So Sunday by Sunday we come, in obedience to Our Lord’s call, to fulfil the obligation of the Sunday Eucharist.  We too kneel and worship, we too open our treasures and present to God our gifts – the gift of ourselves at the Offertory, and the greater gift of Our Blessed Lord at the Consecration, present on the altar in the Most Holy Sacrament.

In the words of the Offertory prayer for the Feast of the Epiphany said over the bread and wine, “We beseech thee, O Lord, mercifully to look upon the gifts of thy Church: wherein no longer presenting gold and frankincense and myrrh, we offer and receive him who by those gifts was signified, even Jesus Christ Our Lord”. (1)

Or to look at it from another point of view, at the Sunday Eucharist Our Lord comes into our midst in the Blessed Sacrament to present us before his Father’s throne in Heaven as his own people whom he was born and died to save.

So Sunday by Sunday Our Saviour withdraws us, as it were, from the individual outposts of his Kingdom and brings us together into its innermost citadel, into the very Presence of our God and King.  And then, when the Eucharist is over, he blesses us and sends us from his throne in Heaven back into the world again, there to man our own particular outpost of his Kingdom here on earth as his faithful soldiers and servants, and his loyal sons and daughters.