22d Sunday
in Ordinary Time
Most unusual, but this weekend (Sept. 1-2, 2012) I didn't have an "outside" Mass assignment; thus no homily to prepare. Here's an oldie.
Aug. 31, 2003
Prayer over the Gifts
Good Shepherd, Tampa
“Lord, may this holy offering bring us your
blessing and accomplish within us its promise of salvation” (Prayer over the
Gifts).
At Mass we listen to the word of
God in the sacred scriptures. But God
also speaks to us thru the other texts of the liturgy. There’s an ancient theological principle, lex
orandi, lex credendi: literally,
“the law of prayer is the law of belief.”
In other words, how we the Church pray publicly is an authentic
expression of our faith, a rule of faith, a statement of faith. Hence Holy Mother Church, after the 2d
Vatican Council most strongly encouraging a return to vigorous preaching of the
word of God, doesn’t restrict that only to the readings at Mass but also allow
homilies on other texts of the sacred liturgy.[1] Hence also the Church strictly regulates the
wording and the ritual of our public prayer; she is jealous to preserve what we
hear, because, as St. Paul
teaches, “faith comes from what is heard” (Rom 10:17).
In about 15 minutes we’ll make
this prayer to God the Father: “Lord,
may this holy offering bring us your blessing and accomplish within us its
promise of salvation. Grant this thru
Christ our Lord. Amen.” That prayer comes at the end of the rites by
which we prepare the altar and our gifts for the Eucharistic sacrifice, and
it’s called simply the Prayer over the Gifts.
The prayer is addressed to the
Lord. In most of our liturgical prayers,
that means God the Father. Jesus defined
his mission on earth as showing us the way to the Father—read, e.g., his words
to the Apostles at the Last Supper in John 14-17. When Jesus taught us to pray, it was to his
Father, our Father. And so thruout the
Mass we speak confidently to the lord of our lives, the creator of the
universe, with words of adoration, of thanksgiving, of petition, of contrition.
This particular prayer, which is
characteristic of all the prayers over the gifts, is a petition, a
request: “May this holy offering bring
us your blessing and accomplish within us its promise of salvation.”
This offering is holy. Why so?
Three reasons. 1st, because of
who offers it; 2d, because of the One to whom it’s offered; 3d, because of what
the offering will become.
Our offering is holy because it
comes from God’s holy people. God has
consecrated us for his service. He has
made us his own. He has given us a
sacred rebirth as his children. In the
words of St. Peter and of one of the prefaces of the Eucharistic Prayer, he has
made us “a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people of his own”
(1 Pet 2:9). St. Peter also calls us “a
holy priesthood to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God” (1 Pet 2:5). What I might offer to you—as alms, as hospitality,
as gratitude, and so on—is holy if my motive is good. What I might offer to Chico,[2] or
you might offer to your family pet, is holy in the degree that you honor God
for the loveliness of his creation. A
farmer’s or a gardener’s care for growing things, an astronomer’s study of
Mars, is holy to the same degree. So
whatever we do for God, whatever we do in his name, is holy.
Our offering is twice holy
because it’s offered to God, to the All Holy One, rather than to one of his
creatures. It’s sanctified by being set
aside for his worship, for his glory, for his use; by being made his own in a
way that you or Chico
or your daffodils or Mars is not, just as we regard churches and shrines as
holy places in ways that our homes and places of business are not.
What is it that we offer? The prayer is described as “over the
gifts.” We offer bread and wine. These are gifts in themselves, food (and the
money that purchased them) that we might have kept for ourselves. They’re also symbols because they are our
nourishment. Bread and wine are basic
foods; they sustain our lives; and so they symbolize our lives. We offer God not merely this little bit of
bread—very sorry looking bread, to be sure—and wine, but even our whole
selves. (You’ve heard the quip that it
takes more faith to believe that host is really bread than to believe that it
becomes the body of Christ?)
We also offer God, thru the
bread and wine, our thanks. We imitate
what Jesus did when he fed the hungry crowds and when he celebrated Pass-over
with his disciples. We thank God for all
his saving activity in our lives and the life of the human race, especially for
the death and resurrection of his Son Jesus Christ and our participation in
Jesus’ death and life—the very participation that makes us and offering holy.
Our offering is thrice holy,
finally, because of what it will become:
by the power of the Holy Spirit, the bread and wine will become the body
and blood of Jesus himself. Thus what we
offer to our Father in heaven is truly his own Son, who died on the cross, who
rose on the 3d day, who now reigns with the Father in heaven. We unite our offering with Jesus’
self-offering, the offering that worked our redemption. We can offer the Father nothing holier than
his own Son, nothing more pleasing to him than his beloved Son.
“May this holy offering bring us
your blessing,” we plead. We ask, “Grant
this.” We have no power to bless
ourselves, to redeem ourselves. We rely
upon the graciousness of the Lord: May
he bless us thru this offering, i.e., thru his Son’s sacrifice, thru his Son’s
body and blood that will be given to us in the Eucharist. May our participation in the Eucharist effect
the pardon of our sins, the greatest blessing God can give us, and open our
hearts to further blessings from the Lord.
In the words of St. Thomas Aquinas’s prayer of thanksgiving after Mass,
“May this holy communion be for me…the source of an increase in charity and
patience, humility and obedience, and of every virtue; a strong defense against
the snares of my enemies, visible as well as invisible; a perfect calming of my
passions, carnal as well as spiritual.”
Don’t we all desire such blessings?
We pray that our offering of the Eucharist—and our sharing in it—will
produce such blessings in us because God is so gracious to us.
“May this holy offering
accomplish within us its promise of salvation.”
I’ve already suggested in part what that means. If the Eucharist is the living body and blood
of Christ; if whoever eats his flesh and drinks his blood has eternal life—the
scriptural theme that became familiar to us thru our gospel readings from John
6 the last 5 Sundays—then that is the promise of salvation: eternal life, eternal union with God in
Christ, eternal happiness. We begin that
by a corporeal union with Christ, his body and blood being our food, and that
corporeal union leads to spiritual union.
Christ promises that this union will be perfected when he raises our
bodies from the grave, as the Father raised his, never to suffer or die again,
always to be at peace, in harmony, filled with joy in the presence of God and
all God’s servants.
Our prayer is always made “thru
Christ our Lord.” We recognize that
Jesus Christ is Lord, the same term of divinity we use to address the
Father. He is also our lord in the sense
of teacher and master (cf. John 13:14).
He teaches us the ways of God; he commands us to walk in those ways if
we would go with him to his Father’s home (cf. John 15:11-17). We pray to the Father thru him as our
intercessor, as the One who is always pleasing to his Father, the One who knows
the Father’s heart best of all, the One whom the Father can’t refuse, the One
who became a man like us and brings to the Father not just his humanity
but our humanity as he intercedes for our pardon and our welcome into
the Father’s family.
Our prayer concludes with your
“Amen.” The priest voices the prayer;
your “Amen” ratifies it, makes it yours.
Amen means “so be it” or “yes!” and is easily the most important
word you say at Mass, as many times as you say it. May God indeed do all the marvelous works
that will assure our salvation, thru Christ our Lord.
No comments:
Post a Comment