Please just google it (“Justin Martyr on the Eucharist/Mass”). It is well known to many Catholics and again part of the rich tradition of the Church Fathers. You will find it online. If you’d like to learn about the tradition we build upon, make sure to read them.
I’m glad this came up… I had to dust of my notes about Justin, and the Dialogue with Trypho, just one of his great writings.
Unfortunately, I don’t read this the same way as Catholics, because as Justine describes, “true sacrifice is being in prayer and thanksgiving.”
What I found interesting is that He was a pagan philosopher who later converted to Christianity while remaining a professional philosopher, and who often tried to harmonize Christian thought with what he saw as the best of Greco-Roman philosophy.
While Justin does refer to the partaking of bread and wine as a “sacrifice,” a simple reading of his words shows that his meaning was entirely different. The references are in his work, “Dialogue with Trypho,” where Justin presents a conversation between himself and a group of Jews, chiefly a man among them named Trypho.
Justin quite imaginatively attempts to utilize Old Testament imagery as a prophetic foreshadowing of the details of Christian worship. As such, he sees the fact that Christians of all nations are worshiping God through the communion meal as a fulfillment of Malachi 1:11.
It is an act of remembrance and thanksgiving. The only connection to atonement is that the thing being remembered and one of the things God is being thanked for is Jesus’ finished work of redemption, which is referenced in the past tense as a thing already accomplished and for which they seek only to remember and give thanks.
In the Dialogue with Trypho, Chapter 117, Justin makes it clear that he is talking about a sacrifice of praise. Indeed, pay careful attention to what he said:
“Now, that prayers and giving of thanks, when offered by worthy men, are the only perfect and well-pleasing sacrifices to God, I also admit. For such alone Christians have undertaken to offer, and in the remembrance effected by their solid and liquid food, whereby the suffering of the Son of God which He endured is brought to mind.”
Justin actually believes that prayer and thanksgiving is the true sacrifice. The act of partaking of the bread and the wine in remembrance becomes a sacrifice of praise in that it calls us to prayer and thanksgiving. It is the remembrance itself in thanks for what God has done that is the sacrifice. There is nothing here at all about Jesus’ body and blood being presented again on the altar to atone anew for the sins of those present.
