Sermon XXVIII.
The Mass The Highest Worship.
(Twenty-first Sunday After Pentecost.)
"What shall I offer to the Lord that is worthy?
Wherewith shall I kneel before the High God?"
—Mich. VI.6.
Such is the question which mankind have been asking from the creation of the world. God is so high, so great, so good, so beautiful. He made us. He created us by His Word, and we hang upon His Breath. How shall we worship Him? How shall we express the thoughts of Him that fill our souls? Alas! the words of the lips, the postures of the body, are all inadequate. What shall we do? Shall we, like Cain, gather the fairest fruits and flowers, and bring the basket before the Lord? Or, like Abel, shall we take the firstlings of our flocks, and slay them in His honor? Shall we dress an altar, and pile upon it the smoking victims? Shall we make our children pass through the fire in His Name? Or, like the Indian devotee, shall we throw ourselves under the wheels of the car that carries the image of the Divinity? Such have been the ways in which men have tried to express their devotion to God, but all have been either insufficient or vain. Man's thoughts about God have found no fitting expression. A fire has burned in his heart which no words can utter. Now here, as in so many other ways, Christianity comes to our aid, and places within our reach a perfect and all-sufficient mode of expressing our devotion, a perfect worship. Do you ask me to what I allude? I answer, to the Sacrifice of the Mass.
Let me remind you what the Sacrifice of the Mass is. We Catholics believe that in the Mass Jesus Christ offers His real Body and Blood, under the species of bread and wine, to His Eternal Father, in remembrance of His Death on the Cross. Our Lord's Death on the Cross was in itself complete, and all-sufficient for the purpose for which it was undergone, and need not, indeed could not, be repeated; but His Priestly Office was not exhausted by that offering. In the language of Scripture: "He ever liveth to make intercession for us." [Footnote 231] And, "He is a Priest forever." [Footnote 232]
[Footnote 231: Heb. vii. 25.]
[Footnote 232: Ps. cix. 4.]
In what, then, does our Lord's Priesthood since His Crucifixion consist? In heaven, it consists in presenting Himself to His Father directly and immediately, to plead the merits of His Death and Passion in our behalf; but on earth it consists in representing that Death and Passion in the mystical action which we call the Eucharistic Sacrifice or the Mass; thus fulfilling the words of the prophet in reference to our Lord: "Thou art a Priest forever, after the order of Melchisedec." [Footnote 233:]