Real Presence (Mid-week Message)

 

Fr. Tony’s Mid-week Message

January 29, 2014

Real Presence

A few months back during the Monday evening Men’s group, one parishioner raised the question for all to discuss: “What does the Eucharist Mean to Me?  How is it that God Comes to Me in the Bread and Wine?”  The discussion was very personal, with no one taking notes or judging anyone else, just as our discussions in Church ought to be always.   Some said they believed in the real presence of Christ in Eucharistic elements, the consecrated bread and wine.   Others said they sensed the real presence of Jesus in the Eucharistic celebration, in the sharing of this memorial meal ordained by our Lord before his death. Some said they sensed Jesus’ presence in the gathering of the faithful itself, the body of Christ in the world. 

I myself see Christ in all of these and do not see them as mutually exclusive.  I see real wisdom in the words of the young Elizabeth I, who affirmed her faith in the Real Presence in the elements while ambiguously declining to over-define the matter.  When queried under threat of possible torture or death as a Protestant heretic by Queen Mary’s inquisitors about her belief regarding the Eucharistic elements, Elizabeth is said to have replied with an affirmation that was later memorialized by John Donne in this quatrain: 

Christ was the word that spake it.
He took the bread and break it;
And what his words did make it
That I believe and take it.

 Salvador Dali, Sacrament of the Last Supper 

“What his words did make it,” of course, refers to Jesus’ words of institution at the Last Supper, “This is my body, this is my blood.”   Elizabeth affirmed the real presence while implicitly rejecting receptionism, the belief that the bread and wine remain merely bread and wine but with added symbolism and meaning attributed to them by those consuming them.   But she also declined to endorse either  transubstantiation, the Roman doctrine of the miraculous substitution of the elements’ character as bread and wine with that of the Body and Blood of our Lord, despite visible appearances, or the more Lutheran doctrine of consubstantiation, or the adding of Christ’s Body and Blood to the elements’ character as bread and wine.  We Anglicans, like the Elizabeth and the Eastern Orthodox, have been content to leave the matter undefined, and simply trust Jesus’ words, that the Bread and Wine of Eucharist are indeed somehow the Body and Blood of Christ. 

But there is perhaps a larger issue at stake when we talk about Real Presence.  Franciscan friar Richard Rohr writes the following: 

“The Eucharistic body and blood of Christ is a place we must come to again and again to find our own face, to find our deepest name, and our absolute identity in God. It takes years for this to sink in. It is too big a truth for any one moment, too grand and wonderful for our small hearts and minds.  So we keep eating this mystery that is simultaneously the joy of God and the suffering of God packed into one meal. (Some have seen the body/bread as eating the joy and the blood/wine as drinking the suffering.) All we can really do is to be present ourselves, because we cannot ever rationally understand this. Presence cannot really be explained.  When the two presences meet, Jesus and the soul, then we have what Catholics brilliantly call “the Real Presence.” We did maintain the objective end of the presence from God’s side rather well, but we seldom taught people the subjective way of how to be present themselves! Presence is a relational concept, and both sides must be there, or there is no real presence.” 

May we all be present, truly present, when we come to the altar rail to partake the Body and Blood of our Lord. 

Grace and Peace,

Fr. Tony+