What Shall We Eat?
25 May 2008
"What Shall We Eat?" asks the Gospel this morning, and it is the title of this sermon that the Principal has so prettily and wittily assigned to me. As I subsist on a frugal diet of smoked salmon, gulls’ eggs (when in season) and champagne, only occasionally supplemented by a stuffed guinea fowl or two, I might not seem the most qualified to answer the question. However, the answer to the question was given dramatically and liturgically last Thursday when we celebrated, in high Pusey House style, the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ, Corpus et Sanguis Christi (which some are celebrating today).
God gave to the Israelites manna from heaven and water stricken from the rock in their pilgrimage, their wilderness experience, to the land flowing with milk and honey. His incarnate Son surrendered himself for us on the cross in his sacrificial act of redemption for humankind and love but, lest we feared that he would no longer abide with us, no longer tabernacle with us on our pilgrimage and worldly journey, he left a memorial, a remembrance of his Passion in the Holy Eucharist, instituted on the night that he was betrayed. Under the veil of bread and wine, those almost distressingly commonplace of earthly elements, he left us his very self, his presence ever among us, ever in the midst of us, present in our tabernacles, ever our comfort and resource.
Of course, it is perfectly true that Jesus is present, is with us in his Church in many ways: in the words of Scripture, in our prayers, where two or three are gathered together there he will be, in the poor and dispossessed, in the sick and suffering, in the captive, in the sacraments, in the Sacrifice of the Mass, even in the person of the minister of the altar, the alter Christus. But above all and beyond all he is ever really and objectively present in the Eucharistic species of bread and wine which are his Body and Blood. The presence of Christ in the Eucharist is of an order different from the presence of Christ in the other sacraments and in the other ways.
Dr Pusey put it like this: “What is placed in the mouth is the Body and Blood of Christ. The faithless and the faithful, the wicked and the good receive the Body and Blood of Christ. The Eucharistic Sacrifice means no mere commemorative offering, nor the offering of ourselves, prayers and alms, but the priest presents and pleads to the Father the same body which was broken for us and the same blood which was shed for us, therein sacramentally present.” The Real Presence of Christ in the Sacrament is an objective reality and is not dependent on anything that is personal to the communicant. “The cup of blessing which we bless, is it not a participation in the blood of Christ? The bread which we break, is it not a participation in the body of Christ? Because there is one bread, we who are many are one body, for we all partake of the one bread.”
S. Paul’s words are but one example of the Biblical testimony that underpins the tradition and teaching of the Church, that in the Holy Eucharist Jesus is literally and wholly present, body and blood, soul and divinity, under the appearance of bread and wine. “I am the bread of life. Your fathers ate the manna in the wilderness, and they died. This the bread which comes down from heaven, that a man may eat of it and not die. I am the living bread which came down from heaven … my flesh is food indeed, and my blood is drink indeed.”
The persisting outward appearance of bread and wine is not mere illusion. All sacraments have an outward form but an interior transformation and significance, the outward and visible signs of an inner reality. The actual transformation, the change or conversion of the reality, while the appearance remains unaltered ought not to be disguised by the process or manner by which the process comes about. In the Western Church this manner or process has been called transubstantiation, still for some a contentious issue. But that is only one term for what happens, employing an Aristotelian vocabulary, of accident and substance, and a philosophical framework, humanly adopted as a helpful way of suggesting what happens.
In the miracle at Cana in Galilee, Jesus changed both the accidents and the substance at once but in the Holy Eucharist the change of substance is not matched by a change in the accidents of the bread and wine. He changes bread into his flesh, wine into his blood. The colour remains, the taste remains, all the physical effects and the outward determinations of bread and wine remain. In the Blessed Sacrament we receive that which has the outward properties of bread and wine, but is Christ. “There is no trickery here, no appeal to fallacious outward appearance … the experience of our senses remains undisturbed; what is changed is the substance, that which the thing is, that which makes it what it is in the sight of the Creator who called it into existence. God, who can create and can annihilate, can also change this into that; in the Blessed Sacrament it is his will that the change should be beyond our senses, and that the substance which is truly present should be only seen, only tasted by faith.”
But transubstantiation is only a term, only a way of attempting to explain what happens, helpful to some, less so to others, there are other terms and suggestions; the Eastern Church prefers metousiosis. But none of the terms employed explains the mystery, nor exhausts the mystery. The process or manner of the transformation should not side-track us from the fundamental issue of transformation because all ages agree on the transformation in a way surpassing understanding.
