerings of the people of Israel, but they didn't eat any of that which was to be sacrificed to God." Unquote.

All right, so that's Luther, Luther's objection.

If it's a meal, it's not a sacrifice.

And again, Catholic theologians in the 20th century, um, and up, up to now, um, make a similar argument.

Right, so what should we say?

Typical Catholic response, not an either/or but a both/and.

Right?

Yes, indeed Jesus says, "Take and eat," but he also says, "Take and eat this body given for you and the blood poured out." In other words, we saw in the fourth episode that the, um, the institution narrative shows that the, um, the last supper and therefore the mass, um, is a sacrifice.

He uses deeply sacrificial language.

All right?

So, the mass is both sacrifice and banquet, right?

So, this is the key principle, um, and that, um, it's first sacrificed before it's banquet.

And that was true of the sacrifices of Israel as well.

Take the Passover.

The Passover was first sacrificed in the afternoon of the 14th of Nisan in the temple, right?

Then we had that spectacle of, I don't know, 20, 30, 40,000 lambs being sacrificed with their blood poured out on the altar in that one afternoon.

Um, and then the lamb that was sacrificed was taken, roasted, and consumed by the faithful in the, that evening after sunset.

And so, the Paschal Lamb was both sacrificed and consumed.

Right?

And that's the key type of the Eucharist.

So too Jesus Christ, our true lamb of God, is first immolated in the mass mystically, and that happens in the twofold, the double consecration, right, making his body and his blood present on the altar separated, right, as he was, as it was physically on Calvary, here sacramentally on the altar.

And immediately, the church offers that sacrifice, right?

And that's what the priest says right after the, the institution narrative in the anamnesis, um, remembering, um, the, the passion, the Paschal Mystery, "We offer you," right, "this immaculate sacrifice." So, it's first a sacrifice and then in Holy Communion, it's banquet, right?

So, it's both.

And we receive the very victim who was first offered just as in Israel, they received, they ate the lamb that was first offered in that afternoon, right?

And so, the mass is a sacrificial banquet, both sacrifice and banquet.

First sacrifice before banquet, but even in the banquet aspect, we're receiving the sacrificed victim so as to be conformed to his sacrifice, that is to be conformed to sacrificial love, um, for God and neighbor, right?

Total gift of self.

Right?

So, the mass is essentially a sacrificial banquet.

Not any sort of banquet, right, but a banquet in which we consume the victim offered as in the sacrifices of Israel.

Not all of them.

There, in Israel, there was the burnt offering which was, um, entirely, um, given to God.

But most of the sacrifice of Israel, um, were in fact received by, um, at least the priests and Levites and, and many other sacrifices also by the faithful who offered them.

Um, and we see that, um, in the Passover, but also in, um, the offerings of Thanksgiving and peace offerings, which are a key type of the Eucharist.

Right?

The peace offerings were consumed by the faithful, um, after they offered them to God.

Right?

So it, what Luther said, um, sacrifice, "If it's sacrificed, it's not consumed." That's false.

Even, uh, false in terms of the Old Testament and false in terms of the New.

Right?

The Eucharist.

All right?

Both/and rather than either/or.

And we saw this in the fourth episode when we looked at the, um, the language of the institution narrative.

So, I'm gonna quote here John Paul II in Ecclesiae Dei Eucharistia 12.

He says, quote, "Jesus didn't simply state that what he was giving them to eat and drink was his body and blood." Right?

That's true.

But he also expressed its sacrificial meaning and made sacramentally present his sacrifice, right, which would soon be offered on the cross for the salvation of all.

That is, the very next day.

Right?

So, Jesus says that, yes, we are to take and eat that body first given for us.

We are to drink that blood first poured out for many.

Right?

So there's a double giving of Jesus' body.

And I think many of the Catholic people likewise miss this.

Right?

Jesus is given first to the Father and then to the faithful.

Right?

Which is also a kind of image of the whole Christian life, love for God and neighbor, and there's a primacy on our ordering to God, right, to the Father.

Yeah, so the offering of sacrifice, um, is essentially...

So, I think part of the objection to the sacrificial dimension of the mass, um, comes from the fact that we're simply unfamiliar with the sacrifices of, um, of Israel and the pagan religions.

Right?

And that's because of the very success of the gospel in converting the world.

Right?

So other sacrifices have, um, more or less fallen out of, of human culture....

for the most part.

And therefore, we're unfam- familiar with them and we miss the fact of this link between sacrifice and feast.

But if we read the Old Testament attentively, we see it everywhere.

All right?

