Who
Justin (c. 100 to c. 165) was a Greek philosopher born in the Roman colony of Flavia Neapolis in Samaria, a town that sat near the site of the ancient Shechem, and which today is called Nablus. He was raised pagan, and from his youth he was hungry for truth about God. He told the story of his own search in a book later called the Dialogue with Trypho.
He went first to a Stoic teacher, then to a Peripatetic, then to a Pythagorean, then to a Platonist. Each school disappointed him in turn. The Stoic, he wrote, could tell him nothing of God. The Peripatetic was more concerned with fees. The Pythagorean demanded years of music and mathematics before he would speak of the divine. The Platonist gave him the most, and for a time Justin thought he had arrived.
One day, walking alone on a quiet stretch by the sea, he met an old man. They began to speak. The old man let him talk himself into knots about the soul and the world, and then, gently, pointed him not to a school but to the Hebrew prophets and a Galilean carpenter the prophets had foretold. Pray, above all, that the gates of light may be opened to you, the old man said. Then he walked away. Justin never forgot him.
Justin became a Christian, probably around the year 130. He opened a small school in Rome and taught the faith openly to anyone who would listen. He wrote, among other works, two Apologies in defence of his fellow believers, and the long Dialogue with Trypho. Around the year 165, in the reign of Marcus Aurelius, he was denounced to the prefect Junius Rusticus, refused to sacrifice to the Roman gods, was scourged, and beheaded. Six of his students were beheaded with him. The court record of that trial, the Acta Iustini, survives to this day.
The original voice
Around the year 155, Justin wrote a letter to the Emperor Antoninus Pius. He was trying to save Christian lives. The empire had begun to harass them, often on the basis of wild rumour, and Justin set out to show that the Christians were not seditious, not strange, not a danger to the state. They were ordinary, even quiet. In one short passage, near the end of that long letter, he gave us the oldest surviving description of what we now call the Mass.
And on the day called Sunday, all who live in cities or in the country gather together to one place, and the memoirs of the apostles or the writings of the prophets are read, as long as time permits. Then, when the reader has ceased, the president verbally instructs, and exhorts to the imitation of these good things. Then we all rise together and pray. And when our prayer is ended, bread and wine and water are brought, and the president in like manner offers prayers and thanksgivings, according to his ability, and the people assent, saying Amen.
Justin Martyr, First Apology, 67 (c. AD 155)
What they meant
Read it slowly. There is everything in it: the day, the gathering, the proclamation of the Word, the homily, the common prayer of the faithful, the bread and the cup brought forward, the Eucharistic prayer, the Amen of the people. It is the recognisable shape of the Mass that your parish celebrated this past Sunday, in outline.
Justin goes on, in the lines that follow, to describe the distribution of the consecrated bread and wine, the part the deacons take to the homes of those who could not be present that day, and a collection taken for orphans, widows, the sick, prisoners, and travellers in need. These are also things the Catholic Church still does, almost nineteen hundred years later, on every continent and in every language.
Note also what is not in his description. There is no demand for spectacle. No promise of feeling. No persuasion. The whole liturgy is laid out as if it were the most natural thing in the world for a community to do on a Sunday morning. The Church, in those decades, was still small and often hunted. There was no grand cathedral. There were no famous singers. There was only the day, the table, the Word, the bread, and the people.
Voices that came after
Eighteen centuries later, in November of 2017, Pope Francis began a long series of weekly addresses on the Mass. In the very first one, he reached for the same image Justin had used. Not a ritual, not a duty, but the centre of everything.
Today we begin a new series of catecheses, which will direct our gaze toward the “heart” of the Church, namely, the Eucharist. It is fundamental that we Christians clearly understand the value and significance of the Holy Mass, in order to live ever more fully our relationship with God.
Pope Francis, General Audience, 8 November 2017
Why it still matters
It is easy to feel that Sunday Mass is a habit, a small recurring thing in a busy week. Justin’s letter is a quiet reminder that this small recurring thing is older than your country, older than your language, older than any building you have ever stood inside. The same bread. The same Amen. The same gathering on the same day.
When you take your seat on Sunday morning, you are sitting in a chain of people that reaches all the way back to Justin’s neighbours in second-century Rome, and behind them to the Upper Room in Jerusalem. The faces have changed. The empires have come and gone. The day has not. The bread has not. The Word read aloud has not.
Justin gave his life for this. He was beheaded in Rome rather than abandon what had become the shape of his Sundays. It is worth asking, the next time the alarm goes off on a Sunday morning, what we believe we are walking toward when we walk to Mass.
A line to carry into the week
On the day called Sunday, the table is set, and we are expected.