Week 5: The Our Father, Communion, and the Dismissal
Explaining the Mass, a homily series from September 2025
St. Paul writes to Timothy, “But you, man of God, pursue righteousness, devotion, faith, love, patience, and gentleness. Compete well for the faith…” (1 Tim 6:11-12) As we strive for this faithfulness to living God’s Word, Christ will dwell more and more in our hearts. “Being rooted and grounded in love,” St. Paul writes to the Ephesians, “you may be able to comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth and length and height and depth, and to know Christ’s love which surpasses knowledge, in order that you may be filled unto all the fullness of God.” Today we reach the end of the Mass, and the true high point of our worship of God. The Sacred Banquet is prepared and the Sacrifice has been offered. Everything we have talked about for this month leads to this point.
We begin the Communion Rites with the Our Father, in Latin the Pater Noster. The priest leads this prayer on behalf of all the people to God the Father, so he holds his hands in the “orans” position, which indicates a priestly intercession on behalf of the people to the Father, that I have previously mentioned. (English only: The people, joining the priest in the prayer, pray this prayer for themselves.)
We are invited into the prayer with the words, “we dare to say.” In Latin, it’s “audemus dicere”. We dare and have the audacity to pray this prayer. Why? Well, for starters, we start the prayer by calling the God who created all of the universe “Our Father.” Most of us say this prayer multiple times a day, and we probably don’t realize how incredible this claim is. In the ancient world, the Romans and the Jews would both have found this claim to be sacrilegious and insane. To say that God is your father is to say that you are a son or a daughter of God. In the ancient world, that meant you were a god. If saying “Our Father” is true, it either degraded God to a human level, or it elevated human beings to the level of God. To those who are not Christian, this is ludicrous. But to us Catholic Christians, this is entirely the point. Through Baptism we become sons and daughters of God, his adopted children, and so saying Our Father, at the command of Christ, is entirely correct. We must realize, though, what we are saying when we call God our Father, and we should live our lives accordingly.
I don’t have all day here, so I will try to contain myself and move more quickly through the rest of the prayer. We next say, “who art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name.” We remember that to be in Heaven is to be in the presence of God, and that this experience is not in the material universe. We profess the holiness of God and of his name. We say, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” God came down to this earth so that his kingdom may extend to all the corners of this earth, just as his kingdom encompasses all of heaven. In God’s kingdom, his will is done. That is why we must cleanse our lives of sin and anything that is not of God: sin is contrary to God’s will, and we must cleanse ourselves of it to remain in his kingdom.
“Give us this day our daily bread” is a tricky line, because the English hides something from us. Even the Latin hides it: “panem nostrum quotidianum” translates directly to “our daily bread.” In the Greek of the New Testament, the word “epiousion” is used. If you don’t know what that means, you’re in good company. This word is used exactly two times in the entire Bible: when Matthew and Luke recount the Lord’s Prayer. It’s not used in any other known Greek texts either. Church Fathers argued about this word. Other valid translations are “supersubstantial”–more than necessary, perhaps a reference to the Eucharist Chris would soon give us–, “necessary for existence” and “for the future” are also translations that have some backing throughout history. In such cases, it usually seems that the answer is that it’s probably a bit of all of them.
“Forgive us our trespasses and we forgive those who trespass against us” is a clear reiteration of Christ’s teaching that we will be held to the standard of judgment to which we hold others. If we desire for God to be merciful, we must, in turn, be merciful. I also must mention that “debts” is commonly used instead of trespasses here. The Latin text specifically uses debt terminology. This understanding can deepen our understanding of what God does when he forgives us. To forgive our debtors, in those days, is to pay off what is owed on our behalf so that we may be freed from debt slavery. Humans are born enslaved to sin and death. Like the servant who owed his master an astronomical amount, we cannot repay this debt. So God, our master, forgives it. Not only that, he pays the debt through his suffering and death on the Cross. If we remember the parable, the servant then refused to forgive his fellow servants and was thrown back into slavery until he paid the last penny. We must emulate the forgiving master–God–, not the unforgiving servant.
“And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil. Amen.” I could spend a lot of time here, but we ask God’s protection from evil, from the evil one, and we ask that he not abandon us to trials and testing.
There is so much more I want to say about the rest of the Mass, but I need to wrap this series of homilies up. The most important part of the rest of Mass is the reception of Holy Communion, and so I will skip everything else and talk just about that.
Receiving the Eucharist is not just about receiving the Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity of Jesus Christ into ourselves. I would argue that is not even the most important reason we receive the Eucharist. Remember what we say that we are doing at Mass: we are worshiping God by participating in a Sacred and Sacrificial Banquet. Throughout nearly all of human history, worshiping a god meant that we sacrifice something to that god and then those who participate in the worship eat a portion of the sacrifice. To partake of the sacrifice meant that you approve of what has been done, and you are a part of the community which has offered the sacrifice. We see this in Jewish temple worship too. Those things which are offered to God are, usually, eaten by the priests and the people who have brought the sacrifice to the priests.
At Mass, we have brought forward bread and wine. We have asked God to make this a sacrifice worthy of him. God changes the bread and wine into the Body and Blood of his Son: a sacrifice that is worthy of him. We have asked his angels to bring this sacrifice to him in Heaven and have offered it to him. There remains one component to complete the worship: we must eat the sacrificial offering. When we consume the Eucharist, we express that through this act we offer worship to God. Through this act we express communion with the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic church. Through this act we express our desire to leave behind the shackles of sin and more fully enter the kingdom of God. And yes, through this act we are united with God in an unspeakable way.
This is why St. Paul teaches that those who are not worthy due to sin must not receive Communion, for they will eat and drink condemnation on themselves. He writes to the Corinthians, “That is why many among you are ill and infirm, and a considerable number are dying.” (1 Corinthians 11:30) For our own safety, we must reconcile ourselves to God and his church by bringing any grave sin to sacramental confession.
This is also why accusations that Catholics worship someone other than God are not correct. Prayer and study are not worship. Partaking of the sacrifice is. For us, there is only one sacrifice: Christ on the Cross. Receiving the Eucharist is our participation in this sacrifice. We may offer prayers and petitions to the saints, but we do not offer worship to them.
Finally, this is why we must be in communion with the Church, not a member of another church or in some type of schism with the Catholic Church. Partaking of the sacrifice expresses communion with the community that offers that sacrifice. If we are not a part of that community through separation or through sin, then it is a lie to partake in the sacrifice. It is actually considered a sacrilege, because we are using the Eucharist–God himself–as an instrument to profess this lie.
I have so much more to say, but I think that this is enough for now. At the end of Mass, we hear, “Ite, Missa Est” – “Go, the Mass is complete!” We are sent, with Christ still present in us, out to the world. We are to literally bring Christ out into the world with us.