This holy and living sacrifice: Joining our lives to Christ

By Msgr. James P. Moroney
From A Pro-Life Morning of Reflection and Enrichment, Jan. 14,
hosted by the diocesan Respect Life Office
 
I’ve delayed taking down the manger at Saint Cecilia’s for another week, or maybe even two. And the reason is that it’s just so beautiful. Not just the twinkling of lights on the forest of trees, which remind us of the coming of the light in the darkness, but the plaster baby who stares up at us from a manger of fire-proofed hay, reminding me that God became flesh for love of us.
The incarnation of the Son of God is the inaugural feast of our religion, and for we who so love life, the life of that little baby in the arms of his Virgin Mother is the raison d’être of our lives.
And why he came is just as great a gift as that he came. He came, that child tells us, that we may have life, “and have it abundantly.”
And so, I thought, that we, who spend so much of our time strategizing to protect life, might stop for a while this morning and reflect on what that life means and what it is for.
For this life we have received is not for our self-fulfillment, enjoyment or pleasure alone. Way down deep, in the words of Pope St. John Paul II, it “far exceeds the dimensions of [this] earthly existence, because it consists in sharing the very life of God.”
What is the life of God? As every second grader can tell you, the Blessed Trinity is three persons in one God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. St. Thomas Aquinas goes further when he tells us these three persons are not static, but are each loving. That is what God does and is: love.
The Father loves the Son with a paternal, creative love, while the Son loves the Father with an obedient filial love and this love between the Father and the Son (in the words of my grandmother “so thick you could cut it with a knife”) is the Holy Spirit.
And we, who are made in the image and likeness of God, the God who is love, are called to enter into that inner life. In other words, our full-time job, just like God’s is to love, with a creative, obedient sacrificial and, above all, merciful love. Not just to be nice, but to love. 
Loving enough to believe Jesus when he says we must forgive our brother when he sins against us seven times 77 times. Loving enough that when we stand at the altar and remember we have a grievance, to leave our gifts at the altar and go forgive him. Loving enough that we stop judging and pray for our enemies. It’s like Mother Teresa used to say, “if we really want to love, we must first learn to forgive before anything else.”
Now, those are very beautiful words. But C.S. Lewis was right: “Forgiveness is a beautiful idea, until you have someone to forgive.”
The Lord Jesus understood that as he hung from the cross and looked down at those who had nailed him up there. And then he prayed: “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do.”
And then he turns to us and says, “Love one another, as I have loved you.” Unto death. On a cross.
So, how do we enter into this life of love?  The answer is as clear as the altar and the cross which stand at the center of this and every church. We do it through liturgy and life.
For in the liturgy we offer the sacrifice of our lives and join it with the holy and living sacrifice of Christ upon the cross. That’s why in baptism you were joined to the priesthood of Christ, empowered to offer yourselves “as a living sacrifice that is holy and acceptable to God.” Neither in Judaism nor in the ancient world, was this kind of self-offering as a “living sacrifice” ever before heard of. Like Christ, however, each Christian baptized into his death and resurrection is called to make of his life a living sacrifice of praise.
The priesthood of the faithful, then, is made manifest in the work of offering sacrifice—not the bloody sacrifice of bulls or sheep, but the sacrifice of our lives. To quote the Conciliar decree Presbyterorum ordinis, “priests [then] must instruct their people to offer to God the Father of the Divine Victim in the sacrifice of the Mass, and to join to it the offering of their own lives.”

Presentation of the gifts

When Pope Benedict XVI was preparing his post-synodal Apostolic Exhortation on the Eucharist, many were surprised when he chose to comment on what seems to us to be a fairly ordinary part of the Mass, the presentation of the gifts. Yet, he pointed out there is great significance in this action for who we are at Mass and what we are called to be.
“This humble and simple gesture is actually very significant,” he wrote in Sacramentum Caritatis, for “in the bread and wine that we bring to the altar, all creation is taken up by Christ the Redeemer to be transformed and presented to the Father. In this way we also bring to the altar all the pain and suffering of the world, in the certainty that everything has value in God’s eyes.”
Indeed, in the presentation of the gifts it becomes evident a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God’s own people, are joining the sacrifices of their lives with the one and perfect sacrifice of Christ upon the cross. When gifts of bread and wine are placed into the hands of the priest, it is not just bread that is offered, but with those pieces of bread are mixed all the sacrifices of our lives. And with the wine in that cruet are mixed the joys and sorrows, the longings and holy desires of each member of the gathered assembly. 
We place those gifts into the hands of the priest, offering them to Christ. Then the priest, acting in the person of Christ, places those gifts upon the altar in the same way that Christ placed his body upon the altar of the cross in a perfect sacrifice of praise. These are the gifts that will be transformed by the great Eucharistic Prayer into the very body and blood of Christ, and then returned to us as our nourishment that we might have the strength to continue to join ourselves with Christ’s sacrifice every day of our lives.
The French poet Paul Claudel once wrote of this moment: “Your prayers, and your faith, and your blood, with His in the chalice. These, like the water and wine, form the matter of his sacrifice.”
And this participation, this offering of the sacrifice of our lives, is not something we do alone. Rather we do it in communion with the whole Church, as people bring their sacrifices to altars from Boston to Beaumont, all joined by the same altar, the same Christ and the same perfect sacrifice of praise.
Back in the 1950s, at the Assisi Liturgical Conference, Cardinal Emmanuel Célestin Suhard put it best:

