In this series I have introduced the brief prayer, doce me passionem Tuam—teach me Your suffering—a simple aspiration we can pray many times a day. This prayer is lived most deeply when we participate in the Church’s liturgy, especially in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, the bloodless Calvary. The Mass is a weekly—or better, a daily—invitation to enter into Our Lord’s suffering, endured for love of us.
The Mass is more than just a reenactment of the Last Supper. As Pope Benedict XVI, citing Josef Andreas Jungmann, explains in Jesus of Nazareth: “What the Church celebrates at Mass is not the Last Supper; no, it is what the Lord instituted in the course of the Last Supper and entrusted to the Church: the memorial of his sacrificial death.” “Memorial” here does not just mean recalling something from the past, but actually making that event present in the here-and-now. The Mass is the Sacrifice of the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ offered on our altars under the appearances of bread and wine—a sacramental re-presentation of the Sacrifice of the Cross. This is not just symbolic: although Jesus does not suffer the pains of His Passion again during the Mass, His blood still flows, and His flesh is still made a living sacrifice for us on the altar.
With routine and familiarity, it is easy for Catholics to forget this central truth of our Faith: the sacrifice of the Mass is the same as sacrifice of the Cross. Contrary to Protestant objections, it’s not that Christ is sacrificed again at Mass; rather, the Mass is the very same sacrifice of Calvary. At every Mass we are actually standing at the foot of the Cross, as Our Lady and St. John were two thousand years ago. In light of this, consider the immense spiritual power of the approximately 86,000 “bloodless Calvaries” celebrated throughout the world each day—whether a high Mass celebrated by a bishop in his grand Cathedral, or a simple outdoor Mass celebrated by an Army chaplain for the troops before they march into battle.
If the Mass is the Sacrifice of Calvary made present to us today, then to appreciate the Eucharist we must understand Our Lord’s crucifixion. This means not just seeing a serene and beautiful Jesus nailed to the Cross and gazing at us through tranquil eyes. It means seeing Jesus in all the anguish of His Passion; it means gazing upon Our Lord’s tortured and bloodied body, suffering for us. We first need to see the crucifixion of the Son of God as His contemporaries would have viewed it—namely, with shock and horror—in order to discover Christ’s love in it. The crucifixion should take our breath away: if we witnessed what really happened there, we would probably recoil and wretch. The scene would haunt us afterwards. We would be horrified that any human could be treated that way.
With this shock, we are struck with the scandalous realization that it was not just any man who was tortured and crucified, but God Himself. And we also come to realize that we are no different than those who drove the nails through His hands. By our sins, we condemned Our Lord to that death as much as His contemporaries did. Jesus’ wounds manifest the thousands of ways in which we have and will betray Him. And yet, He submitted to crucifixion anyways, for you and for me. If we only view the Cross through saccharine images of sentimental love, we fail to recognize the enormity of Christ’s love. And we fail to appreciate the graces offered to us at every celebration of the Mass.
Jesus knew that Peter would deny Him, and yet He died for Peter. He knew Judas would betray Him, and yet He died even for Judas. He knew that I, with the benefit of knowing about His Resurrection (unlike Peter and Judas), would nevertheless betray Him by my sins. And yet He suffered death on the Cross out of love for me. By drawing a little closer to the horror of the crucifixion, we understand more deeply the love expressed when Jesus prayed, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.” We too know not what we have done, what we still do now, and what will do in the future; and yet He loves us regardless.
If we begin to recognize our own role in the horrors of the crucifixion, we will more clearly see and experience His love for us personally. That sacrificial love, demonstrated in His most profound suffering, is far more compelling than any shallow love suggested by a sanitized depiction of the Cross. Much of the pain of Purgatory involves the Holy Souls recognizing, through eyes longing for union with God in Heaven, the horrors of the crucifixion and their own betrayal of the One they seek. To begin our process of purgation now, we need to acknowledge our betrayal of Jesus by our sin, so we may gradually detach ourselves from everything that holds us back from Him.
There is a reason that every Catholic Church has a visible crucifix on or behind the altar. We gaze upon Jesus hanging on the Cross during the Mass precisely because the Mass makes present to us that very event. It is not just the pristine face of Jesus we kiss when we receive the Holy Eucharist, but His bloodied, beaten, and abused face. When the bread and wine are transformed into the body and blood of Christ, Jesus is offering Himself just as He did at Calvary. In giving us His flesh and blood in Holy Communion, time and again, Jesus demonstrates that—if this were necessary for our salvation—He would be willing to climb back on the Cross to suffer and die all over again for each one of us.
Our Lady was present there on Calvary, witnessing its horrors, and yet she never cursed God, never abandoned her Son. How many of us, with confidence, can say we would do the same? Which of us can say that we would willingly be martyred for love of Him? Or that we would consent to the martyrdom of our children for love of Him, as many of the early Christians did? And yet Our Lord and Our Lady did precisely that for us.
At Mass, we stand with Our Lady at the foot of the Cross as she participated in Jesus’ Passion with Him. More than any other person in history, Mary is most fully united to Christ. By meditating on her sorrow, we can unite ourselves interiorly with Jesus more fully when we receive the Eucharist.
The person we are the second before we receive Holy Communion is entirely different—if we orient our will to Christ and open the doors of our heart to Him—than the person we are the second after we receive the Host. The Mass, and reception of Holy Communion, are the most sacred acts we can partake in this side of Heaven. Nothing draws us closer to the suffering Christ than this.
We should attempt to maximize the duration of that union by adoring the living God who is now physically present in our bodies immediately following Mass. It is not the right time to immediately get up and leave, to chat with our neighbor, or to grab a donut. Instead, we should resolve to spend at least ten minutes after Mass in silence, giving thanks to Our Lord for this immense gift of Himself in the Eucharist. We will miss many of the graces available there if we don’t linger and enjoy the sweet embrace of Our Lord, truly and substantially present inside of us in those precious minutes.
Without entering into controversies about liturgical forms or customs, I will mention, as Joseph Ratzinger wrote before he became pope, that whenever applause breaks out in the Mass, the spirit of the liturgy has been lost. We are not there to celebrate ourselves, but to stand at the foot of the Cross accompanying our suffering Lord, and to receive everything He wants to give us in that supreme sacrifice.
Holy Communion does more for us than any other prayer, devotion, or good work. The Eucharist is the summit of the burning love that Jesus offers to each of us if we open our hearts to receive Him.
Doce me passionem Tuam—teach me your suffering—especially in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.
Author’s Note: This is Part 5 in a weekly Lenten series on the Christian meaning of suffering and the Cross of Christ. All other articles of the series can be read here.
Photo by Diocese of Spokane on Unsplash