A Journey through the Mass
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As the Creed ends with an emphatic AMEN, we sit as the gifts are prepared and the liturgy of the Eucharist begins. The bread and wine were made by many human hands from the gifts of wheat and grapes. The money represents the sacrifice of hours in our lives given to the charitable and evangelical work of the Church. The Procession with the gifts offers one of the strongest opportunities for understanding the relation between the sacrifice of the Christian people and the sacrifice of Christ. The Procession to the altar by representatives from the assembly is accompanied with song. The ordained bishop/priest/deacon receives the gifts and places them on the altar. These gifts were made by the community as food for life. We are all dependent upon each other for bread, the most fundamental of foods, and for the wine with its festive aura. We are all in communion in a ritual action showing the relationship of the order of the ordained and the baptized. By ourselves, we cannot offer suitable thanksgiving for all that God has done for us. In our poverty before God, Christ comes to meet us and reveal his solidarity with us in this poverty. Christ takes our gifts into his hands, and he will transform them into the Paschal Sacrifice continually offered in heaven. We offer up our lives to God through, and with, and in Christ’s offering. We place our lives into the hands of the priest in the person of Christ, who leads his whole body in this offering of sacrifice.
As the bread and wine are set upon the altar and all is prepared, the priest leads us in prayer that ends with It will become for us the bread of life … It will become for us our spiritual drink.
The ritual of the priest of deacon mixing a little water in with the wine contains the prayer, By the mystery of this water and wine may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity. Our poor humanity, water, mixes completely with Christ’s divinity. The priest will wash his hands reciting, Wash me, O Lord, from my iniquity and cleanse me from my sin. The hands of the priest now turn to a new purpose representing Christ’s hands who will take up these gifts, transform them through the power of the Holy Spirit and offer them to the Father.
The altar is set with our sacrifice and Christ’s and the priest now tells us to Pray, brothers and sisters that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God the almighty Father. The people rise to their feet affirming the sacrificial actions about to proceed at the hands of the priest. And so, we enter the Eucharistic Prayer.