The Mass

01The letter

What Justin told the emperor

“And on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits; then, when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things. Then we all rise together and pray, and, as we before said, when our prayer is ended, bread and wine and water are brought, and the president in like manner offers prayers and thanksgivings, according to his ability, and the people assent, saying Amen”

Readings. A sermon. Everyone standing to pray. Bread and wine. A long prayer of thanks. A room saying “Amen.” If you’ve ever been to a Mass, you just got goosebumps. That’s next Sunday, written down almost nineteen centuries ago.

The Catechism quotes this letter and says its basic lines “have stayed the same until our own day for all the great liturgical families.”¹

Which raises the real question. Why do the same thing every week for nineteen hundred years?

02The stakes

Why this is not just a nice tradition

Be honest. For a lot of people, “Mass” means an hour of standing, sitting and kneeling, always half a second behind everybody else.

But the Church calls the Eucharist “the source and summit of the Christian life.” Why such big words? Because in it “is contained the whole spiritual good of the Church, namely Christ himself.”¹⁰

Think about it. If the Church is right, the most important thing on earth happens every Sunday, a short drive from your house. If she’s wrong, it’s the weirdest habit in history. There’s no comfy middle.

It started in one room in Jerusalem, the night Jesus was betrayed.

03The night it started

This is my body

Jesus sends Peter and John ahead to get the Passover meal ready.¹¹ They’re shown “a large, furnished upper room.”¹²

ImaginePicture it. Oil lamps. A crowded table. A meal these guys had done every year of their lives. Then Jesus goes off script.

“He took bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke and gave it to them, saying, ‘This is my body which is given for you. Do this in memory of me.’ Likewise, he took the cup after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood, which is poured out for you.”

Notice what he doesn’t say. Not “this is like my body.” Not “this stands for it.”

He says, “This is my body.” Then he gives an order: “Do this in memory of me.”¹⁴

That night, Jesus gave us the Eucharist to carry the sacrifice of the cross forward until He comes back.¹⁵ And Christians have done it ever since, the substance unchanged.¹⁶

Did the first Christians really take him literally? We don’t have to guess. We have their mail.

04The evidence

What a bishop wrote in AD 107

Around AD 107, Bishop Ignatius of Antioch, on his way to be executed, warns the Christians of Smyrna about some heretics. And look at his complaint: “They abstain from the Eucharist and from prayer, because they confess not the Eucharist to be the flesh of our Saviour Jesus Christ, which suffered for our sins, and which the Father, of His goodness, raised up again.”¹⁷

Less than a century after the cross, this was already the line in the sand. Is it really his flesh, or not?

Fifty years later, Justin tells the emperor the same thing: “not as common bread and common drink do we receive these,” but as “the flesh and blood of that Jesus who was made flesh.”¹⁸

Jesus Himself didn’t exactly soften it.

“He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day.”

And the Church says the same today: in the Eucharist “the whole Christ is truly, really, and substantially contained.”²⁰ The whole substance of the bread and wine becomes his body and blood; the big word for it is transubstantiation.²¹

That leaves the word that makes a lot of people flinch. Sacrifice.

05The objection

Once for all, and here

Maybe you’ve heard it: “Catholics think they sacrifice Jesus over and over.”

Nope. The Church is crystal clear: “the sacrifice of Christ and the sacrifice of the Eucharist are one single sacrifice.” The same Christ who offered Himself once, bloodily, on the cross is offered at Mass without blood.²²

The Mass makes the cross present, remembers it, and pours out its fruit on you.²³ Not a second Calvary.²² The same one, here, now.²³

Which is why Catholics are so stubborn about Sunday.

06The day

Why every Sunday

Sunday is Resurrection day, kept “by a tradition handed down from the apostles.”²⁴

The Church calls Sunday Mass “the foundation and confirmation of all Christian practice,” and asks Catholics to be there on Sundays and holy days unless there’s a serious reason, like being sick or caring for a baby.^25,26

Not Catholic yet? You’re welcome at any Mass. Sit, watch, soak it in. When people go up for Communion, just stay in your seat. Nobody will think twice.

One last line from Justin. Most people skip it. It’s the best part.

07The ending

It ends at the door

Justin’s Sunday doesn’t end at the altar: “to those who are absent a portion is sent by the deacons.” Then there’s a collection for the one presiding, “who succours the orphans and widows.”³

That’s the whole shape of it. You gather. You listen. You give thanks. Then it walks out the door, to the people who couldn’t be in the room.

Sunday is one hour of your week. That leaves a hundred and sixty-seven. What happens there matters too.