As S. Cyril of Jerusalem wrote: “The bread and wine of the Eucharist before the holy invocation of the adorable Trinity were simple bread and wine, but the invocation having been made, the bread becomes the Body of Christ and the wine the Blood of Christ.” So it is that the faithful in the Eucharistic Rite of the Ethiopian Church are able to affirm, “I believe, I believe, I believe and profess to the last breath that this is the body and blood of our Lord God and Saviour Jesus Christ, which he took from Our Lady, the holy and immaculate Virgin Mary, the Mother of God.”
But we do no less when we say Amen at the conclusion of the Eucharistic Prayer. That Amen, our Amen, is first and foremost an act of faith in the presence of Christ in the consecrated bread and wine that have become the Body and Blood of Christ. That Amen, our Amen, expresses not only a faith in the Body of Christ that is the Eucharist but also a faith in the Body of Christ that is the Church, the authentic setting for the sacramental reality we witness. The Eucharist and the Church are inseparably bound together. That Amen means a belief in and a commonality with those who hold the same faith concerning the Eucharist, the Mass, the Holy Communion, who accept the Catholic Creeds and the authentic authority of the Church Catholic.
The Real Presence of Christ is an incarnational imperative. As God gave his Son into the world to transform the world so God continues to use the mundane, the worldly and the earthy and the temporal as a means of communicating to his people the transcendental and the eternal. God in his Son was located in historical and physical reality: he remains in his Son located amongst his people in physical but veiled form, tangible, apprehendable. “It is not man that causes things offered to become the Body and Blood of Christ, but he who was crucified for us, Christ himself. The priest, in the role of Christ, pronounces the words, but their power and grace are God’s. ‘This is my Body,’ he says, the Word transforms the things offered.”
The Real Presence of Christ is also a resurrection imperative and enables us to share his resurrection life. As S. Ambrose put it, “If you receive the bread each day, each day is today for you. If Christ is yours today, he rises for you every day … ‘You are my Son, today I have begotten you,’ therefore, today is when Christ rises.”
Incarnation, Passion, Resurrection all have at their heart the love of God in Christ Jesus unstintingly poured out and in the Blessed Sacrament is above all and beyond all the enduring expression of divine love present and active in the world. In that disc or fragment that we hold momentarily in our hands, or receive reverently and courteously on the tongue, God is become present: a statement that cannot be made anywhere else. The significance of our act of consumption should never be lost on us, nor wearied with familiarity.
All the blessings and graces bestowed on us, all that have been granted to and showered upon all those who have gone before us, even all those inestimable benefits granted to Our Lady and all the saints in the glory of heaven (including S. Bede the Venerable, the patron saint of historians, whose day this is), all the miracles, all the gifts of healing, all the wonders wrought by God in Christ, many though they have been, great and mighty though they were, cannot be compared with what Our Lord gives us in the Sacrament of his Body and Blood, for there he gives us his very self.
One of my most distinguished predecessors Humphry Beevorended a sermon on the Blessed Sacrament with these profoundly true words, I can do no better:
“Our Lord’s purpose in coming to us in the Blessed Sacrament is the same purpose which brought him to live and die in Palestine two thousand years ago. He comes not merely to be worshipped but to give us life, to be the Mediator between sinful man and his Father which is in heaven. We honour and declare his sacramental presence in our midst; we join in the worship that the shepherds and wise men paid to the infant Saviour at Bethlehem; we cry out with S. Thomas, ‘My Lord and my God.’ Yet we cry also with S. Philip, ‘Show is the Father;’ our devotion to the Incarnate Lord must lead us to the contemplation of the unchanging glory of the eternal Triune God: for ‘he that has seen me has seen the Father.’ As we glorify him, we glorify the Father who sent him, the Father who through his eternal Spirit has given him the power to change our sinful lives by the communication to us of his perfect life. Kneeling before the Blessed Sacrament, we give thanks for communions past, we look forward to communions to come; we praise our Lord and pray to him because his sacramental life is the source of all that is best and worthiest in us; because through him we worship the Father, and in him we behold the Father; and apart from him we are not worthy to approach the throne of God.”
Father William Davage Custodian of Dr Pusey's Library