I’d like to do something a little out of the ordinary for our homilies over the next few weeks.  One of the things I hear most from people is their desire to have a better, more fulfilling and enriching experience at Mass.  Everyone knows that Mass is important and a central part of our lives as Catholics.  But we all want to get more out of it.  We want to be more open to the various graces that God wants to give us here.  So I’d like to take a few weeks and just talk about the Mass: what it is, why it’s important, how we can enter more deeply into it and get more out of it.  St. John Vianney said that if any of us understood, even for an instant, what was really going on at Mass, we would die of joy.  It’s true.  What God does for us here, every week, every day, is truly extraordinary.  And the more we understand what that means, the more we will love and cherish the Holy Mass; the more it will transform us.  So we’ll take a few weeks and try to focus in on a few things.  

Where do we start?  Let’s start today with the Mass as a sacrifice.  We speak of the “Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.”  What does that mean, that Mass is a "Holy Sacrifice?"  We have to understand first what sacrifice is, especially in the Old Testament which is the background and context of Christ’s sacrifice.  In the Old Testament, the chosen people had a deep instinct that their relationship with God was not as it should be.  They had sinned and fallen away from God’s friendship.  Again and again, from the very beginning.  God would reach out, they’d do okay for a while, and then slip away from his friendship again, into idolatry or pagan worship or despair.  The prophets were constantly pointing out the sins and brokenness that the Chosen People brought to their relationship with God.  The People knew that they needed to do something to fix this relationship.  And so they offered God sacrifice.  They took something valuable and precious, most commonly an animal, usually an animal that was crucial to their survival, and they offered it to God as a sacrifice: giving something important of themselves, usually destroying it in the process as a sign that they really did mean it and that they weren’t holding anything back.  Eventually this sacrifice became quite ritualized, and was made by designated priests in the temple in Jerusalem on behalf of the whole people.  

But even while they were doing this, and it was the best they could do: the chosen people knew that it just didn’t work.  No bull or goat or lamb, no matter how critical to the community’s survival, was actually precious enough make up for all my sins, certainly not for the sins of the whole world.  Especially when you consider the fact that it’s God who has been offended.  He’s infinitely good and we’ve rejected him; how do you fix that?  The answer is: only a perfect sacrifice can repair our relationship with the perfect God; only a perfect sacrifice can cover all my many, many sins; only a perfect sacrifice can cover the sins of the whole world, in every place and time.  We could never make such a sacrifice.  Who can?  God can.  And so he does, for us.  He sends his Son, Jesus Christ, himself God, to be the sacrificial lamb, to be the sacrifice which is pure enough and perfect enough, to repair the sins of every person in the whole world.  God himself becomes the priest who offers the sacrifice; God himself becomes the sacrifice itself: the Lord offers himself as a perfect sacrifice to the Father.  And the beautiful thing is: since he is also truly man, in addition to being perfect God, the sacrifice is ours; it’s coming from us, coming from a member of our human family.  In the God-made-man, humanity can finally offer a complete, sufficient, and perfect sacrifice, which finally repairs our relationship with God.  

This is what happens on the cross.  And this is what we get to experience at every single Mass.  It’s the sacrifice of the Cross, brought here and now for us to experience.  It’s not a new sacrifice that I offer: Fr. Hammond’s sacrifice would not do you any good, I promise.  It’s Christ’s sacrifice, offered on the cross, brought mystically through space and time to be right here, right now, for us to love and worship.  He’s the real priest, offering the sacrifice: I’m just his hands.  He’s the real sacrifice, given for us: the bread and wine are just the signs he asks us to use.  So when we see the frail human priest say those sacred words and then lift up the host and the chalice: what we’re really seeing, if our eyes could handle it, is Christ being lifted up on the cross.  It’s not even bread and wine any more.  It’s Christ, being sacrificed.  And we get to see it.  We get to be there.  We get to unite our own prayers and sacrifices to his, directly.  We get to be present for the moment of our salvation, and welcome that salvation into our own lives.  

As you know, I just got back from the Holy Land, which was an incredible experience in so many ways.  But what I realized, and what I told our pilgrims on our last evening together was this: we’ve stood where the Lord was born, we’ve waded into the river where he was baptized, we’ve been inside his empty tomb: but none of that compares to what we experience at home at every Mass: when we’re not just remembering, and visiting, and following in his footsteps: at Mass, we are with him: he and his sacrifice are really here.  We are really in the presence of every part of his life, his passion, his death, his resurrection.  And as powerful as these pilgrimage experiences were and should be, if we understood, if we knew what was happening at every single Mass, we would die of joy.