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Whence shall we? John 6.
I didn't say nearly all there is to say about the Credo, the Sunday before last, but I think we had better take it as said and go on to the Offertory, because we don't seem to be getting through the Mass as quickly as we ought to. At the end of the Credo, the priest turns and says Dominus vobiscum, and then Oremus. Don't be taken in by that; it's a false alarm. The priest says Oremus, Let us pray-and then he doesn't do anything of the sort; he just starts doing things with the chalice and paten. But on the whole I think it's rather a good thing that the priest does kid you like that; because as I was saying before the word Oremus is a useful sort of alarm-dock (if we will use it like that) to wake us up at various points in the Mass, just when our attention was in danger of going to sleep. And it generally means something is going to happen; a new movement in the dance is just going to begin. On being invited to pray like that, you immediately sit down, to shew that you are not being taken in. But the fact that you are sitting down doesn't mean that it's a good moment for exchanging a word with a friend, or joggling that loose tooth in the hope that it will come out, or otherwise just filling in the time. The Offertory is really rather an important part of the Mass, and all the more so because, in a sense, this is where you come on.
I rather think if you go to High Mass in a Dominican church you will find that point emphasized; I mean about the Offertory being important. The Dominicans, as I dare say you know, have a rite of their own when they say Mass. It was only in 1570, you see, that St. Pius V, the same Pope who excommunicated Queen Elizabeth, said it was really time we stopped saying Mass more or less as we liked, and the whole of Latin Christendom must say it in the same way. But, he added, that wasn't to apply to religious orders who had been using a rite of their own for two hundred years or more; and that included the Dominicans. I may tell you, in a sort of undertone, that St. Pius V was a Dominican himself. And that's why when Father Gerald Vann comes here he not only wears odd clothes but says Mass in such an unexpected way. In certain of the old rites too there is a lot of ceremonial leading up to the Offertory. The chalice and paten haven't been in church at all up till then; and at the Dominus vobiscum-Oremus a procession comes out of the sacristy, with the subdeacon carrying the chalice and paten, and people walking with candles and so on in front of him. It all seems rather overdone to us, perhaps because we are accustomed to do things much more simply; and at Low Mass all that happens is that two wretched little boys in red cassocks scramble to their feet and go round to the side and have a quarrel about which shall hold the water and which the wine. What's the sense of making a fuss about it?
Well, in the first place I think you can say this; the Mass is all one; the sacrifice is going on all the time, not just at odd intervals. We pick out certain bits of it and treat them as high spots; there's a bell for the Sanctus, bells for the Consecration, bells for the Domine non sum dignus; and if we aren't careful we shall think of the Mass as three separate moments of action with a few odd prayers shoved in between. That, of course, is all wrong; the Mass is a continuous action; and I expect most of you have been brought up to realize that from the Preface down to the priest's Communion the sacrifice is being made. What I mean is that it's not like hanging on to the telephone and waiting for a call to come through, suddenly; it's like watching a game of tennis, say, at which every stroke counts. And I think it's much more business-like to treat the Offertory, not the Preface, as the starting point; though I don't know if people who are learned in liturgy would back me up there. I think the continuous action of the Mass begins just here, with the Offertory.
It's all very well for you to point out that the Offertory is only concerned with unconsecrated bread and wine, and that isn't much to get excited about. That's quite true, of course, but I think if you will use your imagination for a moment you will see that there is good excuse for making a lot of the unconsecrated host, the unconsecrated chalice. They may have no great importance of their own at the moment, but they are going to be terrifically important. And it's very narrow-minded of us .if we think only of what things are at the moment, not of what they are going to be.
Imagine yourself walking through a field of wheat; out in the park, say, by the deer-cote. All those ears of wheat are full of promise; they are going to be something. That particular ear of wheat which is sticking out on the left of the path will be threshed, ground in the mill, baked in the oven, made into a sandwich, and be eaten by somebody on a railway journey; that is the destiny which is shaping itself inside that particular set of little husks. Now look at that ear of wheat which is sticking out on the right of the path. That one will be threshed, ground in the mill-the same mill, baked in the oven no, not in the same oven, or at any rate, not in the same batch; there will be no baking powder this time. Then it will be pressed by a Carmelite nun in a press which will give it the imprint of the crucifix; it will be sent off in a tin to the sacristan of some church; it will lie on the altar, some Latin words will be said over it, and after that it will be lifted up in a gold monstrance, and everybody who passes in front of it will go down on both knees . . . It's the same with the chalice, only, of course, we aren't so familiar with the process of making wine. That duster over there will find its way into a bottle of ordinary wine; somebody will drink it over his dinner; get drunk on it, perhaps, and come to blows, and be sent to prison. That other duster will find its way into a bottle of altar wine, will be consecrated_, will be drunk by a priest, and bring him just the grace he needed to resist that temptation, to rise to that height of sanctity. And yet the two clusters grew side by side in the same vineyard, long ago.