“Therefore, when you approach the altar, never come alone. Together with yourselves, you have the power and the mission to save your home, your street, your city, and the whole of civilization. … The worker will offer up the monotony of assembly-line work or the joy of skilled craftsmanship. The mother of a family will offer up her household cares, her fears for a sick child. The man of science will offer up the world of ideas, the universe whose depth and breadth have been tapped. It is the task of the scholar, the philosopher, the sociologist, the artist, at this turning point in the world’s history, to gather the world together in order to raise it up to the Father.”

That is what the priest means when he says: “Pray brethren, that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God, the Almighty Father.” My sacrifice … the sacrifice of Christ which I was ordained to offer with and for you, and your sacrifices (in the plural!). All offered on that altar and joined to the perfect sacrifice of Christ. 
  
Participation at Mass
 
Our participation in the liturgy is not, therefore, just what we see on the outside: standing, kneeling, responding and singing. Our participation in the liturgy is from the inside out.
Thus, our demands that we be prepared “with the dispositions of a suitable heart and mind. What [we] think and feel must be at one with what they say; they must do their part in the working of grace that comes from above if they are not to have received it in vain.”
This is one boat, I fear, that the Church has too often missed. For while we have spent much time arranging furniture and books and telling people where to stand and what to do, we have not spent enough time or energy moving souls and hearts and people to be more like Christ, so that they might be joined with him in the great sacrifice of praise that is the liturgy.
A great example of this relationship between the internal and external at the liturgy is found in what the Roman Missal tells us about the posture of the faithful at Mass.
“A common posture, to be observed by all participants, is a sign of the unity of the members of the Christian community gathered for the sacred liturgy: it both expresses and fosters the intention and spiritual attitude of the participants.”
External liturgical action, then, grows from an internal intention. Common liturgical action strengthens that internal or spiritual attitude and is motivated by our common conviction that we are not gathered as strangers or individuals, but as a priestly people, called and made one with Christ on his great sacrifice of praise. Such common external action in turn strengthens our internal, foundational unity in Christ, who is the source of all unity and praise.
Another great example of participation in the liturgy starting from the heart is found in an extended theological description of who the priest is at Mass. Perhaps more strongly than any other postconciliar description of the priest, the new Roman Missal speaks of the primacy of the internal and its determinative role on external participation in the liturgical action:
“When he celebrates the Eucharist, therefore, he must serve God and the people with dignity and humility, and by his bearing and by the way he says the divine words he must convey to the faithful the living presence of Christ.”
Here we find an exquisite description of what it means to minister in persona Christi. Not just by what he says, not just by where he moves and what he does should the priest seek to show forth Christ to the gathered liturgical assembly. No. The new missal proclaims that by the way he speaks and by the way he moves the priest must convey, in dignity and humility, a living sense of the presence of Christ in the liturgy.
Such participation is informed, internal, and profound. It demands that the person who distributes the holy Eucharist does so with a full appreciation of not only how to present the body of Christ for the nourishment of his holy people, but with a deep consciousness of who this priestly people is and with a clear focus on the overwhelming mystery of how Christ, present in the consecrated host, is held before the eyes of each communicant.
It means that lectors who proclaim at the conclusion of each reading that what we have heard is “The word of the Lord,” truly believe that God has used their tongues to speak his words to a people whom he has loved unto death.
It means that each person is profoundly focused not on the external bow, response, or gesture the liturgy demands of them, but on the ways in which that liturgical action joins them to the Church and to their neighbor and, indeed, to Christ in his paschal sacrifice.

WE ARE TRANSFORMED
 
Thus, the first and most essential level of our participation in the liturgy and in the Church is our participation in Christ’s paschal death and rising on so intimate a level, that we become the mysteries we celebrate; we are transformed into the image of him whose body and blood we eat and drink.
A full participation in such a mystery means a full donation of self. 
A conscious participation in such a mystery means a conscious dying to my own will and a rebirth to God’s will for me. 
An active participation in such mysteries means that I actively let go of everything I have and embrace only the obedient and active love of Christ who now lives in me.
So, you disciples of life, this is what you proclaim and believe. 
For the whole meaning of life you work so hard to protect is to be transformed by this holy and living sacrifice, that when we walk out those doors after Mass we are just a little more like God, inserted more deeply into his Trinitarian life, more worthy of living in the image of love.
In the words of Pope Benedict XVI, “The Eucharist draws us into Jesus’ act of self-oblation.”