Mass8.html

Preparation for Mass

Opening Rites

The Gloria

Collect and Readings

Creed I

Creed II

Creed III

The Preparation

Preface and Sanctus

The Benedictus

Part IX

The Cannon (cont)

The Our Father

The Sign of Peace

The Agnus Dei

The Communion

Part VIII: The Benedictus

Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!

Who is it that comes in the Lord's name? Who but the one before whom the children strew branches of palms and olives? Who but the one who can claim the Lord's Name as His own? Who but He who is the Lord's own Word, His very Name, God Himself, our savior Jesus Christ?

It is right to say that He is blessed indeed, He who is the source of all blessing and of every good thing. Yet we also bless Him, in calling him blessed. Indeed, we sometimes pray "Let us bless the Lord / and give Him thanks." God gains nothing from our blessing, from our praise, yet He desires it because it brings us to perfection. All the world is His, created by His hand, held together by His will, and yet He desires us to bring Him what meager gifts we can, because by offering to Him we become rich in His grace. It is by the greatness of His love that we were created, out of the abundance of His love that we were redeemed after having sinned, and from the richness of His love that He shows us the way back to Him through praise and worship, through penance and sacrifice. Nothing could be more true than to call our Lord blessed, and nothing more good for us. In praising our savior we are reminded that we are little and dependent on him. The sin of pride, to which we all tend, is beaten back as we recall our simpleness before our Lord's greatness, and our total dependence upon his tender generosity.

Blessed is He who comes. Just as He came into Jerusalem in triumph, with branches of palms and olives cast on the street before Him, bringing His divine presence into that city more truly than it had ever dwelt in the temple, and just as He is coming again at the end of time to judge the world through fire, so He comes to us in the mass, about to become present on the altar at the words of the priest. Because the moment of His coming is so near, we kneel on the ground at the end of this prayer, aware of our unworthiness to appear in His presence, and the great honor that he is about to give us by appearing before us. Again we repeat the cry of the children of Jerusalem--Hosanna in the highest--and then we fall into silence, on our knees, before that great mystery that is the presence of Christ, coming to us.