Thus the bread of the Eucharist is for us at once the sign of the cross and the sign of God's great and joyful harvest. It looks back to the cross, to the grain of wheat that died. But it also looks forward in anticipation to God's great wedding feast to which many will come from east and west, from north and south (cf Mt 8:11); indeed, this wedding feast has already begun here in the celebration of the Holy Eucharist, where men and women of all races and classes can be God's happy guests at table.
It is the priest's finest and sublimest ministry that he can be the servant of this holy meal, that he may transform and distribute this bread of unity. For him too this bread will have a double meaning. It will--to start with--remind him too of the cross. At the end he too must somehow be God's grain of wheat: he cannot be content with giving only words and external actions, he must add a piece of his heart's blood--himself. His fate is tied to God. What that means we have heard in the epistle. It means many kinds of external contestation and failure, the consciousness of not having really been the grain of wheat, and perhaps this is indeed the most oppressive and difficult of the lot, the realisation of how pathetic what one has done is measured against the immensity of one's task. Those who know this will understand why the priest says before the Preface every day: 'Pray, brethren, that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God, the almighty Father.' And he will let many kinds of thoughtless talk pass and instead hearken to the complete urgency of this summons to share in bearing this sacred divine burden.
But even for the priest the grain of wheat does not simply point to the cross. For him too it is a sign of God's joy. To be able to be the grain of wheat, the servant of the divine grain of wheat Jesus Christ, can at the same time make man glad in the depths of his heart. In the midst of weakness, the triumph of grace is fulfilled, as once again we have heard in the epistle from Paul, who experienced the immense joy of God precisely in his wretchedness. Not without embarrassment does the priest learn how through his weak and petty words people can smile in the last moment of their life; how through what he says people find meaning again in the ocean of meaninglessness, meaning on the basis of which they are able to live; and he learns with gratitude how through his ministry people discover the glory of God. He learns how through him God does great things, through his very weakness, and is full of joy that God has found someone as mean as him worthy of such mercy. And in learning this he becomes at the same time aware that God's joyful wedding feast, his harvest of a hundredfold, is not just a promise in the future but has already begun among us in this bread that he is empowered to distribute, to transform. And he knows that to be able to be a priest is at once the greatest demand and the greatest gift.
So we can well understand that today the Church allows the priest to pray after holy communion once again what he is able to say every day in the Office with the psalmist of the Old Covenant: 'And I will come to the altar of God, the God of my joy' (Ps 43[42]:4). We want to ask God that he will always let something of the splendour of this joy, if it is necessary, fall on our life; that he may give the radiance of this joy ever more deeply and purely to this priest who today for the first time comes before the altar of God; that he will still continually shine upon him when he does so for the last time, when he comes before the altar of eternity in which God shall be the joy of our eternal life, our never-ending youth. Amen.
--Card Joseph Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), Homily at a priest's first Mass, 1962, in Ministers of Your Joy, pp 20-23
Eucharist points to past sorrow and future joy and fills the priest's life with meaning
