Priests and Masses

As an Anglican, I am trying to break myself of the habit of referring to worship as "mass." The Book of Common Prayer, even the heterodox 1979 Episcopal Prayerbook, never uses the term "mass" but Holy Eucharist. And yet Anglo-Catholics insist on calling it "the mass." What's the big deal?

Anglicans do not celebrate a mass because we do not believe that we are re-sacrificing Jesus over and over again. Mass means sacrifice. This is why Episcopal ministers are called priests, because priests preside over sacrifices. The Roman Church and their agents inside the Anglican church today, in contrast to historical Anglicanism, have transformed The Lord's Supper as remembrance into an act of sacrifice. This is most clearly seen when the priest lifts the big communion wafer (called the host) for all to see and venerate (aka worship) and says, "Christ our Passover is sacrificed for us."

I was reading my 1837 copy of the Book of Common Prayer of the Protestant Episcopal Church as it was then called. The Lord's Supper is almost word for word the same as the current Rite I except there was nothing about lifting the host and proclaiming Christ is sacrificed. That's because the church, when it still believed the Scriptures took seriously Hebrews 9:25. Contrasting the practice of the Old Testament priesthood in which the priest entered the Holy of Holies once a year to make atonement for sin, we are told Jesus himself enters heaven to appear before God on our behalf.

Christ did not enter heaven to offer himself again and again, the way the High Priest enters the Most Holy Place every year with blood that is not his own. Otherwise, Christ would have had to suffer many times since the creation of the world. But now he has appeared once and for all at the end of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of himself.

It is clear that the New Testament Church did not practice the Lord's Supper as a sacrifice. For one thing, there is no mention of priests in the New Testament Church. In all the texts that mention the spiritual gifts and the offices and qualifications of church workers, priest is never mentioned. That is because the Apostles taught that Jesus is our High Priest who has made priests of all believers who are called to offer spiritual sacrifices to God through Jesus Christ (1 Peter 2:5). It doesn't say spiritual sacrifices of Jesus Christ. Using the principle of Scripture interpreting Scripture, we discover that spiritual sacrifices are "a broken spirit, a broken and contrite heart..."(Psalm 51:17). In the New Testament, our spiritual worship is defined as giving our whole lives to God (Romans 12:1). Believers offer up a sacrifice of praise to God for the finalized atoning work of Christ (Hebrews 13:15-16).

Not only does Scripture undo the Mass, but it is clear from Anglican history that there was no understanding of sacrificing Jesus over and over again each Sunday for the forgiveness of our sins. If by the sacrament of the Lord's Supper we could be forgiven of our sins, why does my 1837 Prayerbook (and all others until this most recent Episcopal one) spend half the ink devoted to the Eucharistic service warning the unrepentant not to dare approach the Lord's table lest they eat and drink damnation to themselves? (1 Corinthians 11:27-30).

Jesus intended The Lord's Supper to be a commemoration of his death and coming again, a remembrance. Celebrating the Mass not only ignores the clear teaching of Scripture, it blasphemes against Christ and turns bread and wine into superstitious magic, idols before which we genuflect, depriving Christ of his sovereign and eternal priesthood in favor of man-made traditions. The priests like to claim as authoritative traditions that go back to the first century. It doesn't matter how old the traditions are, but how faithfully they adhere to the Apostles' teaching preserved in the New Testament. If we set a mass upon the altar, we overthrow the cross and make a lie of our Savior's last words; for if His death on the cross was not once and for all then Jesus was wrong when he said, "It is paid in full" (a better translation than "It is finished").

Rite I gets it right when it ascribes to Christ's death upon the cross as "his one oblation of himself once offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world." But as it is now constructed Rite I is clearly illogical, self-contradictory, and unaligned to the witness of Scripture. How can the priest proclaim the re-sacrifice of Jesus and then pray, "And although we are unworthy, through our manifold sins, to offer unto thee any sacrifice, yet we beseech thee to accept this our bounden duty and service, not weighing our merits (a clear refutation of Roman theology), but pardoning our offenses, through Jesus Christ, our Lord."

What a mishmash, what confusion, and what a mess the mass makes.