So what the priest is doing at the altar is to separate, to earmark, this particular lump of wheat, this particular dose of grape-juice, for a supernatural destiny. And that, of course, is just what is happening to you and me all the time. Sooner or later we shall die, and that moment of death will be, please God, our Consecration; we shall be changed into something different, be given a spiritual body in place of our natural body, and live praising God among the Saints to all eternity. What we are doing now, all the time, is to make of our lives an Offertory to Almighty God; to separate them, set them apart for him, so that when death comes it may be our Consecration. And that is why the pious books will tell you, at the Offertory, to put yourself in imagination on the paten, between the priest's hands. You at the moment, your body at this moment, is something ridiculously cheap and unimportant; open one artery of it, choke up one air passage for a few minutes, and it is done for; it will be buried away in the ground and rot there. That's what it is, but the point is not what it is but what it's going to be. Please God, when it has been consecrated as he means it to be consecrated-and he has all that planned out for you and me already-it is going to be a glowing focus of his praise, a mirror which will reflect his uncreated loveliness, for all eternity.
We mustn't despise, then, the unconsecrated host which the priest is holding up in front of the crucifix, the drops of wine which are trickling down into the chalice; we must think of what they are going to be. You have all of you heard about good King Wenceslas, because a clergyman wrote a rather inaccurate carol about him, which thousands of people will be singing this next fortnight. You know all about his making the page carry pine-logs to the poor man's house, although as it was right against the forest fence, you would have thought it would have been simpler to chop him up a dead branch or two on the spot. What you don't know is that King Wenceslas always insisted on making the altar-breads for his chapel with his own hands, because he thought even a king ought to be proud to do that. And the whole idea of the Offertory is that the bread and wine are something which YOU hand over to ME, which the laity hand over to the priest, to see what he can make of them. That's why I say that this is the point where YOU come in. Those two small boys in red cassocks, one of them with hiccoughs and the other with his shoe-lace undone, represent you, represent the congregation. In theory, you are all crowding on to the sanctuary, turning the priest's solitary dance into a tumultuous round-dance; all holding out pieces of bread and shouting, " Father Knox! Father Knox! Do bless this one!" That's what the Offertory really is; only you aren't actually expected to do quite that. You are expected to place your body, in imagination, beside the host on the paten, and to say, " Dear God, this ridiculous thing is all I have to offer you; please make something of it, if even you can make something even of a person like me ".
Yes, let us get excited about the unconsecrated bread and wine, because of what they are going to be; but don't let's lose sight of the fact that what they are going to be depends entirely on what God is going to do with them; WE could wave them about in the air and repeat Latin sentences over them from morning to night, and they would be just ordinary bread and wine still; it's only because God is going to take a hand that they are going to become something quite different. I always like to think of the Offertory as a repetition of what happened when our Lord fed the five thousand people in the wilderness, just with five loaves and a couple of fishes. That's why I took those words as my text, " Whence shall we? " Here are five thousand people all hungry and shouting for food, whence shall we, with only a few coppers in the common purse, buy two hundred pennyworth of bread, in a trackless desert where there are no bakers' shops anyhow? And then the shamefaced afterthought; " As a matter of fact there is an urchin here "-yes, an urchin; the word is only twice used in the New Testament, in Matthew xi where it means a guttersnipe, and here in John vi where it means an urchin-" an urchin who has five loaves and two small fishes; but that isn't going to go far among five thousand ". All the same, the urchin is produced, and stands there on one leg with his thumb in the corner of his mouth looking up at our Lord and grinning: " You can have them if you want.'' That is the server at Mass; the boy in the red cassock with hiccoughs who provides the priest with the material for the miracle that is just going to be performed in his hands. A pathetically small ration, but it's something; our Lord only wants us to give him something. Everything we do for him, every aspiration of our hearts towards him, is so ridiculously inadequate, considered in itself; it is his grace, really, that has got to do the miracle, to make something out of our efforts. Everything you and I do is just water for him to turn into wine, five rolls for him to feed a mass meeting with.
You see, then, something of what the Offertory is. Suscipe, sancte Pater, the priest says; " Holy Father, almighty, eternal God, receive this unspotted Victim " -he calls it that already! It is only a plain piece of bread, but because of what it is going to become, later on, he already calls it" the unspotted Victim"; the action of the Mass is all continuous, you see, and the action of the Mass has begun. On to that victim he piles all his innumerable sins, faults, and pieces of negligence; you wouldn't believe how many of them a priest has.
On to that victim, he piles the needs of all the congregation present, nay, of all faithful Christians, living and dead; this piece of bread, which might equally well have been made into a sandwich and eaten in a railway train, is going to be the Victim that will bring us all to everlasting life. And then the chalice; the wine first, and then the tiny spot of water. If the priest, by mistake, puts into the chalice one eighth as much water as he has put wine, he must start all over again; the water has got to be a tiny spot. And the words the priest says as he does it give the explanation of that: " O God, by whom the worth of our human nature was wondrously fashioned, and refashioned more wondrously still, grant us, through the power of this water-mingled-with-wine, in imitation of this water-mingled-with wine, to be partakers of his Godhead who was courteous enough to share our Manhood." Make us one and the same thing with Jesus Christ, our identity merged and lost in his, just as the identity of that spot of water is merged and lost in the wine that covers the bottom of the chalice. That is the whole point of the Offertory; to remind us how little it is we offer, so that when we get to the Consecration we may be bowled over, more than ever, by the thought of what he makes of it.
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