is aware of this and acknowledges it when, for example, she prays just before we sing or say in the Mass:

Holy, Holy, Holy Lord.... Therefore all creatures of heaven and earth sing a new song in adoration, and we, with all the host of angels cry out, and without end, acclaim... All things must be brought to Christ by whom and for whom all things were made, as Scripture says. All must be gathered up to Christ, including the lower orders of Creation. This is Humanitys cosmic role, because we have a unity with the material creation, the planets and stars and all living things, since we too are material beings. Indeed, we stand at the peak of material creation; it was given to us by God, Genesis tells us, to perfect, develop and offer back to Him, the Creator. When, then, in our capacity as Lords and Stewards of the material world, we offer ourselves and our work to God, in a sense we bring with us everything that is below us, so that everything is gathered up to God in a great harmonic symphony of praise. It includes the whole cosmos all was made for Man, and Man was made for Christ. The Earth is a privileged planet beyond all others, because here is where God took flesh. The Angels have their own way of praising and worshipping God, spirit to Spirit. The MASS is how Humanity on earth is meant to do it, the way given to us in spirit and truth which fits our human nature, involving the whole human person body and spirit. The Mass opens a door for us: a door into Eternity, where even here on earth we have a means to join in the cosmic and heavenly liturgy of the angels and saints. We bring with us what angels cannot the whole material creation below us. When I celebrate Mass with you here in this chapel, its not just you and me. Behind us is the rest of the material Cosmos. Before us well, we must imagine the back wall of the chapel disappears and before us is the whole Heavenly Court of Mary, the Angels and Saints, before the Most Holy Trinity. Jesus Himself, through the priest, takes all that we bring and place upon the altar, and offers it with Himself as one, great sacrifice to God; then giving back to us what has been offered: Himself again in a Holy, divinising Communion. These notes formed the basis of a series of homilies on the Catholic Mass.

The Catholic Mass

This booklet is based on a series of homilies given at the University Chaplaincy, Bradford in 2011. The motivation for them was a growing awareness that few Catholics understood what they were doing at Mass, or where the Mass came from, or simply what it is. These notes give no more than a very basic outline of some of the history, theology & importance of the Mass; but I hope some good will come of this. The first part acts as an introduction to the topic.

Lets indulge in a little logical thinking seeing as we are rational beings! If, as Catholics, we want to transform the world for the better, we need a clear sense of our own identity as Catholics. For if we are really no different from everyone else, we will have zero impact as we will have nothing to offer and Christs Kingdom will not grow. However, if we are recognisably different, have a clear sense of our identity and therefore of purpose, then we have something to offer. I think this was why God took a small group of people in the ancient Near East to act as a vehicle for His plan. To start off with, this group was pretty much the same as everyone else in the region in which it lived. But through time, God forged them into a distinct people gave them an identity no one else had, because He had made them His own. Their morality and worship were different from the surrounding cultures, because these were given to them by God. This people was the Hebrew people, the Israelites, the Jews. From them would come the Christ the fulness of Gods revelation to humanity. We are the new People of God we belong to the New Covenant which has its roots in the Old. We too are meant to have a recognisable identity, to know who we are and where we are going, and therefore to have something to offer to those not yet part of Gods family. Here lies the importance of WORSHIP (from worth-ship, to give worth to someone or something) as a way of establishing a clear identity. Our worship of God, its principal act, is called the Mass. The Mass is the principal source of our uniquely Catholic identity. Where did it come from? One obvious answer is: Jesus Christ. The Mass

