Saturday, June 22, 2024

M. C. D’Arcy on the Sacrifice of the Mass being Offered to Jesus and the Holy Spirit, not the Father only

  

One difficulty, however, rises out of this mediatorship. Christ is both God and Man and he is Priest and Victim. How, it may be asked, can “these things be”?

 

The answer will be understood if we call that Christ is God, that he is Man, and that he is the God-Man. As God he is the recipient of Sacrifice, because it is the Trinity which is worshipped and propitiated in Sacrifice. Some theologians, indeed, regard the father, the first Person, as the acceptor of the sacrifice of the Cross, and the words of Trent, Christ “offered himself unto God the Father,” and certain texts in the New Testament seem to support the view. But generally the expression used at Trent is taken to be one of appropriation, a term explained in another essay, which means shortly that certain actions common to all three Persons are attributed by convenience and analogy to one Person above the others. The expression in this context is, however, still more simply explained by the fact that Christ is regarded there as the God-Man, “the one mediator of God and men, the Man Jesus Christ.” However mysterious and above reason this conjunction of natures in one Person must ever remain, it does allow for the possibility of God using manhood as a propitiatory gift, endowing it with his own personal merit, and so combining the representative and the pleasing and holy. If Christ had been the Word and no Man, then he could not have been a Mediator, for there would have been nothing between himself and the Father save a distinction of personality. If he had been but a man, again mediation in the strict sense would have been impossible, because the gulf between sinful man and God would not have been bridged. The mysterious conjunction of two natures does, however, resolve the difficulty; and as long as the mediation is assigned to One who does not lose anything of the Godhead by being Man nor anything of his Manhood by being God, and we can understand how Christ though God can offer sacrifice to God. (M. C. D’Arcy, “Christ, Priest, and Redeemer,” in The Teaching of the Catholic Church: A Summary of Catholic Doctrine, ed. George D. Smith, 2 vols. [New York: The MacMillan Company, 1927, 1961], 1:485)