Sacrifice

The Rt Revd Dr Peter Brain

Good liturgies are driven by truth and grace. Following our Lord’s words ‘God is spirit, and his worshippers must worship in spirit and in truth’ we are not surprised that this kind of worship nourishes our minds, lifts our hearts and builds our resolve to serve him.

The prayers that follow our receiving the bread and wine have helped me to remember that Sunday worship must flow out into daily living. The BCP has two timely responses to our privileged sharing around the Lord’s table. The first runs ‘And here we offer and present unto thee, O Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy and lively sacrifice unto thee. . .’ and the second: ‘And we most humbly beseech thee, O Heavenly Father, so to assist us with thy grace, that we may continue in that holy fellowship, and do all such good works as thou hast prepared for us to walk in . . .’. Our second and third order services in AAPB and APBA, helpfully call upon us to declare this response together: ‘Father, we offer ourselves to you as a living sacrifice through Jesus Christ our Lord’, then in line with the first order prayers to seek God’s enabling grace: ‘Send us out in the power of your Spirit’.

The way our services of Holy Communion unfold is essential. They reserve any talk of sacrifice on our part till after the humble sacrifice of our Lord on the Cross has been fully remembered, rejoiced in and received. Our sacrifice depends on His for us, and is responsive, as gratitude for what he accomplished for us in ‘one true sacrifice for sin’ [2nd and 3rd order services] and more fully expounded in the first order’s: ‘who made there, by his one oblation of himself, once offered, a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation and satisfaction for the sins of the whole world . . .’ Our liturgies, in line with Scripture and reflected in our Articles are clear, that because of our inherent and practised sinfulness we have nothing to offer our Holy God, except, as the late Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple famously stated ‘the only thing of my very own that I could contribute to my salvation . . . is the very sin of that I must be redeemed of!’

It is for this reason that the Lord’s Table is never referred to as an altar in any of our liturgies and that our sacrifice is only ever one of ‘praise and thanksgiving’. No sacrifice of ours, nor any offering of Christ has any part in the Holy Communion. To do so would be to denigrate our Lord’s perfect, once and for all offering on our behalf and be presumptuous and unnecessary, turning the whole trajectory of the sacrament on its head. The grace of God in Christ is entirely from his side and at his initiative. However, in disarming us of any sense of pride in our achievements or liturgical actions we are able to be thankful and responsive people. We cannot earn our redemption, but we must receive and rejoice in our Saviour’s redemptive work on his altar, the Cross of Calvary. As a result, we come as penitents, we cast ourselves with the deepest possible sense of gratitude, wonder and humility entirely on God’s grace towards us in Christ at Calvary and through the Holy Spirit in our new-birth conversion.

Grace drives away complacency and fear in our responsive service. We serve Christ in the rough and tumble of daily discipleship not to earn salvation but to give evidence of it every aspect of our lives. This is the service that Morning Prayer reminds us of in that memorable phrase, ‘whose service is perfect freedom’. Here is the basis of our prayer: ‘thank you for assuring us of your goodness and love’ and the greatest possible reason for our determined desire ‘to offer ourselves as a living sacrifice’. This order has been beautifully expressed by WH Griffith-Thomas: ‘I will not work my soul to save, for that my Lord has done; but I will work like any slave, for love of God’s dear Son’.