Do you come to Mass with specific intentions you would like to pray for? Do you know when the best time is to offer these intentions to God? Father Simon explained this and the greatest offering of the Mass during a recent episode of Father Simon SaysTM on Relevant Radio®.
“I’ve been reading about the Mass and during the Mass, our prayers are strongest at the consecration but also, I was reading we offer ourselves and we should offer ourselves during the offertory. I didn’t quite understand that, because I thought that the point of the Mass was that Christ offers himself to us,” said Yvonne.
“No, Christ offers himself to the Father. That’s the point of the Mass and we join him on the cross,” responded Fr. Richard Simon.
“When I get distracted at Mass—and priests do, we’re always worried about the next thing and where we’re supposed to be after Mass and do I have time to read my breviary and that sort of thing—when I get distracted I start concentrating on the word ‘you’ and ‘your’. The imperative forms of the word, all the second-person forms, because who’s the ‘you’ we’re talking to at Mass? It’s the Father! And so the priest, in the person of Christ, offers Christ to the Father. And you know what I do? I climb up on the patten and offer myself,” explained Fr. Simon.
“I love that prayer, the Morning Offering: O Jesus, through the Immaculate Heart of Mary—because she’s the very representative of the Church—I offer you my prayers, works, joys and sufferings of this day. So, whenever the bread is lifted up to the Lord in the offertory and when the consecrated Body of the Lord is lifted up in the major and minor elevations, those are three good times at which to offer our joy and our sorrows to the Lord, to offer ourselves. When I take Communion, what I’m saying is just as Jesus put himself in his flesh and blood on this altar for me and offered himself to the Father, so too I join him on the altar and offer myself for the redemption of the world in union with him.”
We bring everything to the altar at Mass. “We don’t go to Mass to get something, we go to Mass to give something. I give him my joys; I give him my sorrows; I give him all the people I’m worried about, all the people who have asked for my prayers.”
Listen to the conversation below, and tune in to Father Simon Says, weekdays at 2pm ET / 11am PT, only on Relevant Radio.
