Before the Offertory, deacons will have prepared the offerings: bread and wine which by God's grace and the descent of the Holy Spirit upon them become the Holy Body and Blood of the Lord.

“Give to the Lord the glory due His name; Bring an offering, and come into His courts.”— Psalm 96:8

As the Lord Jesus offered Himself as a sacrifice of love to God the Father on our behalf, we ought to offer ourselves totally — through our unity with Him — as His own body. By the Offertory, the Church declares her acceptance of the sacrifice of the Lord Jesus, and her willingness to offer her life as a sacrifice of love for Him. We offer ourselves and our lives in Jesus Christ.

The liturgy is not a repetition of the cross but its continuation. Our life — together with our labour, joys, sorrows, hopes, ambitions, and hardships — is represented by the offering of the bread and wine. We present a spiritual effort and a sacred toil, an offering of love.

The Lord Christ specifically chose the fruit of the vine to be transformed into His Holy Blood. The resemblance of Christ and the Church to the grapevine is repeated throughout Holy Scripture. Every local church is a bunch of grapes in this vine, and the believing members are the grapes. The universal church is the huge vine that includes all these bunches. Christ is the root and origin.

“I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in Me, and I in him, bears much fruit; for without Me you can do nothing.”— John 15:5

In the sacrament, the grains of wheat are gathered together in one qorbana ("sacrifice", i.e. the Body), and the individual grapes are gathered in one cup — symbolising the nature of the united Church: many individuals who have become one in and through Christ.

Without grinding, each grain of wheat remains individual and not united with the others. Water, symbolising the Holy Spirit, binds the flour into one Body, just as the one Spirit makes the Church one by descending upon it. We are God's wheat.

“Most assuredly, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls into the ground and dies, it remains alone; but if it dies, it produces much grain.”— John 12:24