A Year with the Catechism. Petroc Willey, Dominic Scotto, Donald Asci, & Elizabeth Siegel

love the Father.” He is wholehearted in his obedience, holding nothing back. The term “embrace” is used of Jesus’ obedience whenever there is mention of the Father’s loving plan of salvation (606, 607, 609).

      This embracing of the Father’s plan allows him to “accept” the suffering that is an inevitable dimension of love in the fallen world in which deep sin and the distortions of self-will oppose the Father’s plan. Perfect Love faces the opposition of sin and its consequences, experiencing the horror of suffering and death. This can’t be “embraced,” for it is not itself a good, but an agony; but it can be — and is — fully accepted. “By accepting in his human will that the Father’s will be done, he accepts his death as redemptive” (612).

      This free and loving embrace of the Father’s plan, even in the face of suffering and death, is supremely expressed in the Mass. Jesus takes the very heart and center of who he is — his free and loving union with the Father — and gives this — gives himself — to us. The Catechism describes it this way: “Jesus transformed this Last Supper with the apostles into the memorial of his voluntary offering to the Father for the salvation of men” (610). The Last Supper, in the body given and the blood poured out, perfectly expresses and incarnates his total self-offering (610-611).

      Day 86

       CCC 613-618

      Christ Offered Himself for Our Sins

      A sacrifice is an offering. Why are offerings made to God, who is infinite Being? They add nothing to him, give him no joy that he does not already have, provide no complement to his already boundless love.

      Offerings are made, not for his sake, but for ours. Because we are made to give ourselves over into his perfect happiness and enjoy him forever, we seek every means by which to express this. We want to offer ourselves in love, so we symbolize this by giving things that belong to us — tithes of crops, of animals, of time. But they only symbolize the gift God really wants: the heart. And when the heart is not given along with the offering, we see the reaction in the Sacred Scriptures: ‘“What to me is the multitude of your sacrifices?’ says the Lord; ‘I have had enough of burnt offerings of rams and the fat of fed beasts’” (Is 1:11); “‘Do I eat the flesh of bulls, or drink the blood of goats?’” (Ps 50:13).