A Tour through the Mass!

Presentation of the Bread and Wine

As we have already seen in this series of articles, the Liturgy of the Eucharist is made up of three parts, each of which corresponds to one of the actions of Christ at the Last Supper. He takes bread and wine, blesses the Father over them, breaks the bread and gives the bread and wine to his disciples. Bread and wine were both central elements in the Jewish ritual meals which are the background to the Last Supper and to the Eucharist.

At the Presentation of the bread and wine, we are doing the action of ‘taking’ corresponding to that action of Jesus at the Last Supper.
Unfortunately, the Presentation of the bread and wine has not yet been taken seriously enough in our celebration of the Mass. It is the point at which the gathered People of God enter into the action and meaning of the Mass.

The people who bring the bread and wine forward are ministers of the whole community; they are doing this action in the name of all. They are ministers as truly as are readers and special ministers and they need to be formed for this ministry as other ministers are prepared for theirs.
Let us look into the meaning of this initial part of the celebration of the Eucharist. To do that I want to ask a very basic question about these pieces of food which are part of our everyday lives.

Bread (Food)

What is food? What is its place in our lives? And bread is especially important as we often use it as a stand-in for our whole food culture as when we say that ‘we earn our bread by the sweat of our brow’.

Every time we eat food, we acknowledge that we cannot keep ourselves alive! We acknowledge that we have to take something into ourselves from outside ourselves to keep living! This is a recognition of our utter dependence on something beyond ourselves to stay living. We may not think about this as we eat, but it is nonetheless true of every human being. It is a radical statement about who and what we are.

So at Mass, we take this simple thing from our daily lives to the table of Christ. And the prayer which the priest prays acknowledges that God is the One who is the ultimate source of the life we have: “Blessed are you, Lord, God of all creation, for through your goodness we have received the bread we offer you: fruit of the earth and work of human hands, it will become for us the bread of life.”

This action of presenting these simple things upon which we depend for life to begin the Eucharist, acknowledges that we are not just dependent on something outside of ourselves for life but on the God who gives life to all. We acknowledge him as the source of our life and ourselves. We do this as we enter into the rest of the action of the Eucharist.

The Presentation of the bread and wine is not just a decoration of the Mass or something to get people involved; it is a radical expression of our relationship to the life-giving God. It asks us all to be spiritually and eucharistically involved.

By Fr Frank O’Loughlin