"And With Your Spirit"
Priests have a few different options with which to greet the assembled congregation. “Grace to you,” they might say, “and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ.” Another option is: “The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ, and the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit be with you all.”
These greetings are anything but simple. The priest is not saying hello. In fact, they are taken from the letters of Saint Paul in the New Testament. Paul begins his letters with these exact same greetings: “Grace to you,” he wrote to the Romans, “and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” (Rom 1:7). He wrote the exact same greeting to the Corinthians, Galatians, Ephesians, and Philippians. He ended his letters with similar salutations. That, in fact, is where the priest’s other option comes from ― the end of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. It was his closing salutation: “The grace of the Lord Jesus Christ and the love of God and the fellowship of the Holy Spirit be with you all,” he wrote (1 Cor 13:14).
The priest’s shortest option to open the Mass is simply: “The Lord be with you.” This appears all across the Old and New Testaments. At key moments in their lives, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Joshua, and David all heard this greeting, either from God or from one of his angels. “The Lord your God is with you,” God announced to Joshua as he prepared to lead the Israelites into the Promised Land (Jos 1:9). It was these same words that were said to Mary before she was told of the Messiah in her womb: “Hail, full of grace! The Lord is with you” (Lk 1:28).1
It is not without significance that the Mass utilizes these greetings. Indeed, by using them, the Mass invokes the way God speaks to us and the way the first Christians spoke to each other. The greetings indicate that, right now, the Lord is with us, and so this is one of the key moments of our life. Like Isaac, Jacob, Moses, or Mary, we are being summoned ― at this very moment ― to notice the presence of God breaking into our lives.
The greetings, moreover, carry us into another world and into another age ― the age of the Bible and the Apostles. They were, after all, words spoken to Mary. They were words spoken by Paul among the Apostles. The Apostles, of course ― and their successors, the bishops ― were the ones who gave us the faith. Therein lies another purpose for the greetings at Mass. They remind us of the lineage we participate in, that the Mass is not new. It is as old as Paul, Mary, and the rest of Jesus’s Apostles. The Mass is as old as the faith itself. And by using these specific lines from Scripture, the Mass reminds us that our faith ― and the Mass, too ― was bequeathed to us down the generations of patriarchs, Apostles, bishops, and Christians of every stripe.
To all these greetings, the congregation replies the same way: “And with your spirit.” This, likewise, is more than a welcoming, “you too, Father.” Indeed, the congregation’s reply also reflects language Saint Paul used in his letters. Writing to the Christians at Galatia, Paul prayed that “the grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with your spirit” (Gal 6:18). I like how the Benedictine Jeremy Driscoll has explained this: When we respond this way, we “are addressing the ‘spirit’ of the priest; that is, that deepest interior part of his being where he has been ordained precisely to lead the people in this sacred action. [We] are saying in effect, ‘be the priest for us now.’”2
See Edward Sri, A Biblical Walk Through the Mass: Understanding What We Say and Do in the Liturgy (West Chester, PA: Ascension Press, 2011), 25.
Jeremy Driscoll, What Happens at Mass (Chicago: Liturgy Training Publications, 2011), 24.