PRIESTS AND VICTIMS AT HOLY MASS
PRIEST AND VICTIM
How marvelous is the priesthood of the Christian, for he is both the victim that is offered on his own behalf, and the priest who makes the offering. He does not need to go beyond himself to seek what he is to immolate to God: with himself and in himself he brings the sacrifice he is to offer God for himself.... Truly it is an amazing sacrifice in which a body is offered without being slain and blood is offered without being shed.
(Saint Peter Chrysologus, Bishop, Doctor of the Church, 406-450)
Dear Co-worker of Christ,
You had said "Yes" to Jesus--and He has taken you at your word.--The Word of God became Man--Poor.--Your word to God--became Jesus--poor and so this terrible emptiness you experience. God cannot fill what is full.--He can fill only emptiness--deep poverty--and your "Yes" is the beginning of being or becoming empty. It is not how much we really "have" to give--but how empty we are--so that we can receive fully in our life and let Him live His life in us.
In you today--He wants to relive His complete submission to His Father--allow Him to do so. Does not matter what you feel--as long as He feels alright in you. Take away your eyes from your self and rejoice that you have nothing--that you are nothing--that you can do nothing. Give Jesus a big smile--each time your nothingness frightens you.
This is the poverty of Jesus. You and I must let Him live in us and through us in the world.
Cling to Our Lady--for she too--before she could become full of grace--full of Jesus--had to go through that darkness. "How could this be done?--" But the moment she said "Yes," she had need to go in haste and give Jesus to John and his family..
Keep giving Jesus to your people not by words but by your example--by your being in love with Jesus--by radiating His holiness and spreading His fragrance of love everywhere you go.
Just keep the joy of Jesus as your strength.--Be happy and at peace.--Accept whatever He gives--and give whatever He takes with a big smile.--You belong to Him--tell Him I am Yours and if you cut me to pieces every single piece will be only all Yours.
Let Jesus be the victim and the priest in you.
I have started going round our houses in India--so I have beautiful time alone with Jesus in the train.
Pray for me as I do for you.
Yours in Jesus,
M. Teresa, MC
(Blessed Mother Teresa, Letter to a priest, Come Be My Light, pp 275-276)
A true sacrifice is anything that we do with the aim of being united to God in holy fellowship – anything that is that is directed towards that supreme good and end in which alone we can be truly blessed. It follows that even an act of compassion towards men is not a sacrifice, if it is not done for the sake of God. Although it is performed by man, sacrifice is still a divine thing, as the Latin word indicates: “sacri-ficium”, “holy-doing” or “holy-making”. Man himself can be a sacrifice, if he is consecrated in the name of God, and vowed to God – a sacrifice in so far as he dies to the world in order to live to God....
[Jesus Christ] took on the form of a servant and suffered for us. It was under this form that he both offered and was offered: at the same time mediator, and priest, and sacrifice.
St Paul starts by exhorting us to present our bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable to God, as an act of homage justly owed to him. He tells us not to con-form ourselves to the world but to be trans-formed by renewing our will and our thinking: seeking to find out the will of God, to discover what is good, what is acceptable, what is perfect; for we ourselves are the whole of that sacrifice....
This is the sacrifice of Christians: we, being many, are one body in Christ. And, as the faithful know, this also is the sacrifice which the Church continually celebrates in the sacrament of the altar, in which she teaches that she herself is offered in the offering she makes to God.
(St Augustine, City of God)