When two parties argue, they can be like ships passing in the night. Each is correct from his own perspective, and there isn’t a chance that they will find a way to reconcile their viewpoints. Sometimes their disagreement can take a long time to resolve. Sometimes they both simply have to grow in knowledge and wisdom before the question can be peacefully decided. Meanwhile, each side scrutinizes its own position, doesn’t see any defects, and can harden into resisting any new paradigm that might tend to resolve the differences.
That is the way it was with the question of the Holy Mass as a sacrifice. The Catholic position after the Reformation was in opposition to the Protestant position. When the Catholics and Protestants argued, they often eliminated any middle ground. But let’s take a look at a new position we’ll call, for want of a better name, a “biblical” position.
It is a reconciliatory position that softens the opposition between Catholics and Protestants by keeping what is good from both sides. It keeps the Catholic position about the Real Presence, the necessity of apostolic (ordained) ministry, and the sacrificial.aspect of the Mass. It keeps the Protestant position of the once-for-all sacrifice on Calvary, the symbolic meaning of the Lord’s Supper, and the Mass as an ordinance established by Jesus. Keeping both sides, it takes us deeper into the Bible. We need to examine the Old Testament types foreshadowing the Mass, of which there are several. Let’s take the communion sacrifice, otherwise known as the peace offering – the book of Leviticus, chapter 3.
Those who wished to offer the sacrifice of peace had to take the animal victim to the priest. The victim was killed before the Tent of Meeting, ie. The temple-tent. The priest splashed the blood of the victim on the altar. The priest took a share for his livelihood, and the offerer returned home with the rest of the victim. At home, a meal was prepared so that the family could share in the peace offering.
It was only one sacrifice offered in a bloody, painful way by the slaying. But it was shared in an “unbloody” or painless way in the special sacrificial meals that used the same victim: the family meal, the priest’s meal, and God’s “meal,” comprised by the smoke rising up to heaven. The shared victim made the peace between the parties who thus sat down at table together. Although separated by space and time, they were united in the same meal by the same victim.
Using the Old Testament type of the peace offering, what do we see about Jesus? In the first place, he made special pains to make a peace offering, calling it “a new covenant in my blood” (Luke 22:20), just as the old covenant of peace was concluded by the blood of the lamb. His greeting of “Peace” before and after showing his wounds to the disciples (John 20:19-22) takes on a new meaning when seen in the light of the peace offering.
Who could deny that the bread became his body and the wine his blood after they had seen the other miracles he had performed? – changing the water to wine at Cana, multiplying the fish and loaves, raising the dead, and now standing before them alive. At the Last Supper he made the bread and wine into himself by his word so that he, as victim, could be shared as the peace offering of the New Testament. The victim would be shared by his priests, his people, and by God.
Without the example of the peace offering from the Old Testament, we would wonder where Jesus ever got the idea of needing something to share. He took the elements of bread and wine from Melchizedek (Gen. 14:18). He could have simple offered his life on the cross for the salvation of the world. It would have been sufficient, unique, and once for all (the Protestant position), and there would be no reason for the Lord’s Supper at all.
But Christ didn’t leave it at that. He gathered his disciples on Holy Thursday in imitation of the Old Testament types and to fulfill them. He instituted his own peace offering – his sacrificial meal as in the Old Testament and in fulfillment of the Old Testament – so that we could have a share – a real, tangible share – in his sacrifice and be at peace with god. He himself said that nothing in the Law would pass away until it was all fulfilled (Matt. 5:17).
The Old Testament peace offering needed fulfillment in the New Testament. So the Mass is symbolic in that our participation symbolizes our real, personal entrance into the Lord’s peace of the New Testament, much as the exchange of wedding rings symbolizes our agreement to the bonds of marriage. The subject of the symbol is not the presence of the Lord but our entering into relationship with him.
But if we say that the Lord’s Supper is merely symbolic and not real, than we must say that it gives us a symbolic participation, not a real one, in the sacrifice of Christ on the cross. Suppose someone had come to the home of the family who had offered the peace offering, and said,”I don’t like mutton, so I’ll just symbolically participate in the meal at your table by eating this beef I brought from home [which wasn’t offered in sacrifice] while you eat your mutton.” Did such a person participate in the peace offering? Without real participation, he can’t have real salvation. Symbolic participation does not save us – real participation does.
Thus the Mass is a real sacrificial meal instituted by Christ that gives us a real share in the Real Presence of the sacrificial victim. To refuse the Mass is to refuse the cross – it is the same sacrifice and the same offering. To refuse to share in the sacrificial meal of the peace offering would have to be to reject the Peace itself. “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you will have no life in you” (John 6:53).
The Mass is a sacrifice that does not supplant Calvary precisely because it is the meal of the sacrifice on Calvary. It would have no meaning without the once-for-all sacrifice in the upper room and on Calvary, of which it is the completion, together with the eternal sacrifice of the Word at the right hand of the Father that completes the type of the smoky sacrifice (Heb. 9:12). If it were a new sacrifice without any relation to Calvary, it would indeed be non-Christian as some Protestants say, because God proposes to us no other sacrifice acceptable to him than that of his son. All sacrifices that have been accepted by God are accepted in view of Calvary.
Looking from the Protestant position, we see that the Mass doesn’t take anything away from Calvary, but is in fact a necessary completion of Calvary. While the sacrifice of the Son of God was absolutely full and abundantly sufficient, the fruits of the sacrifice still need to be distributed to believers, as in the Old Testament sacrifice, and very concretely by the Lord’s Supper, which is the share that the Lord himself gave us in his peace offering to god. It is not just a matter of fulfilling an ordinance or commandment but a completing what the lord himself intended. The good of the Lord’s Supper is not merely in obeying his command but in receiving the fruits of his sacrifice.