we bother with Mass here on earth? Because Christ commanded that this offering be made continually it is how we fulfil the first Commandment to worship our Creator. We, as free beings, have the dignity and privilege of being able to consciously praise and worship our God (animals cant do this consciously). And God, over great length of time, has given us our pattern of worship, and the purest sacrifice that it is possible to offer. This need to make an offering of ourselves is also wired in to us. The three Divine Persons of the Trinity have an existence of constant mutual Self-giving. We are made in that image its part of our make-up; we must offer/give ourselves or become utterly self-centred. Also, the Mass is how we participate in the COSMIC LITURGY or worship of God. What we do here is a reflection of what takes place in Heaven. The Apostle St. John, who leaned on the breast of Our Lord at the Last Supper, was shown a glimpse of the worship of God in Heaven. You will find his description in chapters 4 and 5 of the Book of Revelation. He is shown the awesome majesty of the Throne of God, and the court of Heaven chanting Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God of Hosts. Then he sees before the Throne a Lamb, which seems to have been sacrificed, but yet lives. The Lamb too, is worshipped and there are 24 elders each with a golden bowl full of incense made up of the prayers of Gods people. He hears the sound of an immense number of angels gathered around the Throne, and then he hears all living things in Creation, on land, sea and air crying out in praise of the Almighty. Thus we are presented with a vision of the Cosmic Liturgy: all orders of Creation are there represented: the angelic order, the human race, all other material life, engaged in the worship of the Creator of us all. The Church

THE MASS A recap: the aims of this series are: - To deepen our understanding of what is actually happening at Mass, so we can participate more fully, - To show where the Mass has come from, - This will give us a solid sense of who we are, our unique Catholic identity so that - We can show we have something unique and wonderful to offer to the world. We looked at Old Covenant sacrifice, as Christ and the apostles would have been familiar with. We saw how the life of Gods people revolved around the great feasts of Israel. We noted how they knew how to carry out their worship because God Himself had given them precise and detailed instructions. In other words, He had told them how He wanted to be worshipped, and how they were to offer sacrifice (otherwise they would get it wrong!) We looked at the different types of sacrifice which the Jews offered sin offerings, thanksgiving sacrifices, worship and honour offerings, communion sacrifices. We saw how it was the people who benefitted from these ceremonies, because they worshipped God correctly and the offering of sacrifice, especially the communion sacrifice deepened their bond with God. Yet all this was only a stage in the organic and evolutionary development of true worship. Christ said: The time will come when you will worship the Father in spirit and in truth. We saw how Jesus Christ fulfilled in Himself all the old sacrifices and brought them to completion in a way the Jews never imagined could happen. There was just ONE sacrifice now, in the New Covenant. That sacrifice was to be Jesus Christ Himself, His Living Body and Blood, after He fulfilled the Jewish Passover and the Day of Atonement over the course of Holy Thursday and Good Friday. This new sacrifice of Christ is a perpetual one: Christ our Great High Priest is eternally interceding for us before the Father, offering Himself on our behalf. If Christ is in Heaven interceding for us anyway, why do

comes from the intentions, words and actions of Christ on, specifically, Holy Thursday and Good Friday. We celebrate Mass because He commanded us to. But there is another answer to the question where did it come from? It lies in a deeper appreciation of Old Covenant Jewish worship; because the Mass began with New Covenant people who had taken part in first century Old Covenant worship services, and who understood sacrifice in terms of them. A good working definition of sacrifice is the offering of a gift back to God as an expression of our desire for union with him. The sacrifice is not a substitute for the person offering it but rather is the real sign of his or her self-offering. Sacrifice, therefore, should always involve an inner conversion to God, or renewal. It is not something that God needs. But WE need it. If then we understand sacrifice as it was understood in the first century A.D., then we will understand Christs sacrifice, and if we understand Christs sacrifice, we understand the Mass, in which that same sacrifice is renewed. This is what the next section will attempt to do. I hope that we will then begin to see that the ultimate purpose of worship, and the ritual and ceremony surrounding it, is union and communion with God Himself.

