Q: What is the difference between “mass” and “worship”? Where do these words come from?
A: If someone asks you whether you can have breakfast with them on Sunday morning, you might say, “I can’t, on Sundays I go to mass” or “…I go to worship.” Is one more correct than the other?
The answer is…not exactly. One–mass–is more precise than the other, but both are correct.
Worship is “the paying of divine honor to God” (source) and is a general team that includes any kind of honoring God. According to the Episcopal Dictionary of the Church, modern worship is generally either:
- private prayer: responding to God, by thought and by deeds, with or without words (Book of Common Prayer pg. 856) on one’s own
- corporate worship: we unite ourselves with others to acknowledge the holiness of God, to hear God’s Word, to offer prayer, and to celebrate the sacraments (Book of Common Prayer pg. 857)
The gathering we host on Sunday mornings is a specific type of corporate worship during which we offer Holy Eucharist, “the sacrament commanded by Christ for the continual remembrance of his life, death, and resurrection, until his coming again” (Book of Common Prayer pg. 859). This particular service of corporate worship is called the Holy Eucharist but is also called: the Lord’s Supper, the Holy Communion, the Divine Liturgy, the Great Offering, and finally and most simply–mass.
On a quick glance, “mass” sounds like a nod to the assemblage of people into a group. The noun mass which means simply a collection of humans can trace its roots through this etymology: “from Old French masse, from Latin massa, from Greek maza ‘barley cake’; perhaps related to massein ‘knead” (sourced from Oxford Languages via Google). Knowing that the word for assembling people has a history in baking and kneading–in which individual parts lose their own qualities and become one–seems quite on brand for what we do on Sunday mornings when we celebrate mass.
However, the etymological clues of that “mass” are a red herring. Despite the assembling of humans into a group and the parallels with being the body of Christ (symbolized by bread), our “mass” comes from somewhere else. When we say mass to mean the specific corporate worship that includes the Holy Eucharist, we are using a word whose history is traced thus: “Old English mæsse, from ecclesiastical Latin missa ‘dismissal, prayer at the conclusion of a liturgy, liturgy, mass’, from Latin miss- ‘dismissed’, from mittere ‘send, dismiss’” (again from Oxford Languages via Google). The dismissal from the medieval Latin Mass included the words “Ite, missa est” (source). “Ite” is an imperative (bossy verb) telling the listener to go or leave, but the “missa est” literally means “it is sent,” or “the Church (those convened here) is sent” which has a purpose other than simply telling folks that it’s time to vacate the pews. It is instructive. The end of Latin Mass conveys the same spirit as our dismissal at the end of worship: “Go in peace to love and serve the Lord.”
Worship, on the other hand, is a more straightforward word. Its roots are traced as: “Old English weorthscipe ‘worthiness, acknowledgment of worth’” (Oxford Languages via Google.” The Episcopal Dictionary says that “the term, from the Anglo Saxon, means to pay someone what is their due.” It doesn’t sound wrong per se–we absolutely want to give God what is due to that which Created and sustains–but it sounds a little transactional. Are we paying off a debt to God? (What is the interest rate on original sin?) Fortunately, the dictionary explains the current use more appropriately: “Today, it refers to the paying of divine honor to God. It is both a verb and a noun, used to translate the Latin verb adorare and the noun cultus and their equivalents in other languages. It was defined by Evelyn Underhill as ‘the response of the creature to the Eternal.'” That is indeed what we do on a Sunday morning.
Whether you tell your friend that you’re going to worship or you’re going to mass, we’re glad that you’re here.