Picture this. It’s Friday evening. You call a close friend to invite them over for dinner on Sunday. Your friend is thrilled with the invitation and asks, “What can I bring?” You don’t really want to put them out, so you say, “Why don’t you bring a salad.” Your friend agrees, and you both hang up the phone, eagerly awaiting your Sunday evening meal.
Promptly at 5:30 on Sunday evening your friend rings your doorbell. You invite her in, and she quickly puts her salad in the refrigerator before you can take it from her. Then you invite her to sit in the living room to chat for a bit while your main course finishes cooking.
When the timer goes off, your friend excitedly pulls the salad out of the fridge. “I grew this myself,” she announces with a great deal of pride as she hands you a beautiful head of Romaine lettuce. Not quite salad, but you know just how much time and effort your friend put into growing this lettuce, and you feel honored that she would share the fruit of her labors with you.
You accept the lettuce, wash it, toss it with some olive oil and balsamic vinegar, add some craisins, walnuts and a bit of parmesan cheese, and now you’ve transformed a plain head of lettuce into a gourmet salad. Your friend is ecstatic and comments on how delicious the salad is.
If you pay close attention to the prayers that are said during the Offertory, you’ll see that not only is this story a good analogy of what takes place during the Offertory, but it’s also the model of our spiritual lives!
God takes the initiative After the priest receives the gifts of bread and wine at the procession, he takes the bread and wine back to the altar. Then, lifting up first the bread and then the wine, he prays, “Blessed are you, Lord God of all creation, for through your goodness we have received this bread/wine to offer…”
Notice the emphasis on receptivity here. We are recognizing that all we have, indeed our very being, is a gift from God. Earlier, as we recited the Creed, we recognized that God is “creator of heaven and earth, of all things visible and invisible.” In our Offertory, we recognize that the very things we are offering to God were first given to us by God. Sure we call the wheat and the grapes “fruit of the earth,” but we recognize that the earth and everything in it is the product of God’s creative action. The only proper attitude to the great gift of God’s creation is one of gratitude. As one prayer has it, “We offer You Your own from what is Your own.”
We transform, then give back to God When God made Adam and Eve, He called them to join Him in His own act of creation when he gave them the command to “till and keep” the Garden, and to “fill the earth and subdue it.” With this call to be God’s co-creators in bringing all of creation to its fullest potential, the Offertory prayer continues, “…fruit of the earth/vine and work of human hands…”
The gifts we are offering at the altar represent the work of our hands, our own blood, sweat and tears – the fruits of human labor in our efforts to be God’s co-creators. It was God Who created the grapes and the wheat, but it is man who cultivates those gifts, harvests the fruits, and transforms those fruits into bread and wine for the nourishment of our bodies, and for the joy of our souls (yes, wine is a symbol of joy).
This brings up an important point. We must bear in mind that on one level the bread and wine we offer symbolize us. We are offering ourselves to God, recognizing that all we have and all that we are come from Him. This is why the priest later prays over the gifts, “May we be accepted by you, O Lord, and may our sacrifice in your sight this day be pleasing to you.”
God receives, transforms, then gives back to us Yes, we are co-creators with God, but God is not one to be outdone. We have cultivated His creation and brought forth bread and wine for the life and nourishment of our bodies. But God created us as “living souls,” (cf. Gen. 2:7) – a unique blend of body and spirit, the material world and the spiritual world. Man cannot live on bread alone, we are told, but must also be nourished on the spiritual food of God’s Word. (cf. Deuteronomy 8:3), which is given to us “for the life and salvation of our souls.”
And so God takes up the gifts that we offer Him. And these gifts, through God’s own saving action, “…will become for us the bread of life/our spiritual drink.” God uses the food that nourishes our physical bodies to then nourish and bring life to our souls as well.
We receive and are transformed, becoming God’s gift to the world There’s an action that the priest performs quietly at the altar immediately before he elevates the chalice. After pouring the wine into the chalice, he takes a cruet of water and pours a few drops into the wine. Many interpret this action as being symbolic of the blood and water the flowed from Jesus’ side on the Cross. But this isn’t the full symbolism of the gesture as expressed in the prayer that accompanies the action:
“By the mingling of this water and wine, may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled Himself to share in our humanity.”
This brief prayer reveals to us the truth of what our participation in the Eucharist is all about. God accepts the gifts we offer Him, particularly the gift of our own humanity that we offered Him in the person of Mary. In exchange for our gifts, He promises us a “share in the divinity of Christ.” In other words, God offers us here and now a share in His own life and happiness. Our Holy Communion is a foretaste of the eternal communion that we hope to share in the life to come.
The challenge is, after receiving this foretaste of eternal life, are you going to keep it to yourself, or are you going to go out and share it with the world? As we’ll see when we come to the end of our catecheses on the parts of the Mass, the end of the Mass itself is a command for us to “go in peace” to share this divine life with others in our daily lives.