Old Covenant Sacrifice

This second section looks at Old Covenant sacrifice, as practised in the first century A.D. We use a fictitious character, Eleazar, a farmer from Nazareth and his wife, family and relatives to bring it to life a bit. Thus we will look at Old Covenant sacrifice as Jesus and the apostles knew and understood them, and thus how Jesus understood His sacrifice, which we renew each time we

celebrate Mass. Eleazar did not participate in sacrifice every day of his life (impractical for a farmer living some distance from Jerusalem). But he went up for the great feasts of Israel, e.g. Pentecost, a harvest feast and a celebration of the giving of the Law on Mt. Sinai. Eleazar takes with him: the first fruits of the new harvest, some lambs, kids and flour for offerings. The trip took a couple of days each way. The group (Eleazar, his sons, brothers and families, sister and family, cousin) looked forward to the trip, especially the ceremonies in the Temple: drama and pageantry of the highest order, the most important events of their lives. There, they, as part of Gods people, would interact with the Lord Himself in the one place on earth where He dwelled. This was the time of the year they would be closest to the Lord and be most able to receive His blessings. The public offerings for Pentecost included a first-fruits offering of the newly harvested grain, burnt offerings of animals to honour God, sin offerings in case anything was done wrong in the sacrifice and peace offerings or The Jerusalem Temple, first century A.D. communion offerings to express the nature of the feast as an occasion for communing with God. These were also accompanied by offerings of bread, oil, incense and wine. Taken together, all this was a symbolic banquet for God - some of which, God shared with the worshipper. Everyone knew that God did not really eat the offerings, but they also knew that making offerings was a way of expressing their relationship with Him. All these were of the best quality, with no defects or blemishes. At dawn, the trumpets were sounded to announce the beginning of the day and of that days service of God. Then the offerings began. The first

Thus were all the sins and transgressions of Israel atoned for. The other goat was brought to the High Priest who laid his hands upon its head and confessed over it all the iniquities and faults of the people of Israel. This goat, the scapegoat, was then lead out of the camp into the desert, bearing away with it all the sins of the people. The result of these actions was that Before the Lord, you will be clean of all your sins, Leviticus 16. In the Garden of Gethsemane, after the Supper, Christ was loaded with the sins of humanity of all time. The meeting in Christ of divine holiness and the malice of human sin produced an extreme physical reaction He sweated blood. The next day, bearing the sins of the world symbolically expressed by the wood and burden of the Cross Christ was lead out of the city walls to a place of desolation to be crucified. Since the sacrifice of Christ was the fulfilment of all Old Covenant sacrifices, among which was the Day of Atonement, His sacrifice had to include the presentation of His blood to God in the Holy of Holies; just as the High Priest had to take the goats blood through the veil into Gods Presence, and sprinkle the blood there. As Christs earthly life expired, the veil screening the Holy of Holies in the Temple in Jerusalem was torn from top to bottom, signifying that the former way of doing this was no longer necessary: because the real Holy of Holies, where God is present, is Heaven itself. What happened then, was that Christ, the sacrifice for sin, entered into the real Holy of Holies not made by human hands Heaven itself. He took with Him not the blood of a goat, but His own. When did He do this? By His resurrection from the dead God accepted the sacrifice - and His Ascension into Heaven to stand before God interceding on our behalf. This was the fulfilment of what had been done on the Day of Atonement. Now, Christ continually offers Himself to the Father on our behalf; it is a continual sacrifice or Self-offering. In the Mass, this is made present to us here on earth throughout time we witness it. The same Jesus Christ makes the offering, for the same reasons, but without the pain and suffering. The next section will examine how the Mass is an event of cosmic significance.

