Psalms 141:2

"Let my prayer be set forth in Your sight as incense, and the lifting up of my hands an evening sacrifice" [Psalm 141:2]. That this is wont to be understood of the Head Himself, every Christian acknowledges. For when the day was now sinking towards evening, the Lord upon the Cross "laid down His life to take it again," [John 10:17] did not lose it against His will. Still we too are figured there. For what of Him hung upon the tree, save what He took of us? And how can it be that the Father should leave and abandon His only begotten Son, especially when He is one God with Him? Yet, fixing our weakness upon the Cross, where, as the Apostle says, "our old man is crucified with Him," [Romans 6:6] He cried out in the voice of that our "old man," "Why have You forsaken Me?" That then is the "evening sacrifice," the Passion of the Lord, the Cross of the Lord, the offering of a salutary Victim, the whole burnt offering acceptable to God. That "evening sacrifice" produced, in His Resurrection, a morning offering. Prayer then, purely directed from a faithful heart, rises like incense from a hallowed altar. Nought is more delightful than the odour of the Lord: such odour let all have who believe.

A sermon has to be preached about the evening sacrifice. We prayed after all as we sang, and we sang as we prayed, "May my prayer rise straight up like incense in your presence; the lifting up of my hands an evening sacrifice." In the prayer we observe the person, in the extension of the hands we recognize the cross. So this is the sign that we carry on our foreheads, the sign by which we have been saved. A sign that was mocked, in order to be honored; despised in order to be glorified. God appears in visible form, so that as man he may intercede; he remains hidden so that as man he may die. "For if they had known, they would never have crucified the Lord of glory." So this sacrifice, in which the priest is also the victim, has redeemed us by the shedding of the Creator's blood.

And he prays "constantly" (deeds of virtue or fulfilling the commandments are included as part of prayer) who unites prayer with the deeds required and right deeds with prayer. For the only way we can accept the command to "pray constantly" as referring to a real possibility is by saying that the entire life of the saint taken as a whole is a single great prayer. What is customarily called prayer is, then, a part of this prayer. Now prayer in the ordinary sense ought to be made no less than three times each day. This is evident from the story of Daniel, who prayed three times a day when such great peril had been devised for him. And Peter went up to the housetop about the sixth hour to pray; that is when he saw the sheet descending from heaven let down by four corners. He was offering the middle prayer of the three, the one referred to before him by David, "In the morning may you hear my prayer, in the morning I will offer to you and I will watch." And the last time of prayer is indicated by "the lifting up of my hands is an evening sacrifice." Indeed, we do not even complete the nighttime properly without that prayer of which David speaks when he says, "At midnight I rise to praise you because of your righteous ordinances." And Paul, as it says in the Acts of the Apostles, prayed "about midnight" with Silas in Philippi and sang a hymn to God so that even the prisoners heard them.

But what should be said concerning the evening sacrifices, since even in the Old Testament, by the law of Moses, these are ordered to be offered continually? We can show that the morning whole-burnt offerings and evening sacrifices were offered every day continually in the temple, although with figurative offerings. This is seen from what is sung by David: "Let my prayer be set forth in your sight as the incense, and let the lifting up of my hands be an evening sacrifice." We can understand in a still more spiritual sense that the true evening sacrifice is what was given by the Lord our Savior in the evening to the apostles at the Supper, when he instituted the holy mysteries of the church, and what he himself, on the following day at the end of the ages, offered up to the Father by the lifting up of his hands for the salvation of the whole world. The spreading forth of his hands on the Cross is quite correctly called a "lifting up." For when we were all lying in Hades, he raised us to heaven, according to the word of his own promise, when he says: "When I have been lifted up from the earth, I will draw all people to myself."

Does any one perchance flatter himself with this notion, that although in the morning, water alone is seen to be offered, yet when we come to supper we offer the mingled cup? But when we sup, we cannot call the people together to our banquet, so as to celebrate the truth of the sacrament in the presence of all the brotherhood. But still it was not in the morning, but after supper, that the Lord offered the mingled cup. Ought we then to celebrate the Lord's cup after supper, that so by continual repetition of the Lord's supper we may offer the mingled cup? It behoved Christ to offer about the evening of the day, that the very hour of sacrifice might show the setting and the evening of the world; as it is written in Exodus, "And all the people of the synagogue of the children of Israel shall kill it in the evening." And again in the Psalms, "Let the lifting up of my hands be an evening sacrifice." But we celebrate the resurrection of the Lord in the morning.