So the offering of sacrifice, like feasting, are communal events, and typically in, um, ancient culture in general and particularly in Israel, they went together.

Right?

The great communal feasting, the Passover, was first a sacrifice, and the same for all the other feasts of Israel.

Right?

And likewise for, um, the, um, the classical world.

And I think part of the, um, people like today, Catholics anyway, um, like to emphasize the banquet part because we s- understand it as communal, whereas we don't understand sacrifice as communal, but we ought to.

Right?

And so going back to the...

in the preceding episode, in the last episode, we saw that sacrifice is...

by its very nature has a communal dimension.

And unlike...

So prayer can be personal as well as communal, but sacrifice by its nature is communal.

It's offered sensibly to express our social nature, and therefore, it's an offering of a society.

Right?

And this is why there's a Sunday Mass obligation, so that we come together as, as a church, as a parish to offer the great sacrifice together.

And again, I think tragically, many of the Catholic people don't fully grasp that.

And even though in our parish, maybe there aren't that many people, nevertheless we're offering the sacrifice with the whole church, and that's expressed in all the Eucharistic prayers.

Right?

It's being...

We offer it in union with the church for all the needs and intentions of the church.

Okay.

Another objection that's made, um, by Martin Luther and others is the idea that understanding the Mass as an expiatory sacrifice, that is a sacrifice offered, um, for the forgiveness of sins, um, that implies an angry God in need of appeasement.

So Luther in his work, The Misuse of the Mass, says, "He who sacrifices wishes to reconcile God, but he who wishes to reconcile God considers him to be angry and unmerciful, and whoever does this does not expect grace or mercy from him, but fears his judgment and sentence.

Nothing could be more directly opposed to the profital, profitable use of this sacrament than the teaching of the papists who believe that God is angry and needs to be appeased by this sacrament.

But if God were not so gracious and merciful, he would never have poured out so rich a treasure and given us such a precious gift." Unquote.

All right.

How should we respond to that?

Um, um, well, Luther really gives the, the way to respond at the end of that quote.

Um, "It is precisely God's graciousness and mercy that is shown in giving us not merely something to receive, but also something to give back.

For it is more blessed," Jesus says, "to give than to receive." Right?

Acts 20:35.

Of ourselves, we don't have anything worthy to give him.

Right?

And that's precisely why Jesus gave us the Mass, so that we could offer the Father, his father, an infinite gift and join our own to it.

Right?

And so it's...

We should understand the sacrificial dimension of Ma- of the Mass not as, um, the wrath of God, but precisely the goodness of God giving us something that we can give back.

Right?

And this is, in fact, the model of how we should do mercy in, um, in human life.

Right?

We want to...

When we aid someone, we want to restore their dignity by enabling them to give back, right?

Something unique of their own.

Right?

And that's what Jesus does with us.

Right?

So the fact that the Mass is in fact a propitiatory sacrifice doesn't mean that God is angry, or mer- or most- or merciful or that he hasn't been appeased by Calvary.

Of course, he has.

We said that Calvary, um, m- outweighs in goodness the sins of the world put together.

But the very grace and goodness of God is to give to his church the chance to offer it day by day and to join in the offering.

Right?

So that we, not just 2,000 years ago on Calvary, but for me, I was at Mass before recording this, um, I got to join in the offering of the infinite sacrifice that is more pleasing than all human sin from the beginning of history to the end is displeasing.

Right?

This is God's graciousness, um, reconciliation he gives to us as a grace, not a burden.

Okay.

Another objection.

This is one made by Calvin, um, and that is that the sacrifice of the Mass seems to imply that Christ is killed again in every Mass.

And so Jes- uh, Calvin makes this, um, this charge in his Institutes in Book 4, Chapter 18.

He says, quote, "It is necessary that the victim which is offered be slain and immolated.

If Christ is sacrificed at each Mass, he must be cruelly slain every moment in a thousand places.

This is not my argument but the apostles'." That's Hebrews 9.

Um, quote, "Nor yet that he should offer himself often, for then he must have often suffered since the foundation of the world.

So Jesus gave himself in death, over to death only once, once and for all." Right?

And that is true indeed, and we do not deny that.

Um, "That one giving over to death is mysteriously made present,"...

in the Mass.

But we don't say that in the Mass, we slay Jesus again.

That's why the Council of Trent, um, defined the...

Said that the mode of offering in the Mass and on Calvary is different.

On Calvary, the mode of offering was bloody.

In the Mass, the mode of offering is mysterious, sacramental, and unbloody.