At the same time that thousands of lambs were being sacrificed in Jerusalem for the Passover of A.D. 33 the feast to mark the deliverance of Gods People from captivity AT THAT VERY HOUR, Jesus was dying on the Cross, offering Himself as the Lamb of God to free all mankind from the captivity of sin. So we see that, first, we had the preparation in history. Now, we have the reality the real thing. At Passover, Gods people consumed the lamb which had been sacrificed for them, because partaking of the sacrifice in that way deepened the bond between them and God. This was the purpose of sacrifice. How could the Lamb of God on the Cross fulfil this element of a sacrifice? He had The paschal lamb already done this, the night before the Crucifixion at the Last Supper. The real Lamb was now present, had arrived. Remember He Himself was the sacrifice. He changed bread and wine into Himself, and gave of His Body and Blood to His apostles. It was not dead flesh though, but Living, so that by coming into contact with the Living Flesh and Blood of God, we might become divine, fully alive. The Rite of Atonement Once a year, the Rite of Atonement had to be made over the people, to atone for all their sins. This is how God commanded that it be done: two goats were selected and presented at the entrance to the Tent of Meeting. [The Tent of Meeting was the special Tent and area set aside for God. It had an outer courtyard, and a Holy of Holies screened off by a veil. Inside the Holy of Holies was kept the Ark of the Covenant Gods throne on earth]. One of the two goats was sacrificed for the sins of all the people. For the sacrifice to be accepted by God, the blood had to be presented to Him, in other words: it had to be taken through the veil into the Holy of Holies.

was the daily morning offering, the continual offering so called because it was one of the two offerings given to God on a daily basis. At its conclusion, the high priest called down Gods blessing on the people: because they had offered sacrifice according to the law, they were assured that Gods acceptance and blessing were theirs. After the communal sacrifices offered on behalf of the whole people, individual sacrificial gifts were brought up. Eleazar brings up his familys sacrifices and kills them, and then they were offered at the altar by the priests. Not all the offerings were burnt up or poured out. The peace or communion offerings in particular were not; some of it was burnt, some was taken by the priests but most was taken by the person who brought the offering for himself and his family, to be consumed by them. It was something holy, because it had been given to God, and then shared by God with the worshipper. So then the people would have a meal of which these offerings were a part. It was a meal taken in companies. All had to be in a state of ceremonial purity to eat it. Eleazar and his family ate the meal together and distributed portions to those who could not afford the feast and were not part of their company. The meal was a fine meal - a festal meal, with the centre part being the sacrificial offering. The main part of the meal began with a blessing of bread and wine, followed by a main course in which the offering was eaten as the most honoured part. Eleazar concluded with a final blessing over a cup of wine, and hymns were sung to end with praise of God. When we speak of a feast we usually mean just a fine meal. The Israelite festal meal however, was not something done after the important ceremony was over (e.g. our traditional wedding breakfast); no - it was an integral part of the feast, and a way of deepening relationship with

God. Similarly, when we speak of a holiday, we usually mean a vacation or time off. The origin though is from the time when holy days were important parts of Israelite life. Then they were not just time off, but days taken off from normal work to celebrate feasts. They were times to honour God and to deepen relationship or communion with Him. They were the most important times in life.

power of Satan, needed deliverance. We know also that Jesus Christ is the great High Priest able to represent us before God. If Christ is a Priest, He must have something to offer since scripture says every High Priest is appointed to offer gifts and sacrifices. Christ knew that the consequence of His entry into a fallen and sinful world would be His death: there could be no other outcome, since the presence on earth in the flesh of absolute Goodness, Truth and Love would be intolerable to a humanity corrupted by evil, which would then try to do away with Him. Christ of course knew this, and forewarned His disciples; thus making it clear that the sacrifice/offering He was going to make as High Priest was a voluntary one of His own life. This, then, is Christs sacrifice: Himself. Not His death, but Himself. He did not kill Himself, but surrendered to the Fathers will, aware of the consequences. In doing so, He gave His life, Himself, as an offering in love to the Father to atone for sin. This is what we call the Redemption the buying back of Humanity for God. The death of Christ occurred at the time of the Jewish Passover celebration in Jerusalem. This again was no co-incidence it was by design. The Passover was a sacrifice of Deliverance. On the night before the Exodus from Egypt, the last of the 10 plagues took place: the terrible death of all the firstThe Passover - marking the houses with born. This would finally force lambs blood the Pharaoh to comply with the will of God. The Israelites in Egypt could also have lost their own first -born, but a means of deliverance was provided by God. Each family was to take a lamb, sacrifice it, and put its blood around the door of the house. When the destroying Angel passed through Egypt, he would pass over and not enter the houses which had the blood of the sacrificed lamb on their doors, as this marked the family as belonging to God. Thus was the Israelites escape - their deliverance - made possible.

