Sacrifice, or Sacrificial Meal?

Hermann Sasse's essay, "The Lutheran Understanding of the Consecration", is excellent on the true point of distinction between Lutheranism and Rome.

Sasse argues that the true point of departure is not transubstantiation (firm though the Lutheran rejection of that teaching is, this is merely an argument over the "how" of the Real Presence). Rather, "the antithesis lies at another point ... in the doctrine of the sacrifice of the Mass". He writes:

"Chemnitz answers the question of whether one may call the Lord's Supper a sacrifice in [a] figurative sense in the affirmative. But a limit is placed on this designation. The moment the Lord's Supper becomes an atoning sacrifice, one has left the ground of the New Testament."

However, elsewhere Sasse does acknowledge that the Sacrament is a sacrificial meal:

One could even say with the Council of Trent, that it is memoria, repraesentatio and application if the further formulations of Trent ... did not give [the latter two terms] yet another meaning that is incompatible with the NT. But that the Lord's Supper is the re-presentation of Christ's sacrifice and the real bestowal of what is gained through this sacrifice is the real teaching of the NT. If one wants to understand it as a sacrificial meal only figuratively, then the sacrifice of Christ on the cross would also have to be understood figuratively"

So the Lord's Supper is truly a sacrificial meal, at which the body and blood of Christ - the same body and blood that were sacrificed for us - are truly present. But if you go on to say that the Supper is an atoning sacrifice is stepping over the line. eg the Roman Canon of the Mass, quoted by Sasse:

"We Your servants, but also Your holy people ... offer to Your illustrious majesty ... a holy victim, an immaculate victim.

(FDN, is that still what is said in the post-Vatican II mass?)

Sasse introduces that quote by saying that "None of the finely worked out theories about the identity of the sacrifice of the Mass with the sacrifice of the Cross ... eliminates the fact that in the Mass man is also making a sacrifice."

The point of distinction is, I suppose, between the Lord's Supper as Christ's action, as He makes Himself present miraculously by His Word through His ministers, and something that is presented as a human work of re-offering Christ to propritiate the Father. It's a sacrificial meal, where we feed upon the Victim of a sacrifice that has happened once for all on a date in history, not a sacrifice, where we offer Him again and again.