The Mass and Personal Self-Surrender

By Fr. Conor Donnelly

(Proofread)

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

My Lord and my God, I firmly believe that you are here, that you see me, that you hear me. I adore you with profound reverence. I ask your pardon for my sins and grace to make this time of prayer fruitful. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

We're told in St. John, “For God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life” (John 3:16). God so loved the world that he gave…

And St. Paul to the Galatians says, “He…loved me and gave himself up for me” (cf. Gal. 2:20). And on the Cross, Our Lord said, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46).

Our Lord's total self-surrender on our behalf, which reaches its culmination on Calvary, is an urgent call to us to correspond to the great love that He has for each one of us.

On the Cross, Our Lord consummated His total self-surrender to His Father's will, and He showed His love for all men, for each and every person. “He…loved me,” says St. Paul, “and gave himself up for me” (cf. Gal. 2:20).

Faced with this unfathomable mystery of love, we have to try and ask ourselves: What can I do for Him? How do I correspond to His love? “What can I give back to God for all that he's given to me?” says the Psalms (Ps. 116:12).

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. There's a priest, someone who offers; there's a victim, the person or the thing offered; there's an internal offering in the mind and in the heart, in the will; and there's the 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 your hands I commend my spirit!” (Luke 23:46).

He's saying, ‘I finished the task you committed to me. I have fulfilled your will.’ And He is, both then and now, Priest and Victim.

St. Paul to the Hebrews says, “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” (Heb. 4:14-15).

This internal offering of Jesus gives full meaning to all the external elements of His voluntary sacrifice—the insults, the stripping of His garments, the crucifixion.

There was a young boy once who was asked by his mother to say the Grace before Meals to thank God for what they were about to receive.

He began by thanking God for all the good things in his life, his mom, his dad, his brothers, his sisters, the relatives who were present; and then all the different things they were about to eat, the rice, and the chicken, and the vegetables, and this and that.

And there was a long silence. People were wondering what was coming next. And he turned to his mom and said, ‘But if I thank God for the broccoli, won't he know I'm lying?’

There was a kid who realized that there was a disconnection between what he might say externally and what was there interiorly. In our sacrifices, there has to be a cohesion between the two. Our external manifestation of sacrifice has to be an expression of our interior will.

On Calvary, Priest and Victim are one and the same divine person: the Son of God made man, divine Love Incarnate.

Jesus was not offered up to the Father by Pilate, or by Caiaphas, or by the crowd surging at His feet. It was He who surrendered Himself.

In all our little sacrifices, we have to try and have that same spirit of Our Lord. ‘Lord, I give you this thing, whole and entire, completely. I identify myself with your will. If this is your will, then it's my will also. I hold nothing back.’

At every moment of His life on earth, Our Lord lived a perfect identification with His Father's will. But it’s on Calvary that Christ's self-surrender reaches its supreme expression.

Each one of us who wants our life to be a reflection of His—we want to imitate Jesus—we need to ask ourselves in our prayer: Do we know how to unite ourselves to that offering of Christ to His Father and accept God's will at every moment?

That's an interesting idea to have in our mind and heart when we go to Mass, because that's what we're participating at: that total surrender of Jesus to His Father’s will.

I heard a priest say once, “When it comes to the Offertory of the Mass,” he said, “I jump onto the paten.” And he was a big man! So, we place all our sacrifices, our hurts, our desires, our challenges there on the paten, our whole self, whole heart and mind.

We can try to unite ourselves to Him in our joys and sorrows and in all the activities that make up each one of our days. If some challenging moment comes along, we can repeat our Morning Offering. Say, ‘Lord, I really meant it, and I offer to you again that Mass that I participated in this morning.’

It may be even more relevant for us to unite ourselves to Him at the more difficult times—times of failure, of pain, of illness, of loss of a loved one, of contradictions—but also in the easy times, when we feel our souls filled with joy.

In The Way of the Cross in the Fourth Station, St. Josemaría says, “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’” (Luke 22:42).

When we want to focus on the unity that exists between the Sacrifice of the Cross and the Holy Mass, we could think of that interior offering that Christ makes of Himself, with a total self-surrender and a loving submission to His Father.

The Catechism of the Catholic Church says that the Mass makes Calvary present to us (cf. Catechism, Points 1362-1368). Powerful statement.

Or if you like, when we're at Mass, we get transported back to the foot of the Cross. If you close your eyes during Mass, you're at the foot of the Cross.

