Real Presence
(Feast of Thanksgiving for the Holy Eucharist; Corpus
Christi)
Homily delivered at Trinity Parish, Ashland (OR)
Thursday June 20, 2019 12 noon Said Mass
Gen 14:18-20, Psa
116:10-17, 1 Cor 11:23-29, John 6:51-58
The Very Rev. Fr. Tony Hutchinson,
SCP, Ph.D.
A few years ago 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.
“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.
An early Christian hymn by Ephrem of
Edessa, writing in a late form of Aramaic in the fourth century expresses
wonder and reverence before the consecrated elements of the Eucharist this way:
Lord, your robe’s the well from which our healing flows.
Just behind this outer layer hides your power.
Spittle from your mouth creates a miracle of light within its clay.
In your bread there blows what no mouth can devour.
In your wine there smoulders what no lips can drink.
Gale and Blaze in bread and wine: unparalleled the miracle we taste.
Coming down to earth, where human beings die,
God created these anew, like Wide-eyed Ones,
mingling Blaze and Gale and making these the mystic content of their dust.
Did the Seraph’s fingers touch the white-hot coal?
Did the Prophet’s mouth do more than touch the same?
No, they grasped it not and he consumed it not. To us are granted both.
Abram offered body-food to spirit-guests.
Angels swallowed meat. The newest proof of power
is that bodies eat and drink the Fire and Wind provided by our Lord.
(tr. Geoffrey Rowell)
A
hymn we sing from time to time speaks of how our worship in the sacrament of
the Eucharist must fit into a larger sacrament of life for us:
Draw us in the Spirit’s tether;
For when humbly, in thy name,
Two or three are met together,
Thou art in the midst of them:
Alleluya! Alleluya! Touch we now thy garment’s hem.
As the faithful used to gather
In the name of Christ to sup,
Then with thanks to God the Father
Break the bread and bless the cup,
Alleluya! Alleluya! So knit thou our friendship up.
All our meals and all our living
Make as sacraments of thee,
That by caring, helping, giving,
We may true disciples be.
Alleluya! Alleluya! We will serve thee faithfully.
And simply, in the hymn, “Lord you give the great commission”: “Lord, you make the common holy, this my body, this my blood. Let us all, for earth’s true glory, daily lift life heavenward.”
When we pray the Lord’s Prayer, we
ask “give us this day our daily bread.”
But this is not simply a prayer for basic physical sustenance. The words translated by “our daily bread” actually
mean something more like “our bread for the morrow,” the bread of the great
feast on the Day of the Lord, or “the bread beyond what you meant when you
said, ‘man shall not live by bread
alone.’” It is for this reason that the
Lord’s Prayer has always been recited as part of the Great Thanksgiving, just
before the breaking of the bread.
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.”
That is what St. Paul is talking about when he warns
us about taking the eucharist unworthily, without “discerning the body.” Real presence in the Eucharist requires our
real presence, otherwise, we risk missing what it going on, missing the saving
act of God in the Eucharistic sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving.
May we all be present, truly present, when we come each
to the altar rail to partake the Body and Blood of our Lord.
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