We all have had the opportunity, especially during the season of Lent, to make sacrifices by giving up something for the higher purpose of showing our love for God. During Holy Week, as we are reminded once again of the Sacrifice on Calvary, this notion of sacrifice takes on a loftier meaning being employed in its ritual sense, to indicate an act of worship.

Sacrifice considered in this ritual sense is the principal external act of the virtue of religion, that special virtue whereby man gives to God, as far as he is able, the honor due to Him alone. It is more than just an offering. A gift, representing ourselves, is first offered in recognition of God’s supreme dominion and authority and man’s dependence. Then the victim, so offered, is immolated by being changed or destroyed in some manner to express the totality of the giving of ourselves and of the reparation man desires to make for his sin. Not infrequently there is also a sacrificial banquet in which the priest, or those present, consume the sacrifice, or part of it, to denote close union with God through the sacrifice. Thus sacrifice springs from the very nature of things, from the necessary and essential relationship existing between the Creator and his creature, the external and sensible representation of man’s interior immolation to his God.

From the very beginning man has been impelled to make this act of sacrifice, as we read of Cain and Abel in the Old Testament, for God commanded Adam to sacrifice to Him, and subsequent generations, while forgetting the true God, did not forget that sacrificial worship was necessary. However there are among the religions of history many that do lack it, e.g., pure Buddhism, Mohammedanism and Protestantism. A religion without sacrifice is unnatural and essentially defective in content.

Sacrifice being the essential rite of any religion, the true religion instituted by God made man, Jesus Christ, must possess just such a liturgical homage as its basic act of religion —and there is none such in God’s Church, nor ever has been, except the Mass. For the sacrifice of the Cross, permanent as to its effects, was nevertheless accomplished at a particular moment of time, which Christ called His "hour." It was in this "hour" that He ascended the hill of Calvary, as the priest ascends the steps of the altar, and there stretched Himself upon the altar of the Cross and became the Victim, to be slain as a sacrifice for the redemption of the world. The Mass not only reminds us of His "hour" on Calvary, is not merely a remembrance of it, but is essentially the same sacrifice as the sacrifice of Calvary, re-enacted, re-presented. It is a memorial of Christ’s Passion, its commemoration and representation, not an innovation.

After Calvary there is no need of actually turning Christ into a victim again since He remains the Victim for all eternity. As St. Ambrose says: "There is but one victim and not many victims, because Christ was offered but once: and this latter sacrifice is the pattern of the former. For just as what is offered everywhere is one body, and not many bodies, so also is it but one sacrifice." The Mass is not a new sacrifice —there is no new priest, no new victim, nor are the oblation and immolation essentially and substantially new; rather it is Christ’s very sacrifice. It is the very same act of offering by which the High Priest offered himself on the cross in a bloody immolation, which is now communicated to the Church and participated in by the Church in a sacramental manner. There is in both the same offering to God for the same purpose of adoration, thanksgiving, atonement and petition. By the will of the Incarnate Word expressed in instituting this sacrament and through the power of the words of consecration this sacrifice is sacramentally perpetuated in His Church. Christ is made present on the altar in the state of sacrificial victim, together with the eternal power of his Passion. The words themselves effect the separate presence of his body under the species of bread, his blood under the species of wine.

Nor does the principal one who offers change. Christ the eternal High Priest perpetually offers sacrifice as the head of the Church through the Church’s ministers, who are his instruments acting in his power. Christ himself, while instituting this sacrifice at the Last Supper, founded a new priesthood whose essence would be found precisely in its relationship to the Eucharist. The successors of the apostles by valid ordination receive a participation of Christ’s own priestly power in virtue of which they act for him in offering daily in many places this sacrifice to God.

By reason of His sacramental presence, His divine power and the power of his Passion work man’s redemption here and now by applying to individual souls the graces gained by the sacrifice of the Cross. As the Council of Trent declared: "In the divine sacrifice that is offered in the Mass, the same Christ who offered himself once in an bloody manner on the altar of the cross is present and is offered in an unbloody manner…. For it is one and the same victim: he who now makes the offering through the ministry of the priests and he who then offered himself on the cross; the only difference is in the manner of offering. The benefits of this oblation [i.e., the bloody one] are received in abundance through this unbloody oblation."

Yet despite the fact that when we attend Mass, we are standing at the foot of the Cross in the blessed company of the Mother of God, St. John, the holy women and amidst the choirs of angels and saints in order to offer this most sublime worship to God; despite the fact that there upon the altar the perfect Victim is offered in the most perfect way and despite the fact that the Mass is our opportunity to share fully in the sacrifice of Christ and obtain the fruits of redemption; despite all of this, sadly enough, many attend the Sacrifice of the Mass with a merely indifferent or passive presence. We forget that we will receive grace in the measure of our giving, in the degree of surrender of self to God. It is through our sincere and zealous participation in the Mass, climaxed in our union with the sacrificial victim at his sacred banquet, that we will truly realize the significance and effects that the Mass has upon our lives and thus be enabled to wax strong in the grace and wisdom of God.

Each year during Holy Week we recount the details of the passion and death of our Lord Jesus Christ. This year many people have had the opportunity to see these details realistically visualized on the big screen in the movie The Passion of the Christ by Mel Gibson. Many viewers have been moved to a greater appreciation and love for Christ and what he did in regard to our salvation, which is not surprising since we know that actual graces are given to those who sincerely reflect upon the sacrifice of Christ’s passion and death. But let us not forget that we have this same sacrifice sacramentally re-presented upon our altars in the Mass, and the Sacrifice of the Mass not only has the power to move us but also and most importantly has the power to sanctify us. Let us not waste this most precious of gifts.

May you all have a happy and holy Easter.