The Meaning of the ceremony

The feasts of Israel were great events: Israelites offered their sacrifices together, at the communal feasts because they related to God as a people. The Jews went to Jerusalem because the Temple was there; it was the sole location on earth of His special presence. The Holy of Holies within the Temple was Gods earthly throne room, and so the holiest place on earth. The Israelites gave sacrifices because sacrifices are gifts to God, meant to show Him honour and acknowledge the fact that He is God. A common scriptural way of describing what we would call a sacrifice is offering. The Hebrew word for offer is literally brought near and indicates that to give the gift to God, it had to be brought near to Him, to the place where He was present. Another scriptural term for making an offering is consecration. To consecrate something is to make it holy. When something is holy, it belongs to God; so when a gift is made over to God, it is made holy or consecrated. Sacrifices, then, were consecrated, that is, put into Gods possession when they were offered to Him, and as a result were holy things. The sacrificial gifts given under the old covenant were domestic animals, bread, oil and wine. These were the main things people lived on. To give some of these things The altar of sacrifice - a burnt offering to God was to give

to draw us into a right relationship with God, because in God and in God alone do we find the fulfilment of all our longings and our deepest happiness. Hence, getting back to the structure of our worship, it should contain elements of Praise and Adoration acknowledging God for who He is; elements of Thanksgiving and joy for how He has provided for His people; elements of Petition because we are dependent on Him for our needs; and the element of Sorrow for our offences, our sins, for which we need and seek pardon. With the coming of Christ, we have a fulfilment: everything that all the Old Covenant sacrifices were instituted for, all that they were intended to achieve, was fully accomplished by the ONE sacrifice of Christ. The next section will look at how Christs sacrifice fulfilled all that went before; particularly the Passover Feast and the Day of Atonement, and how this brought about our Redemption the reconciling of humanity to God and the outpouring of Gods love and mercy upon mankind, and that that is made available to us each time Mass is celebrated.

The Sacrifice of Christ

Sacred Scripture tells us that the world was made by Christ and for Christ. This is His Creation. There is a perspective favoured by the Church which says that Christ was always going to come among us the Second Person of the Trinity had from all eternity wished to become Incarnate with a human nature even if humanity had never sinned. However, humanity did sin. So when Christ did come, it was not only to bring us the fullness of life as was originally intended, but now for us to experience that, Christ would have to deal with sin, and its consequence: death. Mankind - enslaved by sin and subject to the

something personally valuable, something that sustained life. It was a way of expressing the value of the relationship with God. The strange part to us is the actual ritual - especially the burning of animal bodies or bread and the pouring out of blood and wine. But these were done as a way of making the gifts over to The altar of incense God. Once the animals were killed, the bodies burned and the blood poured out, they were by that fact taken out of human possession and given to God. The smoke and fragrance that went up were the giving of these to God, as was the pouring out of the blood or wine. It is wrong to think that it was the death of the animal being given to God - it was the animal itself, or the bread, wine, oil etc. The placing of the gifts upon the altar also involved Gods taking of these gifts, making them His own. We tend to see a sacrifice or offering as something we do for God; and that is indeed an aspect of it. But in the Old Covenant understanding, something could not really be a sacrifice until it was accepted by God. This was accomplished by putting it on the altar, either burning it on top, or pouring it out at the side. Doing so in an acceptable way meant that God had accepted it and it was now holy. Not all the sacrificial offerings were completely burned; e.g. most of each peace/communion offering was saved for a meal. These meals were holy meals: they were part of the sacrificial ceremony and a way of sharing in it. They therefore made the people who took part in them holy, because taking part strengthened their belonging to God. When sacrificial gifts are made to God, they express something greater than the material value of the gift; they express our homage and submission, our desire to be in a certain relationship to God. In our worship, we as Christians express the gift of our whole life to God: we offer ourselves to Him and express the fact that we are His. The gifts we offer, in fact, signify our lives. In summary, to sacrifice is to glorify and worship God as God, and is the highest act of honour and worship.

