Participating in the eucharist is like getting on a celestial lift. Though it’s a brief journey timewise, a few minutes when it comes to specifically pleading Christ’s Sacrifice, we should be aware that the people and needs already on our hearts when given to God get lifted to him with powerful consequence. With John 6 we see the lifting of Christ in bread and wine drawing the cosmos to God. With Saint Paul who sees the Eucharist showing the Lord’s death we are lifted with Christ through separate consecration and display of bread and wine to imagine a showing, a piercing through the Church walls, of divine love to irradiate the suffering world. With the author of Hebrews we see our prayer taken up into Christ’s perfect prayer ascending evermore from earth to heaven.
These two Sundays I’m covering for Fr David’s leave I want to focus on two aspects of Christian life we need to keep central to our lives – Christ’s Sacrifice and Presence in the Eucharist. Consideration of these aspects flows naturally from our Gospel readings from Saint John Chapter 6 used in July and August of Year B to supplement St Mark’s Gospel which is so short it can’t be used to provide 52 Sunday readings.
Keeping the main things as the main things is as necessary to living eternal life as it is of living life and the two main things are Christ’s Sacrifice and Presence. Today we’ll be focusing on the first and next Sunday on the second though they’re inseparable. In today’s Gospel as in the last two Sunday Gospels from John 6 we read of the controversial drawing power of Jesus as Bread come down from heaven. ‘Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph…? How can he now say, “I have come down from heaven’?’ They say. Our Lord answers by affirming his divine nature and his capacity to bring people into harmony with God the Father whose sacrificial instrument he is. ‘No one can come to me unless drawn by the Father who sent me… I am the living bread that came down from heaven. Whoever eats of this bread will live for ever, and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh’.
The main things in Christianity are the sacrifice of Christ linked to his presence, God’s presence with us and the Eucharist is our weekly, even daily, reminder of this. God the Father made us to draw us into friendship with himself. The short falling and misuse of our God-given free will we call sin made a barrier to such friendship. The Father sent his sinless Son to be present in the world, ‘open wide his arms for us on the cross’, break the barrier of sin and ‘reveal the resurrection’ and win us back into friendship ‘by rising to new life; so he fulfilled [the Father’s] will and won for [him] a holy people’.
Though Christ’s Sacrifice has an eternal dimension, intended ‘from the foundation of the world’ it is revealed in time upon the cross and in the interpretation of the Cross at the Maundy Thursday Supper table and afterward in the Garden of Gethemane. This morning’s Eucharist is a memorial of the Last Supper where Our Lord took bread and spoke over it the words I shall speak in his person and on his behalf and our behalf: ‘This is my body’ and over wine, ‘this is my blood’. The death of Christ on Good Friday is given meaning for us by the action of the Last Supper and the record of Christ’s prayer of self-surrender in Gethesemane which followed it.
The disappointment of the Christian world over a skit during the Paris Olympics opening ceremony which appeared to parody Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘The Last Supper’ is linked to the perception of that meal as revealing the heart of Christianity. The scene featuring drag queens, a transgender model, and a nearly-naked singer in roles reminiscent of Our Lord and his apostles reveals a blindness to the most sacred event reverently captured by Da Vinci about the self- giving of God for the cosmos. That love does not exclude drag queens but its priority is to explain how the death of Christ on Good Friday is a voluntary sacrifice showing the costly, abundant and far reaching love of God. Sacrifice is about love more than it is about death. At the heart of reality lies the mutual love of God the Father for the Son in the Holy Spirit inviting human beings into the communion of saints. This was first stated at the Last Supper Table, revealed upon the Cross and at the Lord’s command is presented to us at every Eucharist so we can enter afresh into its movement of self offering towards God and the world.
Participating in the eucharist is like getting on a celestial lift. Though it’s a brief journey timewise, a few minutes when it comes to specifically pleading Christ’s Sacrifice, we should be aware that the people and needs already on our hearts when given to God get lifted to him with powerful consequence. With last Sunday’s section of John 6 I see the lifting of Christ in bread and wine drawing the cosmos to him ‘the bread of God which (also) comes down from heaven and gives life to the world (v33). With Saint Paul who speaks of the Eucharist as ‘showing the Lord’s death until he comes’ we are lifted with Christ through separate consecration and display of bread and wine to imagine a showing, a piercing through the Church walls, of divine love to irradiate the suffering world. With the author of Hebrews we should be aware of our prayer and obedience being taken up into Christ’s perfect offering and obedience with that of his whole body, that in the eucharist we are ascending ‘Mount Zion, [we are] come to the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, and to innumerable angels in festal gathering, and to the assembly of the first-born who are enrolled in heaven, and to God the judge of all, and to the spirits of the righteous made perfect, and to Jesus the mediator of a new covenant, and to his sprinkled blood’ (Hebrews 12:22-24)
Attending the eucharist week by week, day by day, is spiritually uplifting, yes, as we engage with the special selection of scripture, join intercession for those on our hearts and, above all, receive Holy Communion in Christ’s body and blood about which we will share more next Sunday. It is also transformative of much beyond ourselves through our joining in worship ‘as on Mount Zion [in Jerusalem]’ in solidarity with the Sacrifice of Christ which has solidarity with the suffering and joy of the whole world. This morning we might think of the extraordinary turmoil in our own society. As one Eucharistic prayer states ‘May this Sacrifice which makes our peace with you advance the peace and salvation of all the world’. We respond to the priest before the Eucharistic Prayer: ‘May the Lord accept this sacrifice at your hands, for the praise and glory of his name, for our good, and the good of all his Church’. That response leads into a dialogue about self-offering as we say we are ‘lift up our hearts’ with Christ to God. After the consecration of bread and wine bells ring to underline the Lord’s coming in these elements – more next week on this – the priest prays on our behalf to God ‘offering you this our sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving bringing before you this bread and this cup’.
In his booklet on ‘The Christian Concept of Sacrifice’ Archbishop Michael Ramsey reflects on a saying of P.T.Forsyth: ‘There was a Calvary above which was the mother of it all’. Ramsey continues ‘we get the idea in [the letter to the] Hebrews that Christ’s sacrifice in time and history had an eternal root. He was doing, as man’s (sic) priest in time and history, something that he could not but do because it belonged to his eternal essence to be doing it’. Like our Gospel passage – more next week on this – the letter to the Hebrews opens a window to obedience as the inner motive of sacrifice, Christ’s and ours at the eucharist, as it quotes the Psalmist: ‘See, God, I have come to do your will’ (Hebrews 10:7).
Day by day, Sunday by Sunday, we have an invitation to participate in a blessing and distribution of bread and wine that impacts the cosmos through the eucharistic sacrifice of Jesus who died in our place and comes here and now, there and then, to be in our place and that of the whole world before our Father. His institution of the eucharist calls forth obedience – ‘do this in remembrance of me’ – but more profoundly obedient self-offering in his own for our salvation and that of the whole world. Coming regularly to Mass helps us keep the main things as the main things necessary to living eternal life, namely entering and re-entering again and again Christ’s Sacrifice and Presence. ‘Through whom we offer you, Father, our souls and bodies to be a living sacrifice… to live and work to your praise and glory’.
