This is a gamechanger episode, specifically because it changed my game! After learning this, I was so much more able to pray the Mass.
Here are a few quotes:
a. Gregory of Nazianzen writing to another bishop: “Cease not both to pray and to plead for me when you draw down the Word by your word, when with a bloodless cutting you sever the body and blood of the Lord, using your voice for the sacrificial knife.”
b. CCC 1085: “All other historical events happen once, and then they pass away, swallowed up in the past. The Paschal mystery of Christ, by contrast, cannot remain only in the past because by his death he destroyed death, and all that Christ is—all that he did and suffered for all men—participates in the divine eternity, and so transcends all time while being made present in them all. The event of the Cross and Resurrection abides and draws everything towards life.”
c. Feingold: “The logic of sacrifice requires that each person makes his own interior act of self-offering and intend that it be represented by the external bodily sacrifice that is offered on the people’s behalf by the priest, who is their mediator before God.”
d. St Peter Chrysologus comments on this : When Paul says this, he “raised all men to priestly status….Each of us is called to be both a sacrifice to God and his priest. Do not forfeit what divine authority confers on you…keep burning continually the sweet smelling incense of prayer…Let your heart be an altar. Then which full confidence in God, present your body for sacrifice. God desires not death, but faith; God thirsts not for blood, but for self-surrender; God is appeased not by slaughter, but by the offering of your free will."