Mass Talks 23: Sacrifice in General and in the OT

If there is a single word that characterizes Catholic worship and sets it against all forms of Protestant worship it’s the word sacrifice. Catholics thus speak of the sacrifice of the Mass and of the offering of bread and wine, and by extension, of offering up one’s endurance of evils. To help our understanding of this singularly important term, sacrifice, we will speak about it first in general, and then regarding the sacrifices of the Old Testament.

The first and highest duty that man has is to surrender or to submit himself to God. This is because God alone is the Supreme Being and the source of all good. Worship given to God then is an act of homage and thanksgiving and a means of obtaining additional favors from Him. The question is how should this worship of God be performed? Is just an occasional thought of Him or a “thank you” sufficient to fulfill this obligation?

Unlike angels, mental or verbal acts alone will not suffice for humans because we have bodies as well as souls. We need then an outward, physical way of expressing what’s in our minds and in our hearts. Sacrifice adds to the worship of God that physically dimension by giving Him “gifts and presents.” (These two terms, gifts and presents, are often found in the prayers of the Missal, notably in Eucharistic Prayer I.) Thus, Cain and Abel, once they had sensed their duty to worship God, dedicated sacrificial offerings to Him from their flocks and their produce. So we discover here an essential feature of sacrifice: it entails man’s renunciation of his ownership of something so as to give it to God. The effect of this transfer of ownership from man to God makes the thing sacred so that, thereafter, that physical, visible thing can represent man’s inward submission to God.

There is something else that must be included when the word sacrifice is used: propitiation. This is because beyond thanksgiving and petition in our worship of God, we have to do something about our sin-doing. We need to offer God something both to show Him regret for our offenses and make compensation for them. And so, in every time and in all cultures, man offered God sacrifices in blood (which is to say by a death) in reparation for sin. Remember the adage: “the wages of sin is death.” We deserve to die on account of our sins, but God’s law doesn’t allow us to kill ourselves to compensate for our sins. He provided rather for the substitution of our death with the slaying an animal. God’s command to the Jews to slay animals instead of people showed God’s goodness and mercy, giving men a “way out” of having to die. Had mankind never sinned, thanksgiving sacrifices would have been sufficient for the human race. But once we sinned, there had to be the sacrificial destruction of the offering. And all this had to be done in the precise manner, place and time that God Himself prescribed, in a communal and ritual manner and by a designated sacrificer, the priest.

Even after the offering and the immolation was performed, all was not done for a sacrifice to be complete; two things more were yet required. On God’s part, He had to accept it; on man’s part, he needed to take part in it. It’s clear that God doesn’t accept just any ol’ sacrifice. He’s particular about what gifts He will accept. On man’s side, he eats part of the sacrifice in a sacred banquet, thus becoming holy by eating the holy thing.

The other aspect of today’s topic is the Sacrifices in the Old Testament. In a way, it would be counterproductive for us to start with the OT and to work forward to the time of Christ because, in reality, it is the sacrifice of Christ that gives meaning to all the previous OT sacrifices. In other words, it is only in view of Christ that we can gain a retrospective comprehension of the sacrifices of the OT. They were necessary but only as preparatory for the sacrifice on Calvary.

Regarding these OT sacrifices, beside the aforementioned sacrifice of Abel, there were sacrifices offered by Noah, the bread and wine offerings made by Melchizadeck, and those of Abraham and Jacob. Moses, in receiving the law from God, specified all the details on how the OT sacrifices were to be conducted. These OT ceremonials were of two basic kinds: the bloody and the unbloody sacrifices. Of the bloody types were holocausts (in which an unblemished male animal–or for the poor, a bird–was slain, its blood poured out around the altar and then entirely consumed by fire); the peace offering or Communion Sacrifice (where one part was burnt up, another eaten by the sacrificers, and a third portion given over to the priests); and also the specifically designated Sin Offerings that were made in reparation. In these sacrifices, a bull, goat, sheep or ram was first slain and then some of its blood was sprinkled by the priest on the veil of the Holy of Holies, some of it was put on the horns of the altar of incense, and the remainder was poured around the altar of holocausts.

Living as we do now in the time after Christ, we may be astonished by the grear number of bloody sacrifices of the OT. Yet those bloody sacrifices were the only legitimate means humanity had for atoning for sin until the perfect and final sacrifice of Christ on the cross. In the Letter to the Hebrews, it says that the OT was only “the shadow of the good things to come” (10:1) and that it was “impossible that with the blood of oxen and goats sins should be taken away” (10:4). What good then did the OT sacrifices do? Were they just futile and wasteful exercises? The OT sacrifices, although provisional and imperfect, did serve to impart that necessary exterior purification so that an Israelite could participate in public worship. These rituals also stirred up his contrition–a necessary requirement for anyone to be forgiven by God. But one should clearly understand that, by their inadequacy, they necessarily referred to the coming sacrifice of Christ which alone could rightly make atonement for sin. In the Old Law then there was no kind of sacrament which by its power and efficacy could justify and sanctify the sinner. The only effective means available for a sinner’s forgiveness under the Old Law would have been what we would call perfect contrition, and even that would only have been effective on account of the sacrifice of Jesus which was still in the future. So Jews of old benefitted from the Christ’s cross beforehand, even though they did not know it, since our Lord’s redemption is the only adequate and perfect sacrifice for sin.

Today’s sermon should help us appreciate a few things: that at Mass we are rendering to God the debt of praise and thanksgiving that we owe Him, and that this is a sacrificial act, the offering of a Victim’s death to atone for our sins. It yet remains for us to speak about the all-embracing sacrifice of Christ on the cross and to see how our Lord provided for the perpetuation of that single sacrifice by means of the Mass: topics for other sermons in this Eucharistic year.