The Mass and the Sacrifice of the Cross are one and the same sacrifice, although separated in time. Christ only died once, for always. But the Mass is the renewal of that sacrifice.

And so there is made present, on our altar, not the sorrowful and bloody circumstances of Calvary, but the total loving submission of Our Lord to His Father's will.

That internal offering of Himself is identical on Calvary and in the Mass: it is Christ's offering. It is the same Priest, the same Victim, the same oblation and submission to the will of the Father.

We can ask Our Lord that we might never get used to being present or participating in the Holy Sacrifice of the Altar, which, with the passage of time and of our Christian vocation, can come to have more and more meaning for us, more centrality.

As the Second Vatican Council says, “the summit and the source of our whole spiritual life” (Vatican II, Lumen gentium, Point 11, November 21, 1964).

The external manifestation of the Passion and Death of Jesus continues in the Mass through the sacramental separation, in an unbloody manner, of the Body and Blood of Christ, through means of the transubstantiation, the changing of the substance of the bread and wine into the substance of the Body and Blood of Christ. The separation of the Body on the paten from the Blood in the chalice is a manifestation of that Sacrifice.

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, in the person of Christ.

That is why Pope St. Paul VI in an encyclical called Mysterium fidei says, “…every Mass, even though it is 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” (Paul VI, Encyclical, Mysterium fidei, Point 32, September 3, 1965).

Christ Himself, in each Mass, offers Himself up, thus manifesting His loving surrender to His Heavenly Father. That is expressed 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.

Sometimes people ask: What is the most important part of the Mass? Some people have said the Offertory. Some people have said the Final Blessing. Some people have said the kiss of peace. But the Church has said very clearly, “The most important part of the Mass is the Consecration” (William G. Most, A Basic Catholic Catechism).

In our prayer today, we can examine a little bit how we attend Mass, how we prepare for it, how we take part in it, how we try to follow it closely, the words that the priest is saying, over time going deeper in the meaning of what the Mass is all about.

We can ask ourselves, as St. John Mary Vianney, the Curé of Ars, says, “Are you at Mass with the same dispositions that Our Lady had on Calvary? Do we realize that here it is the presence of the one and the same God and the consummation of the same Sacrifice?” (John Vianney, Sermon on Sin).

Perfect Love, a total identification with God's will, would demand an offering of oneself, a desire to co-redeem.

The Mass is like a divine invitation to give ourselves as Christ did, in the vocation where God has placed us and called us, in this family, in this marriage, in this job, in these assignments, in this apostolic task that may be our challenge in front of us.

Because it's essentially identical with the Sacrifice of the Cross, the Sacrifice of the Mass has an infinite value. Every day the Mass is a gold mine. In each Mass, there is offered to God the Father an infinite act of adoration, thanksgiving, and reparation. Those are the ends of the Mass, the purposes for which Mass is set.

This is quite independent of the specific dispositions of the people attending, or of the celebrant. So the Mass achieves that purpose, irrespective of the human weaknesses of the people that may be taking part.

We're there like little children. “Unless you…become like little children, you cannot enter the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 18:3). We have to try and foster our better dispositions. Hence, we try to prepare for the Mass. We try to be attentive during it. We try to thank God for it after it.

But even if we get totally distracted, the Mass achieves its purpose even without us. If our dispositions are greater, then we get greater benefits and graces. But the Mass achieves its purpose anyway.

Christ is the principal Offerer and the Victim who offers Himself. He doesn't need our participation. He wants it, He hopes for it, He wants us to bring our sacrifices and place them on the paten.

There's 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.

You begin to see from this how much importance the Church has given to the Mass down through the centuries. The way churches are built, the way altars are built, the heroic witness that some priests have given down through history in times of great oppression.

If you get a chance to read of the Catholic persecution in England or the history of the Catholic Church in England, it's a story of heroism. Very enlightening.

And in many other countries, stories are beginning to come out now about the heroism of priests in the communist countries or in China or in Eastern Europe. There would probably be a lot written in the future of the shining example of the faith of people in the Holy Sacrifice of the Altar.

There's no more perfect way of thanking God for everything that He is and for His continual mercy towards us. There's nothing on earth that can be more pleasing to God than the Sacrifice of the Altar.

We have to try and hold our Mass in a very special space and do everything we can in our local church or outstation to ensure that everything related to the Mass is kept on a very high level: the liturgical objects, the flowers, the candlesticks, the linens, because all these material things can reflect the greatness and the beauty of what is taking place.

