All of Nature's Contribution to the Mass: Part V

Concluding our series on the sacrifice all of creation offers in worship to God the Almighty Father, we now look at how all of creation is united together through our work, our own sacrifice that we offer in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.

The sacrifices of creation can only be offered to God through our cultivation and work of the items to render them in service of worship. We form and carve the beeswax into candles; we make bread for the Eucharist from the wheat of the earth, and the wine from crushing grapes. We press olives to extract their oil for Chrism and melt and cast gold into chalices to contain our Lord’s blood. Through these actions, we fulfill one of the primordial commands God gave to us in Genesis, to “Fill the earth and subdue it.” (Gen. 1:28). We participate in the work of God by creating new things from what He has given us, and we in turn offer it back to Him.

Pope Benedict XVI wrote in his Apostolic Exhortation Sacramentum Caritatis, “In the bread and wine that we bring to the altar, all creation is taken up by Christ the Redeemer to be transformed and presented to the Father. In this way, we also bring to the altar all the pain and suffering of the world, in the certainty that everything has value in God's eyes… It enables us to appreciate how God invites man to participate in bringing to fulfillment his handiwork and, in so doing, gives human labor its authentic meaning since, through the celebration of the Eucharist, it is united to the redemptive sacrifice of Christ.” (47)

We also offer to God our very self, our bodies and minds to carry out His will in the world. In the Holy Mass, the priest at one point says, “Pray, brothers and sisters, that my sacrifice and yours may be made acceptable to God, the almighty Father”, to which we respond, “May the Lord accept the sacrifice at your hands, for the praise and glory of His name, for our good and the good of all His holy Church.” We each offer the sacrifice of ourselves and our work to God, uniting it with Christ’s sufferings, and the priest in persona Christi is both the sacrifice and the one carrying out and offering the sacrifice. That is, he offers the sacrifice of the spotless lamb, Christ himself on the cross, both by stepping into the self-sacrificial nature of Christ and lifting Christ in the Eucharist towards Heaven in oblation. God provides us at Mass with the sacrifice: His own Son. But He asks of us an interior sacrifice so that we can worship Him completely. Offer to Him your hearts and your minds, your work and your time. Give to God a worthy and acceptable sacrifice to provide for the worship of Him and to provide for all of us on our journey home to Heaven.