This then was Old Covenant worship as Our Lord, His Mother, the apostles etc would have known it. But it had its limitations: the sacrifices were of limited value and not truly worthy of God. Nor did they have any real power to remove the guilt of sin, or bring about the deepest possible communion with God. Next time, well look at how Christ is the fulfilment of all Old Covenant worship, in His very Self.

proud, ego-centric chieftain who has to be constantly pacified, you end up sacrificing babies to him, as the Canaanites the Jews neighbours did. So at the same time that God was teaching His people what He was really like: a God of Love and Mercy, beyond all created things, who yet longed to bring people into friendship with Himself and heal their wounds; at the same time, He was teaching them that their worship must reflect the truth about Himself, and the truth about themselves. This is a crucial point. If we read especially the Books of Exodus, Leviticus and Numbers, we see very precise instructions being given by God: this is the way you are to offer sacrifices, this is how you are to prepare yourselves to offer them, this is how you are to make the Ark of the Covenant, the altar, the lampstand etc. These are the feasts I want you to celebrate and when. In other words, our whole pattern of worship is something GIVEN to us by God, not made up by us. This applies to the New Covenant too, where Christ brings Old Covenant worship to its fulfilment. The Mass has grown out of the Holy Scriptures, the Tradition of the Apostles and the guidance of the Churchs teaching authority. Therefore, we safeguard it and treasure it as something precious that has been entrusted to us. This also has important practical, spiritual consequences for us who participate in the Mass. Because our basic pattern of worship is fixed, it has a definite structure, which doesnt change from week to week. We know what is going to happen and at what stage [some Christians have a different structure nearly every week, relying on the minister or worship committee to create something from scratch]. This allows us to enter deeper and deeper into the Mystery of what is taking place of what GOD is doing. I know its very easy to be distracted at Mass, but think what it would be like if it was different every week, or all put together by a committee! Wed be so busy adapting to the novelty each week, we wouldnt be able to enter into the depths of the Mystery which is expressed by our ritual. The purpose of our coming together for worship is not to be entertained, or to make us feel good about ourselves its not centred on us at all. Its centred on GOD. The purpose of worship is to enable us to approach God,

Fulfilment of Old Covenant worship in Christ

In the last section, we looked at how a Jewish family of the first century A.D. would have participated in the Feast of Pentecost. We got an idea of the sacrifices they offered and what it all meant to them. They saw a sacrifice , the offering of something holy, as a way to honour God, express their relationship with Him and come close to Him. Domestic animals, the fruits of the harvest, bread, wine, incense, were the materials involved in the sacrifices, of which there were several types: sacrifices to give honour and worship to God, thanksgiving sacrifices to thank God for what He had done for them, sin offerings to atone for sins and peace or communion offerings which, after having been offered to God and therefore made holy, were given back to the people to form part of a holy meal which deepened their bond with God. We note that none of the Old Covenant sacrifices were truly worthy of God dumb animals and plants. Moreover, none had the power to cleanse from sin. To be cleansed from sin would have allowed the worshippers to come into a full relationship with God, their Principle of Life. Yet, as St. Paul observed the blood of bulls and goats is useless for taking away human sin. You may want to ask: if these Old Covenant sacrifices were so ineffectual, why did God allow them, teach them, even? Because they all point towards Christ: they prepare for Christ, lead up to Christ. In the meantime, the people had to learn the principles of true worship because, left to themselves, they would get it wrong as everyone else in the surrounding cultures was doing. If you have a distorted idea of God, your worship will also be distorted and vice versa. If you think God is a