Each time the Holy Mass is celebrated, reparation is made for all the sins of the world, because of the infinite dignity of Christ the Victim and Christ the Priest. We have here the only perfect and adequate reparation to which we have to try and 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.

Pope St. John Paul II, in a homily he gave in 1983, said, “The Holy Mass is really the heart and center of the Christian world” (John Paul II, Homily, May 21, 1983).

A lady asked me once, “Father, when I turn on my computer, pressing that button, flicking that switch, can that be redemptive?” And the answer is yes. That little action, united to the Sacrifice of the Mass, acquires a redemptive value, an infinite value.

In this Holy Sacrifice, said the Holy Father, “There is engraved whatever is most profound in the life of every human being: the life of the father, the mother, the child, the elderly person, the young man and the young woman, the teacher and the student, the man of culture and the uneducated man, the nun and the priest—of each without exception. It is in this way that man's life becomes inserted, by means of the Eucharist, into the mystery of the living God” (John Paul II, Homily, May 22, 1983).

The fruits of each mass are infinite, but in us they're conditioned by our personal dispositions, and thus limited.

The document on the Sacred Liturgy of the Second Vatican Council says, “Mother Church invites us to share conscientiously, actively, and piously in the most sublime action which takes place each day” (cf. Vatican II, Sacrosanctum concilium, Points 11 and 48, December 4, 1963).

We have to try and be attentive and recollected, particularly at the moment of the Consecration. At those moments, we can try to penetrate into the soul of Him who is at the same time Priest and Victim in His loving offering to God the Father, just as on Calvary.

That's why following the words of the Preface of the Eucharistic Prayer can be so helpful, to make our own the words that the priest is saying. That is participation in the Mass.

Participation is not just a physical external participation. First and foremost, it's a participation of our mind and heart.

In this way then, the Sacrifice of the Mass can become the central point of our daily life, as it is of the liturgy and of the life of the Church.

Our union with Christ at the moment of the Consecration will be the more complete the greater our identification with God's will is, and the greater our dispositions of self-giving.

Christ surrendered Himself completely. We are also called to surrender ourselves completely to the will of God in this moment, in this place, with this challenge, with whatever it is that God is saying to me at this moment in my life.

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 then 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, and on everything we do.

If when the moment of Communion arrives and Our Lord finds us with these dispositions of self-surrender, of loving identification with the will of the Father, what will He do but pour out the Holy Spirit with all His gifts and His graces on to us?

We have a lot of help to enable us to live the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass well. We have the help of the angels. They are “always present in large numbers to give honor to this holy mystery. If we unite ourselves to them and their intentions, we must receive a lot of favorable influence from their company.

“The choirs of the Church militant unite and join us with Our Lord in this divine act: in Him, with Him, and through Him, in order to win over the heart of God the Father and to make his mercy forever our own” (Francis de Sales, Introduction to the Devout Life, Point 3).

“Speaking the words, “The Mystery of faith!” after the Consecration, the priest expresses his wonder at the substantial change of bread and wine into the Body and Blood of Christ, a reality that surpasses all understanding. …The Church's faith is essentially a Eucharistic faith, and it is especially nourished at the table of the Eucharist” (Benedict XVI, Apostolic Exhortation, Sacramentum caritatis, Point 6, February 22, 2007).

Benedict had said once that our faith has to be always increasing. It needs an input all the time to grow. It doesn't reach a plateau, it doesn't stay still, it needs continual stretching.

“The more lively the Eucharistic faith of the People of God, the deeper their commitment to the life of the Church. The Church's history bears witness to this. Every great reform has in some way been linked to the rediscovery of belief in the Lord's Eucharistic presence” (ibid.).

Our Lord said, “Do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19; 1 Cor. 11:25). Christ expects the Church to receive this gift, and “under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to develop the liturgical form of the sacrament” (ibid., Point 11).

We can ask the angels to help us to avoid distractions. We could make the effort to take more loving care of that unique moment in our day in which we share in the Sacrifice of the Cross.

We know also that St. Joseph and Our Lady are present at each offering of the Sacrifice of the Mass. They can take us by the hand like little children and lead us to a greater appreciation and a greater self-surrender of ourselves in this unique moment.

I thank you, my God, for the good resolutions, affections, and inspirations that you have communicated to me during this meditation. I ask your help to put them into practice. My Immaculate Mother, Saint Joseph, my father and lord, my guardian angel, intercede for me.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

EW