But nevertheless, in the Mass, we have the same victim who is offered, and we have the same priest, Jesus, our eternal high priest, who offers himself through the hands and lips of his ministerial priests.

And, yes, it is true, he doesn't die again, as if we could multiply his death any more than we multiply his sacrifice.

Right?

The Mass doesn't make a new sacrifice.

It's the same sacrifice, um, made mysteriously present on our altars.

And this ob- objection, by the way, I've heard it made in RCA, right?

So I teach RCA, St. Louis at the cathedral, and, um, well-educated Protestants will sometimes make this, uh, objection.

Right?

So the key point is that the Mass...

So the Catholic response is that the Mass is not a different sacrifice, another death, right, but one and the same sacrifice.

Right?

And we saw that Saint John Chrysostom made this argument, um, back in the, um, around the year 400.

Right?

So it's the same sacrifice, but there is a difference.

It's an unbloody mode, and the second difference, we get to join in the offering and offer our lives with Jesus.

Another objection.

It seems that repeating the Mass every day detracts from the dignity of Calvary.

Right?

Lutheran kind of objection.

Um, and we should respond by saying, well, when we repeat something, right?

So if I tell my wife repeatedly that I love her, um, the repetition doesn't detract.

Nobody would think that that repetition detracts from what we did on our wedding day, right?

The exchange of vows.

On the contrary, it makes it human, because human life exists in time, and what, um, what happened one time we have to make present again and again in human life for it to be at the center of our lives that take place in time.

Right?

So we give honor to the sacrifice of Calvary by making it the center of every week, and if possible, even every day.

Now, another aspect of this, um, detracting from Calvary is the idea of, um, very often...

Sorry, don't have enough time to go into this properly, but, um, in understanding atonement, um, Martin Luther and the, the Protestant tradition above all see it in terms of substitutionary punishment.

Jesus is punished in our place so that we go free.

Right?

He takes the hit so that we, the guilty party, are liberated.

And if that's the way to understand Calvary, yes, it would be hard to understand how that could be made present again and again, Jesus taking the hit, as it were.

And I think that's behind Calvin's objection, right?

That we're killing Jesus again in every Mass.

But that's not the right way to take and to understand the atonement.

Um, it's not substitutionary punishment, but Jesus making satisfaction for the sins of the world by offering something more pleasing than all sin is displeasing.

And he does this, he makes satis- vicarious satisfaction so that we can join in doing our part in making satisfaction.

In other words, it's not the logic of substitution, but the logic of solidarity.

Right?

Understanding the atonement in that way, we can see why we...

If his purpose is to bring us into solidarity with his, um, perfect satisfaction, his, um, ex- expiatory sacrifice, the best way to do that is to enable us to join in the offering as, in fact, he does in the Mass.

Right?

So the Eucharist makes the s- the central event of human history, the sacrifice of Calvary, to be the center of our history, the history of our concrete week and, and life.

Right?

It's brought into the center of our lives and consciousness.

And this is the reason why there's a Sunday Mass obligation, right?

So that we make it, um, the center of our lives.

There's only a- an obligation to receive communion once a year, right?

But the church requires us to offer the sacrifice with Jesus, um, every Sunday and holy day of obligation.

So that this constant sacrificial...

Sorry, sacramental representation, um, serves not to detract from Calvary, but to impress upon the faithful the centrality of Calvary for the life of the world, the cause of our hope.

Right?

John Paul II expressed this by saying a, a famous, uh, quote, "Holy Mass is the absolute center of my life and of every day of my life." Right?

And that should be our aspiration, to be able to say that with him.

One final, uh, objection and we'll conclude.

Um, some theologians might grant, all right, there is a sacrificial dimension, but, um, it's a mistake to highlight it too much, and they understand the sacrifice and the banquet aspects as inversely related.

The more we highlight the one, the less we're going to emphasize the other, or it will detract from the other.

And so some theologians are concerned that when we highlight the sacrificial dimension too much, we diminish the aspect of banquet.

The response is simple.

The two go together.

The more we highlight the sacrifice, the more we understand the gift of receiving the victim of Calvary in holy communion.

The two go together and will be glorified in our lives together.

Um, just as we can understand the Mass as this alternation of ascending, descending movements, and that should be the pattern of our lives.

And we can speak of that as the Eucharistic life, a circle of offering and receiving and re-offering ourselves to God and neighbor.

Right?

So let's leave it here.

We give you thanks, O Mighty God, for the gift of being able to participate in the offering of the sacrifice of the Mass through Christ, our Lord, the Father, Son, and the Holy Spirit.