of the Epiphany
Jan. 4, 2015Prayer over the Offerings
Ursulines, Willow Drive, New Rochelle
“Look with favor on these gifts of your
Church, in which are offered now not gold or frankincense or myrrh, but he who
by them is proclaimed, sacrificed and received, Jesus Christ” (Prayer over
Offerings).
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| Adoration of the Magi by Fra Angelico |
Well, that prayer that we’ll pray over the
offerings in a little while is pretty awkward grammatically, and it certainly
wouldn’t win a Hemingway prize for directness or clarity. It is, however, theologically rich.
1st recalling today’s Gospel, it refers to
the gifts of the magi to make a contrast with the gifts that we present here
today as our offering to the Divinity—to the Father, not to the newborn King of
the Jews. These are our gifts, the
Church’s gifts; we ask the Father to “look with favor” upon them.
That word “look” is intuére in the Latin text,
which means—according to a fine commentary on the new presidential prayers—“to
gaze into.” [1] We pray the Father to look into the inner
reality of these gifts and not just their surface, and to find favor with that deeper
reality.
The gifts right now—as we make the
prayer—are just bread and wine. But
bread and wine are not what we’re about to offer to the Father, are they? They’ll become the body and blood of his
beloved Son Jesus, on whom his favor rests—the one who by the gifts transubstantiated
in our sacred mysteries “is proclaimed, sacrificed and received.”
Now the Father can hardly help seeing the
body and blood of his beloved Son when we offer it to him, and we would suppose
can hardly help gazing upon the Son with favor.
So what are we praying for?
According to the commentary to which I referred, that the Father see us
as well. The bread and wine will become
the body and blood of Christ. Are we not
the body of Christ? We pray that the
Father will see us joined to Christ and look favorably upon us too, us who form
part of the “whole Christ.” We pray that
when the Father sees the gifts, he see also us who present them, and when he
sees us gathered here, that he see his Son in or with us. After all, the offering of our Eucharist is
really Christ’s offering, Christ’s sacrifice, isn’t it?
Our prayer says that by these gifts of
God’s Church Jesus Christ is “proclaimed, sacrificed and received.”
Celebrating the Eucharist, we proclaim the
death and the resurrection of Christ until he comes again. We proclaim that he is what the gold,
frankincense, and myrrh signify: our
king, our God, and our redeemer thru his cross.
We pray the Father to keep all that before him, to be mindful of it, as
he looks upon our gifts, and us united with his Son in this offering of the
Son.
As we celebrate the Eucharist, the
sacrifice of Jesus Christ is made present—not re-enacted, for Christ offered
himself once, for all. But thru the
sacred mystery the sacrifice of Jesus is re-presented, made present—not again
but still; thru the sacred mystery “the sacrifice Christ offered once for all
on the cross remains ever present” (CCC 1364).
As the Father was pleased with Christ’s self-offering on Calvary in time, in 30 A.D. (or whatever the
year was), he is eternally pleased
with that sacrifice, which we join Christ now in offering, making his
self-offering our own—and offering ourselves alongside Christ.
In these gifts Jesus Christ is
received. After we proclaim him, after
we offer ourselves to the Father with Jesus, Jesus gives us himself in the
Eucharist, cementing our union with him.
We become what we eat—and we pray that it may truly be so, that we
become perfect images of Christ. If our
union is truly one of hearts, one of commitment to the Father’s will like
Jesus’ own commitment, the Father can only look with favor on the gifts we
offer: not only Jesus Christ, but
ourselves in Jesus and Jesus in ourselves.
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