“Fruit of the Earth and Work of Humans Hands”: What We Bring to the Table
“Blessed are you, Lord God of all Creation, for through your goodness we have received the bread we offer you: fruit of the earth and work of human hands, it will become for us the bread of life” (St. Paul Daily Missal, 842).
Bearing Fruit: Cultivating the Garden of Our Hearts
Gardens are an important setting in Scripture. Adam and Eve are created in the Garden of Eden, born out of God’s great love for us (Genesis 2). Jesus prays and suffers in the Garden of Gethsemane before he is arrested and crucified (Matthew 26:36-46, Mark 14:32-42, Luke 22:39-46)—again, out of love for us.
This Lent, the Catholic Women in Business team is meditating on our interior garden, where we can invite God to help us bear fruit. As St. Augustine wrote, “The turn of phrase by which the man is said to work the land, which is already land, into also being landscaped and fertile, is the same as the one by which God is said to work the man, who was already a man, into also being godfearing and wise.”
It’s not uncommon in business to ask, “What does this person bring to the table?” We ask this question when assessing candidates for a job opening, evaluating potential project partners, or structuring a winning team. In a secular business context, the proverbial table is more often than not the altar of profits, and what is being sacrificed, for better or worse, is a person’s specific skill set.
However, when asking this question from a Catholic perspective, even when evaluating a person’s fit for a business need, the altar of sacrifice is no less than the Eurcharistic altar. And the offering is not simply a skill set but a human person.
Preparation of the Gifts
In the preparation of the gifts in the Eucharistic liturgy, the priest prays, “Blessed are you, Lord God of all Creation, for through your goodness we have received the bread we offer you: fruit of the earth and work of human hands, it will become for us the bread of life” (St. Paul Daily Missal, 842). This prayer raises a couple important questions: How is the sacrifice of the Mass the work of our human hands? What is our participatory role in this sacrifice?
The language of this prayer echoes sacred Scripture, in that God is commonly portrayed as a gardener. We see this imagery in Genesis, when God places Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and also in various parables throughout the Gospels. The analogy of God as gardener provides us with an image of the loving, active role he plays in our life, tilling the soil, planting the seed of his word, and nourishing the garden of our life with the light of his son and the flowing waters of baptism.
So, again, what do we bring to the table? We bring our graced cooperation, expressed in tears of repentance and imitation of his life.
The Lenten Garden
“Remember, you are dust, and to dust you shall return.” This statement is the way our Lenten journey begins, the dust and ashes already marking us as God’s garden to be tilled. Another iteration of the words spoken when ashes are traced on our foreheads is “Repent, and believe the Gospel,” echoing the very first words spoken by Jesus in the Gospel of Mark (Mark 1:15), denoting the beginning of the divine gardener’s work. Only when we acknowledge that we have become arid soil can he till the soil of our life to make us fertile.
This is made clear in the Gospel reading for the third Sunday in Lent, when we hear the parable of the barren fig tree. The owner complains to his gardener, “For three years now I have come in search of fruit on this fig tree but have found none. So cut it down. Why should it exhaust the soil?” But the gardener convinces the owner, “Sir, leave it for this year also, and I shall cultivate the ground around it and fertilize it; it may bear fruit in the future. If not you can cut it down” (Luke 13:6-9).
St. Augustine tells us that the barren tree is humanity, and the gardener is the divine gardener, Jesus Christ, who is merciful to humankind (Sermon 254.3). He goes on to explain that the cultivation of the ground by the gardener symbolizes the virtue of humility and the fertilizer, the tears of repentance. Augustine says that when we repent over our sinfulness, that is fertilizer “in a good place, it’s not wasted there, it produces grain” (s. 254.4).
What is the grain the divine gardener hopes to produce? To find out, we need look no further than the Eucharist. The synoptic Gospels provide us with the last supper narrative in which the words of institution are given: “This is my body,” “This is my blood,” “Do this in memory of me” (Matthew 26:26-30, Mark 14:22-26, and Luke 22:14-20). Where we would expect the same narrative to appear in the Gospel of John, we read about the washing of the feet (John 13:1-17), after which Jesus tells his disciples, “I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do” (John 13:15).
When we read these diverse accounts together, we come to understand that the washing of the feet is Jesus living out his Eucharistic sacrifice. By washing the feet of the disciples, Jesus communicates “this is my body, this is my blood,” and he is commanding us to imitate him (“Do this in memory of me”).
Imitating Christ in Our Life
At this point, the movement swings in the opposite direction, for it is precisely our imitation of Christ’s Eucharistic love that we ultimately bring to the table. As members of the mystical Body of Christ, our participatory offering in the sacrifice of the Mass is the fruit of our daily Eucharistic activity. We imitate Christ’s loving desire to serve others by repenting of the idea that any work is beneath us and humbling ourselves to clean out the office refrigerator, take out the trash, clean up after others, and change lightbulbs and, most especially, by being patiently present to the people around us as they, too, carry a diverse load of burdens personal and professional—even when we feel as though we have better, more productive things to do.
Yes, our hands are calloused and our fingernails are dirtied, but this is precisely what it means to imitate the divine gardener. It is this imitation that makes the whole of our life increasingly fit for bringing to the table, the altar of the universe on which all things are offered to our heavenly Father. It is for this reason that the proper response to the preparation of the gifts is a resounding, “Blessed be God forever!”
Vanessa Crescio is an accountant with the Archdiocese of Saint Louis. She earned an MBA from the University of Notre Dame, an MTS from Newman University, and worked in the real estate and banking industries prior to serving in church management roles at the parish and diocesan levels. She is interested in thinking through co-responsibility in the Church and developing leadership programs to form Catholics to serve the Church with not only their knowledge, skills, and abilities but with the servant heart of Christ. Read more of her writing at FRESHImage, and follow her on Instagram.