The Holy Mass and Personal Surrender
On Calvary, Our Lord, Priest and Victim, offered himself to his heavenly Father, shedding his Blood, which became separated from his Body. This is how he carried out his Father's will to the very end. It was the Father's will that the Redemption should be carried out in this way. Jesus accepts it lovingly and with perfect submission. This internal offering of himself is the essence of his Sacrifice. It is his loving submission, without limits, to his Father's will.
In every true sacrifice there are four essential elements: and all of them are present in the sacrifice of the Cross: priest, victim, internal offering and external manifestation of the sacrifice. The external manifestation must be an expression of one's interior attitude. Jesus dies on the Cross, externally manifesting (through his words and his deeds) his loving internal surrender. “Father, into thy hands I commend my Spirit.” Jesus is both Priest and Victim. “Since, then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we have not a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sinning.”
The Sacrifice of the Cross is a single sacrifice. Priest and Victim are one and the same divine person: the Son of God made man. Jesus was not offered up to the Father by Pilate or by Caiphas, or by the crowds surging at his feet. He surrendered himself. At every moment of his life on earth Jesus lived a perfect identification with his Father's will, but it is on Calvary that the Son's self surrender reaches its supreme expression.
We, who want to imitate Jesus, who want only that our life should be a reflection of his, must ask ourselves to-day in our prayer: do we know how to unite ourselves to Jesus' offering to the Father and accept God’s will at every moment? (We can ask Our Lady) : My Mother and Lady, teach me how to pronounce a yes which, like yours, will identify with the cry Jesus made before his Father: “Not, my will but God's be done.”
The Holy Mass, a renewal of the sacrifice of the Cross.
To help us to meditate today on the unity that exists between the Sacrifice of the Cross and the Holy Mass, let us fix our attention on the interior oblation that Christ makes of himself, with a total self-surrender and loving submission to his Father.
The Holy Mass and the Sacrifice of the Cross are one and the same sacrifice, although they are separated in time. There is made present once again, not the sorrowful and bloody circumstances of Calvary, but the total loving submission of Our Lord to his Father's will. This internal offering of himself is identical on Calvary and in the Mass: it is Christ's oblation. It is the same Priest, the same Victim, the same oblation and submission to the Will of God the Father.
The external manifestation of the Passion and Death of Jesus goes on in the Mass, through the sacramental separation, in an unbloody manner, of the Body and Blood of Christ through means of the transubstantiation of the bread and the wine. In the Mass, the priest is only the instrument of Christ, the Eternal and High priest. Christ offers himself in every Mass in the same way as he did on Calvary, although now he does so through a priest, who acts ‘in persona Christi’.
This is why every Mass even though celebrated privately by a priest, is not a private action, but the action of Christ and of the Church. In the sacrifice that she offers, the Church learns to offer herself as a universal sacrifice, and applies the unique and infinite redeeming virtue of the sacrifice of the Cross for the salvation of the whole world.
Christ himself, in each Mass, offers himself up, thus manifesting his loving surrender to his heavenly Father. This is expressed now in the Consecration of the bread and, separately, in the Consecration of the wine. This is the culmination,the essence, the very nucleus, of the Holy Mass.
Our prayer today is a good time to examine how we attend Mass and how we take part in it. Are you at Mass with the same dispositions that Our Lady had on Calvary? Do we realize that here it is present the same God and the consummation of the same sacrifice? Perfect Love, a total identification with God's will, will demand an offering of oneself, a desire to co-redeem.
The Holy Mass, centre of the life of the Church and of every Christian.
As it is essentially identical with the Sacrifice of the Cross, the Sacrifice of the Mass has an infinite value. In each Mass there is offered to the Father an infinite act of adoration, thanksgiving and reparation, quite independent of the specific dispositions of the people attending, or of the celebrant. This is because Christ is at once the principal Offerer and the Victim who offers Himself.
Thus there is no more perfect way of adoring God than by offering the Mass, in which his Son, Jesus Christ, is offered as the Victim, and at the same time acts as High Priest. There is no more perfect way of thanking God for everything that He is and for his continual mercy towards us: there is nothing on earth that is more pleasing to God than the Sacrifice of the altar.
Each time Holy Mass is celebrated, reparation is made for all the sins of the world, because of the infinite dignity of the Priest and of the Victim. The Holy Mass is really the heart and center of the Christian world. We have here the only perfect and adequate reparation, to which we must unite our acts of sorrow.
It is the only adequate sacrifice that we men can offer, and through it our daily occupations; our sorrows and our joys can take on in it an infinite value. It is in this way that man's life becomes inserted, by means of the Eucharist, into the mystery of the living God. The fruits of each Mass are infinite, but in us they are conditioned by our personal dispositions, and thus limited. Our union with Christ at the moment of the Consecration will be the more complete the greater our identification with God's will; the greater our dispositions of self-giving.
In unity with the Son we offer the Holy Mass to the Father, and at the same time, we offer ourselves through Him, with Him, and in Him. This act of union must be so profound and true that it permeates the whole of our day and has a decisive influence on our work, on our relations with others, on our joys and failures: in fact, on everything we do.
FROM "IN CONVERSATION WITH GOD", LENTEN BOOK BY FR. FRANCIS FERNANDEZ
