What’s So Important about the Presentation of the Gifts? 

In his initial explanation of the Good News to the Gentiles, Acts 10: 34-43, Peter uses the word “witness” three times: “We are witnesses of all that [Jesus of Nazareth] did…. witnesses chosen beforehand by God… commissioned to bear witness that he is the one….” Obviously, Peter could not think of the Good News or of himself without awareness of his call to bear witness—a call that belongs to all of us through our baptismal anointing as prophets. 

“Gone ahead of you”  

Matthew 28:1-10 (alternate Gospel from Vigil Mass) begins: “As the first day of the week was dawning….” This is the dawn of Christianity. A new beginning. In daylight, when people go to work.  

Christ is risen. The seekers are told that if they want to see him, they have to get moving! The angel told the women at the tomb, “He is not here. He goes ahead of you to Galilee. There you will see him.” Jesus repeated the same message: “Go and carry the news to my brothers that they are to go to Galilee. There, they will see me.” 

Galilee here is synonymous with mission. “Most of the events of the Synoptic Gospels occurred in Galilee, and there Jesus spent most of his life and most of his ministry.” (See McKenzie, Dictionary of the Bible, under “Galilee.”)  

If we want to “see” Jesus, we will find him by joining him in his mission. 

To commit to the mission of the Messiah is a mystical experience. It is the experience of call, of being personally invited and empowered by God to do the work of Jesus. Until we hear this call, until we feel moved to take on the work of the Church, we are still “infants” in the faith. Children’s only duty is to develop themselves and grow to maturity. But the mark of maturity is to go beyond oneself in dedication to work that contributes to the well-being of others. We are adults in the Church when we take on the work of the Church. (This is the context in which Paul wrote his famous “Hymn to love” in 1Corinthians, chapters 13-14. He is telling the Corinthians to “grow up” by dedicating themselves to “building up” the Church.) 

People sometimes say they don’t find Mass “meaningful.” The short answer to this is to paraphrase St. John of the Cross and say, “Where you don’t find meaning, put meaning, and you will find it.” But what does “meaning” mean? A dictionary definition is: “adding significance or purpose to somebody’s life.”5 The Mass explicitly does this. 

During the Presentation of Gifts, we are called to “present our bodies as a living sacrifice to God” in reaffirmation of our Baptism. We send up, as a symbol of ourselves, a host to be placed on the altar, lose its existence as bread, be transformed and offered as the body of Christ for the life of the world. Since the host represents us, this is without doubt an act that “adds significance, meaning and purpose” to our lives. If we mean it. 

If we don’t pay attention to what is happening or to what we are doing but just sing the hymn along with the choir or watch the altar servers preparing the altar, we won’t experience anything very meaningful. For that, we have to consciously be aware of what the Presentation of Gifts is expressing at that moment, make it our own expression, and mean what we express. 

What we are expressing is dedication to the mission. We are reaffirming our Baptism, declaring our deliberate participation in all that the Mass means and expresses, and presenting ourselves under the form of the bread and wine to be offered with Christ for the life of the world. 

May the Lord accept the sacrifice… for our good and that of all his Church. 

“A fresh dough”  

1Corinthians 5:6-8 invites us to see the bread being carried up to the altar as us. Paul tells us to be “fresh dough.” To bring a prophetic freshness to the Church and to the world. To live in a way that makes it obvious Christianity, our religion, is not just the “same old same old.” This is what it means to bear witness to the risen, the living Jesus, the Jesus present and acting in us who are his real body on earth. Now. 

To do this, Paul says we have to “get rid of the old yeast.” What is that? 

Yeast is the moving factor. It is what makes the dough rise to become bread. In us and in human society, the “yeast” is what makes us “rise to the bait” when something is held up before us as an object of choice. The yeast is that complex of attitudes, values, desires, compulsions, fears and expectations that is the interior make-up of each one of us. The yeast is everything prior to free choice itself, but it has the greatest influence on what our free choices will be. The yeast determines the “chronic priorities,” recognised or not, that we bring to every encounter with every object of choice. Whether what is offered is good or bad, the yeast is what makes us spontaneously rise to the bait or be unresponsive to it. It takes an act of free will to actually get hooked on what expands or diminishes life, but the yeast determines the attraction. 

The “old yeast” is cultural conditioning. It is made up of all the attitudes, values, etc. that have been “programmed” into us since our first contact with the human race in a society corrupted, as all societies are, by many false attitudes, values and patterns of behaviour. To “get rid of the old yeast” is to declare oneself free—and prove it by living by Christ’s standards instead of by those of the culture. 

The Presentation of Gifts reminds us at every Mass to be “fresh dough.” But we need to put ourselves consciously on the paten to be presented, transformed, offered and shared as the “unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.” 

“Of sincerity”: not corrupted, not ruled by the shortsighted standards of the “world” or the blind impulses of the “flesh.” And “of truth”: not the truth of this world’s orbit, but the Truth of the Way that is divine and the Life that is proper to God.   

Every time we do this, “the first day of the week is dawning.” It is a new day, a new beginning, a new hope for humanity. “This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad.” 

Today’s Psalm Response (Psalm 132): The liturgy invites us to make Peter’s attitude toward this call our own. We embrace it in the Responsorial (Psalm 118): “This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad.”  

Prayer Prompt: What do I usually think about at Mass during the Presentation of Gifts? Do I find new meaning now in the Presentation of Gifts?  Can I make the Presentation of Gifts a moment of intense personal recommitment? 

— Fr. David M. Knight

View today’s Mass readings, Lectionary #42, on the USCCB website here

Fr. David M. Knight (1931-2021) was a priest of the Diocese of Memphis in Tennessee, a prolific writer, and a highly sought after confessor, spiritual director, and retreat master. He authored more than 40 books and hundreds of articles that focus primarily on lay spirituality and life-long spiritual growth.