In the Old Testament, not just anyone could sprinkle the blood and burn the sacrifice of the peace offering. It had to be done by the hands of the Lord’s anointed priest. So in the New Testament, the victim is received from only the ministry of those appointed by the Lord. This is why Catholics say that if we are to respect Jesus and fulfill his plan for our salvation, we must allow his priests to offer us the sacrificial Body of the Lord as he intended. The Lord himself prepared his apostles especially for this ministry (Luke 22:19), and then he commanded them to offer and to share it with the Christian community so that its members would have a share in the sacrifice of Calvary. In this way the apostles became the priests of the New Covenant, because they took the place of the priests of the Old Testament in relation to the sacrificial meal. This is the Catholic position.
Of course, someone could have passed the sacrificial meat on to us after it was received back from the Tent of Meeting – like our modern-day communion ministers. The one who brought the Old Testament sacrifice to the priest also brought it home from the priest to give to others. Without the priest, it could not be the peace offering. It would not be acceptable to give the fat that was meant for God to anyone else who happened to be standing nearby, nor to allow just anyone to put the blood in the altar. It had to be the appointed and anointed priest if it were really to be the Lord’s peace offering.
This is one of the reasons that many priests decided to offer the Mass facing the people after the liturgical renewal. The peace offering of the New Testament comes to us, as it did in the Old Testament, from the hands of the Lord’s anointed, and only so. The priest facing the people helps them see that they share in the sacrificial meal for which the Lord appointed ministers on Holy Thursday and prepared the victim on Good Friday in fulfillment of the Old Testament types.
Many Vatican II changes in the Mass follow from new biblical and liturgical understandings. The Mass explains itself when properly celebrated,visibly and audibly available to the people. The priest himself must know how to properly celebrate the Mass so that his own and his people’s participation is in real relation to the sacrifice of the Lord. Much of the anguish evident in America today over the proper celebration of the Mass has its roots in the fact that priests and people have not dealt with the meaning of the Mass as a sharing in the Lord’s sacrifice. Rather, they tend to think of it as a ritual that they either like or don’t like according to its local form of celebration.
Perhaps it would be better to use the terminology “real” participation or “actual” participation, because “active” participation misses the point. At the same time, we can say that a priest who thinks that he has to invent a show for the people simply doesn’t understand his role in the liturgy. He must face God and pray to God in the eucharistic Prayer, no matter what direction he physically faces, and he faces the people to give them the Eucharist that comes from the Lord through him.
The problem for faith in the Mass is not whether we can believe that the Lord is really present under the appearances of bread and wine based on the authority of the Church, but a different problem: Are we willing to accept from the hands of the one the Lord has sent a share in his sacrifice of peace with god?This returns faith to its biblical roots: not our willingness to believe in non-obvious doctrines – mental faith – but our willingness to act based on our trust in these realities – practical faith.
The faith that saved the woman with the flow of blood was not merely her abstract belief in Jesus, but that she acted upon her belief and approached him for healing (Luke 8:43-48). Had she not approached him to touch his garments, she would not have been healed. Coming forward to Communion is not simply stepping forward to receive a gift, it is making a step in faith to be reconciled to god. Through their worthy sharing in Holy Communion, the New Testament people are reconciled to God, having received in faith the victim he has sent.
Protestant communion is indeed usually only symbolic (so they aren’t wrong in this), because they don’t have a Jesus-authorized priest to offer it. The real sacrificial meal that gives us a real share in the sacrifice of the cross can only come from the hands of those the Lord authorized to offer it – his specially prepared and ordained priests – just as in the Old Testament the victim of the sacrificial meal was received back from the priest. It was impossible to make a sacrifice through the hands of anyone who claimed authority and then use it for the sacrificial meal. You had to use the same victim that you brought to the priest, and it had to be god’s own priest. And it had to be the very victim offered to God as the offering of peace, and received back from the priest. Protestant communion is most often presided over by a layman who has no authorization from god to act as his priest in this manner, and thus is indeed only symbolic. This is also why many Protestant denominations so seldom celebrate it.
No Catholic would claim that he participated in the sacrament of the Eucharist in such merely symbolic meals. On the other hand, I’ve attended some Protestant communion suppers that were full of such genuine piety, sincerity, and love as to put Catholics to shame. And I’ve seen some Catholic Masses that were pure ritualism on the right, and pure entertainment on the left, both evasions of god. Unfortunately, the biblical and liturgical renewals haven’t yet penetrated deeply enough.
Do Catholics add anything to the sacrifice of Jesus? Only new bread and wine in every age, and along with the bread and wine we add ourselves to the sacrifice on Calvary so that the whole Christ is offered to the Father. The priest and the present community offer it anew each time, but it is the same sacrifice that was offered on Holy Thursday in the upper room in an unbloody manner and on the cross in a bloody manner.
In my opinion, it is better to teach new converts using the biblical approach, which leads to better understanding and participation, than to force people into a formulaic position that leaves out too much. All of the other Old Testament sacrifices should be considered too. They are all types of the Sacrifice on the cross, and each explains in its own way another.aspect of the cross and of the Mass. See the sacrifice for sin, for example (Lev. 4), and the Holocaust or the worship sacrifice (Lev. 1). Together these three Old Testament sacrifices offer a fuller explanation of the sacrifice of the Mass, the sacrifice of Jesus Christ on Calvary.